Stripe Tour lands at ICC Sydney this Wednesday, 19 August. The main day runs 8:30am to 5:45pm and costs nothing to attend, which puts it in an unusual category: a vendor conference with a lineup good enough that you would probably pay for it. Unlike previous Sydney-based conferences that have been described by some as “rent-seeking leeches”.

I’m quite jealous of Stripe and their conference clout; they’ve even got other brands sponsoring their event.

Anyway, I'll be there, and so will Cliff from Canva, but I’m sure he’ll attract a bigger crowd. I’ve done a quick recce of the conference to plan the sessions I think founders would get the most value from.

Agentic Commerce Under the Hood
11:30am, Darling Harbour main stage

In September 2025, OpenAI and Stripe launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, built on the Agentic Commerce Protocol the two of them co-authored. Buy the thing without leaving the chat. It was the flagship proof that agentic commerce was a real channel and not just a slide in a keynote.

OpenAI wound it back in March, about six months in. Etsy, one of the first merchants live, said it “did not end up seeing a large volume of sales from Instant Checkout”, though it was useful as a discovery channel.

So Stripe is running a session called “Under the Hood” about agentic commerce featuring Tyler House, CMO at Bellroy, alongside Daniel Miller, Stripe’s Head of Solutions Architecture APAC, and Amy Zobec, Head of Enterprise Sales Australia.

People are asking their AI about products, and the merchants who show up in those answers are the ones whose product data is machine-readable, accurate in price and stock, and structured according to the protocols. That is unglamorous catalogue and feed work, and it is happening whether or not you have a view on AI.

Bellroy is a great local story too. The Melbourne DTC business has a real catalogue of 1st party products. It’ll be very interesting to hear his take on agent-referred traffic today and whether it is growing fast enough to justify the engineering effort.

A Conversation with Cliff Obrecht
1:30pm, Darling Harbour main stage

John Collison, founder of Stripe, is interviewing Canva's cofounder and COO on building an AI-first company at global scale.

This is the marquee booking, and I’m sure Canva negotiated a few bips off their Stripe bill to get Cliff there. However, I think it’ll be an interesting chat. Obrecht is under the pump at the moment as a live case study in retrofitting AI into a product with hundreds of millions of users and a pricing model that predates the technology entirely.

Collison is actually a good interviewer too, as long as he’s having a pint. I’m sure he’ll push Cliff slightly past the well trodden narrative (i hope), and into some thought provoking territory.

If you only attend one session, this is it. I’m sure it’ll be packed too, so a good chance to run into a few founder friends or VCs.

Operationalising Pricing for AI Products
3:30pm, Darling Harbour main stage

From a tactical perspective, this is the session I'm most looking forward to. AI inference costs have changed the economics of software, and startups will need to reframe their pricing models to fit this new reality.

Seat-based pricing breaks the moment your product does the work instead of helping a human do it, but usage-based pricing is hard to build, harder to forecast, and terrifying when you want a predictable invoice.

This panel is stacked with a few local heroes and experts. Nonny Bell, Head of Startup GTM APAC at Vercel (after a significant stint at Stripe!), sits at the sharp end of usage-based billing at scale. Ben Grabiner, co-founder and General Partner at Side Stage Ventures, can bring a local perspective on what he’s seeing on the ground. Wisam Hirzalla is the Product Lead for Billing at Stripe. Ben Hanna, Stripe's Managing Director for New Zealand, and Tim Smith, Global Head of Customer Success, complete the panel.

Indexing the Global Economy, 4:15pm, main stage. Ernie Tedeschi, Stripe's Head of Economic Insights and Research, on what Stripe's transaction data says about the global economy. Stripe sees a slice of commerce almost nobody else does.

Operating a Global Business: Trends in Cross-Border Selling, 2:30pm, main stage. Relevant if you sell offshore, which most ANZ software companies do by necessity.

The networking reception runs 4:45pm to 5:45pm, which is where the actual value of a free conference usually sits. Registration is open at stripetour.com/sydney.