For reasons that are really unclear to me, Stripe decided to give me a free ticket to Stripe Sessions, their two-day annual conference where they talk about payments and other stuff Stripe does. I don’t know why they gave me a free ticket – they sent an email with an offer for free tickets to my old Stripe account that I haven’t used for processing payments in ~6 years (and I only processed ~$25 of payments total). Maybe I looked like a churned customer to them, so they gave me free conference tickets to try to win me back? Idk.
There were booths at the conference from Stripe and its various side businesses (e.g. Stripe Press, their cryptocurrency subsidiaries). All of the major card networks were there too, and many vendors that provide Stripe-related services. The conference had nice aesthetics; they definitely put a lot of effort into making the conference look good. It was fun wandering around the expo hall and looking at everything.
Payments
Many of the interactive activities you can do at Stripe Sessions fall into two buckets: pretending to pay for things, and actually paying for things.
Pretending to pay for things:
- Visa had a demo of using mobile phones as payment terminals to verify card-not-present payments (example was DoorDash preventing fraud from stolen card details by having the customer present the card they used to pay when getting their order)
- They had a bunch of payment terminals that Stripe supports you could look at and play with. They even had a cool-looking test card you could play with. (Stripe’s test cards look better than most real cards)
Actually paying for things:
- They had books and zines you could buy at a Stripe Press area (they used iPhones as payment terminals for receiving payments, and had signs letting you know you could learn more about that downstairs):
- They had a merch store where you could buy Stripe merch
Games
There was a pretty fun game you could play at a physical arcade cabinet. It was actually pretty fun to play; you had to route a train that gets longer through a series of rails that you can rotate.
I mogged most of the other players; I got fourth place on the leaderboard.
Food
I ate the conference-provided lunch and dinner; it was good.
They took over a park near the conference venue for serving food to the attendees.
misc
The conference had unusually intense security compared to any of the conferences I’ve been to before. You have to go through a metal detector, then have someone look through your bags for a few seconds.
There were some advertising trucks that were driving around the front of the conference venue. Like trucks with signs on the side to advertise something. They pulled over in front of the venue for like a minute before circling around and doing that again. It seems kinda bad that advertisers abuse publicly funded road infrastructure that’s intended for transporting people?
