So I love to say the APIs are the dendrites of the internet.

So if you think about the brain being a collection of neurons that by firing together, you know, think,

you can think of the internet as a collection of servers or programs running on servers,

that by interacting with each other, think or do.

And that connection, the synapse, that's almost tautologically, almost always an

API of some kind. Realize that every company is becoming an API company, and every API company

needs an API platform with SDKs and docs and API versioning and just a million different things.

That amazing team that I worked on at

Stripe all collaborated on. People want to be able to focus on their core capabilities,

be thoughtful in exposing the interfaces to users, and not have to worry about the low-level details.

If you've been building with APIs, you know they're the connective tissue of modern software,

powering everything from payments to cloud services.

But as APIs multiply, so did the challenges developers' experience.

SDK quality, documentation, versioning, and now a new frontier.

Interfaces not just for humans, but for AI agents.

In this episode, Stamos founder, Alex Ratrade, joins A16Z partner, Jennifer Lee to share

how his summit stripe shapes Stainless's mission to bring world-class developer platforms,

SDKs, docs, and more to every API company.

They discuss why SDK is often the API for developers, how MCP Model Context Protocol reframes APIs as interfaces for large language models,

and the new design challenges of treating AI agents as first-class users.

It's a conversation about the feature of APIs, agent experience, and what it means to build developer platforms that are robust, idiomatic, and built-to-scale.

Let's get into it.

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