# Breeze crossed $4 billion in annualized payment volume within four years, CEO says Stableminded, a Stabledash show. Aug 13, 2026. Millie Yang. https://live.stabledash.com/shows/stableminded/episodes/agentic-payments-breeze-went-from-zero-to-4-billion-in-C9SKpUYTP_w Millie Yang explains how a crypto gaming startup that pivoted after FTX became a stablecoin-settled merchant of record, and why she thinks checkout has to change for AI agents. Breeze crossed $4 billion in annualized payment volume within four years, CEO and co-founder Millie Yang said in a podcast interview. The company works as a merchant of record: the middle leg runs on stablecoins, while people pay and get paid in fiat. ## From Stripe to a pivot Millie Yang spent four years at Stripe and moved to Singapore to help with its APAC expansion. She describes "impossible battles" to set up banking infrastructure in markets like Indonesia. She started Breeze with co-founder Peng in 2022, first as a crypto payments company aimed at blockchain gaming. Three months later FTX collapsed, and she says those "grand plans" evaporated, which led to the merchant-of-record model. ## Approval rates and chargebacks Yang says Breeze gets 95% plus approval rates on first tries. She puts large enterprises at about 80, 82% or 83%. Part of the gain comes from analyzing card BINs and retrying for problems as small as a cardholder name written in all caps. The company also says it fully indemnifies chargebacks and fights them automatically with AI agents, and gives merchants real-time feedback on declines. ## Checkout is not built for agents Millie Yang says agentic payments have existed for a while on trading platforms, where users fund a wallet and call APIs. Checkout is the obstacle: anti-bot and anti-agent tools mean "the agent isn't able to transact." She says Claude refuses to take her credit card when it plans a trip for her. She predicts machines will charge fractions of a basis point, which she says fiat rails were not built for. Breeze has already published a markdown version of its website for machines. ## Where stablecoins fit Breeze mainly uses USDC. Yang says stablecoins offer settlement in seconds and 24-7 payout liquidity, and they serve foreign merchants who cannot get a US bank account. Her bear case is AI agents finding smart contract vulnerabilities, and she cites a Zcash minting bug. She also positions Breeze for digital goods sellers against Apple, which she says charges 30% for in-app purchases. ## AI inside the company In an internal doc called "Breeze as Intelligence," Millie Yang lays out a goal of going from a sales conversation to an agent building a feature and deploying it to production. She says that after Opus 4.6 launched she vibecoded a vendor's platform herself. The company also ran a month-long AI hackathon for staff. Yang presents Breeze as a payments operations layer run by agents. It targets fast-growing companies that have not built payments teams, at a time when large enterprises staff such teams with 100 to 150 people. Her message to operations staff is to automate their own work so payments stop being a bottleneck. ## Key takeaways 1. Millie Yang says Breeze crossed $4 billion in annualized volume within four years, after pivoting when FTX collapsed three months after the company started. 2. Breeze acts as a merchant of record that settles in stablecoins in the middle while customers and merchants deal in fiat, and it claims 95% plus approval rates on first tries. 3. Millie Yang argues agentic payments are already here in trading platforms, but anti-bot tools such as CAPTCHAs and 3DS stop agents from transacting at checkout. ## Chapters - 0:00 Preview of the conversation and a sponsor message - 1:34 A life of payment problems led Millie Yang into payments - 3:46 Stripe's regulatory battles in APAC pointed toward blockchain - 6:44 After FTX, Breeze pivoted to a stablecoin-settled merchant of record - 10:16 Retry logic and AI push approval rates above 95% - 15:00 Breeze reached $4 billion volume and a Unity partnership - 16:03 Agentic payments already exist, but checkout blocks agents - 23:30 Stablecoins and fiat each win in different places - 30:05 Issuing a stablecoin makes sense mainly as backend treasury - 33:24 Breeze targets hyper-growth companies and enterprises entering new markets - 39:34 Breeze as Intelligence aims to automate feature delivery - 46:42 Ops staff should automate their own work to stay valuable - 48:59 Wrap-up and where to follow Breeze ## Transcript **Millie Yang** (0:01) So we crossed **Drew Rogers** (0:02) $4 billion annualized volume within four years. **Millie Yang** (0:05) And then three months after we started the company, FTX happened. And so we basically went back to drawing board, talked to all the businesses we were interacting with. Payments is built on very legacy infrastructure. So you can just go and build a lot of automation. We fully indemnify the entire transaction in terms of chargeback. We fight them automatically using all these AI agents we created. We just have 24-7 agents responding to all these long tail edge case questions. Instead of businesses having to staff a team up to do it, it's like 95% plus approval rates on first tries. And we literally go in with that to like massive enterprises with massive teams. The checkout page was built for a human consumer. It's not built for machines. But because of all these anti-bot, anti-agent things that we've built in the past, the agent isn't able to transact. My take is actually Agentic Payments is already here, which is apparently not everyone's take. The biggest bottleneck to like growth is your roadmap itself. And you can keep disrupting that if you can implement as much AI as possible. **Drew Rogers** (1:06) Hey, it's Drew. Quick thank you to Altitude for making this episode possible. Altitude is rebuilding business banking for teams on the frontier. They offer the full stack for the modern CFO and founder, a beautifully designed platform for payouts, bill pay, corporate cards, enterprise controls, and so much more. Move money with speed, yield, and