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Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast.

I'm Sonal.

We've been talking a lot about the theme of the API economy lately, from presentations

to videos.

But in this podcast episode, we wanted to dive into the trend more practically,

hearing from those building API first companies and their insights about what people,

not only developers and technology businesses, are doing with these

application programming interfaces. But before pondering the existential question of what is an API,

we began discussing why the API economy matters, to what it means for things like UI design and

sales, and overall what APIs mean both practically and philosophically for innovation.

Joining us to have this conversation, we have

Christina Cordova, who leads partnerships at Stripe, which builds infrastructure for online commerce,

basically any movement of money. You'll hear her voice in the first answer. We have Augusto Marriotti,

who's a CEO and co-founder of Kong, which helps manage secure microservice APIs. And then we

have Laura Barron's Wu, who is the CEO and co-founder of Shippo, which powers shipping for all kinds of commerce.

Sounds like a motley crew of a cast for an episode of the A6 and Z podcast, but we're here to talk about the API economy.

We're just really interested in it because it's sort of the evolution of what's happening next in software.

And so just to launch things off, how would we define or think of the API economy from each

of your perspectives?

So maybe 10, 15 years ago, you used to need to have someone who knew how to do bookkeeping

...