total control, all from your stablecoin balance. Operate at Altitude. If your business is on the frontier, your **Millie Yang** (1:29) finances should be too. You can learn more at altitude.xyz. **Drew Rogers** (1:34) Millie, thank you so much for being on Stableminded. As a founder, you have so many things to be thinking about, so I really appreciate the window of time that you'll spend with us. When I think about the current moment of where we're at as an industry, there's this crazy collision happening with crypto and blockchain and all of the stuff that we've been building for in recent years, meeting the commercial potential of AI and all this stuff. I think about teams that are right in the middle of that intersection and I think about Breeze and have been really grateful for our relationship and partnership so far. So excited to get into your story, your background a little bit, what you're building, but let's introduce yourself and we'll start with a quick intro on your name and your role. **Millie Yang** (2:19) My name is Millie. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Breeze.com. The idea of Breeze is to really make payments a breeze. A little bit of a cheesy slogan. I think what we're doing is AI payments operations. And I'll get into that in a little **Drew Rogers** (2:31) bit. **Millie Yang** (2:32) But I think like the reason why I'm even in payments is because I've kind of experienced payment issues all my life. I grew up in Hong Kong and London. I moved to the US for college. I went to Columbia and then I moved to San Francisco. I started at Stripe as an engineer and then with Stripe moved to Singapore and then back to San Francisco and then now I live in New York. **Drew Rogers** (2:52) Yeah, a lot of moving bounces around there. **Millie Yang** (2:54) Yeah, a lot of different cities around the world, but my entire life has been filled with payments problems. Like when I was in school, my parents couldn't pay my school bills on time and the school would ask me about it, right? I would go on trips with my friends who were international on ski trips and we couldn't like pay bills. Or even like I'm sending money from my own US account to my Singapore account and then the bank would call me and freeze my funds and I'm like, I didn't do anything wrong. It's myself sending myself money, right? It was a very natural deviation of my life to like join Stripe as a company because I was very attracted to the notion of global payments. And then I think starting my own company in 2022 was really because I thought Stablecoins was having a moment. And it was primarily driven by like NFTs, DeFi in that era. And then I think it's really kind of evolved over time because I think stablecoin as rails were very attractive to me then. And that's why we started the company in the first place. **Drew Rogers** (3:46) Yeah. Bring us back to Stripe. I feel like so many formative moments within that chapter. What was it like? And maybe the compare contrast of engineer at Stripe versus founder. What were some of the problems that you were tackling at Stripe? What were some of the things that you were working on there? And then yeah, some of these like aha moments that you found that led you to do your own thing. **Millie Yang** (4:10) Yeah, so I was at Stripe for four years. I think two years into the journey, essentially, we were trying to launch everywhere. It was like a hundred countries. And that's actually the reason why I moved to Singapore to help with APAC expansion. And that's also where my co-founder, but side story, but essentially we were in a two people team launching Alipay to like all of Stripe, right? But a lot of the issues we faced had nothing to do with tech. It had everything to do with like regulatory, legal compliance problems. We would try to launch in Indonesia and then there would be a company that had a website. It's called Sendit. It had a website that was like, we are the Stripe of Indonesia. And so the Indonesian government is like, we don't want Stripe. I mean, they didn't say that, but I felt like they basically meant it because this company creates so many jobs, opportunities within the market. Right, and so we were constantly fighting these impossible battles to try and get banking infrastructure set up, and then we just couldn't. And simultaneously, it was the era of people would go on OpenSea and buy an NFT, click a button, and then transact, right? Like, an Indonesian person could easily do that, you just needed stablecoins. So it felt like I was suffering with problems at work, and it felt like, hey, blockchain solves a ton of these problems, and this is the future. **Drew Rogers** (5:24) Yeah, and your co-founder was hip to hip with you. It sounds like in that moment as well. How did you meet? **Millie Yang** (5:30) Yeah, so we were in a... So my co-founder's name is Peng. We were in a two people teams together launching Alipay. I met him when I first moved to Singapore. It was also COVID. So I literally moved in the middle of COVID. He's one of the few people I knew in Singapore. And then I was just like toying with crypto on the side, just for like fun. And I've been in crypto since the 2017 era. And then naturally so, I talked to my coworker about all these things I'm doing because I just didn't really have any friends in Singapore. Two years later, when we started the company in 2022, it was more like I had to convince him to be like, hey, this is a real opportunity in the world. We can do this great thing together, but he's married with kids. So there was a whole other battle that we had to like go through. **Drew Rogers** (6:14) What do you think ultimately convinced him to go for it with you? **Millie Yang** (6:19) I think he really saw the future like he really saw the pains we were experiencing at Stripe and he really saw the blockchain as like a solution **Drew Rogers** (6:27) to **Millie Yang** (6:28) that problem and both of us are like engineers so everything we think about is programmatic money how do we do things programmatically I think even today it's like how do we AI-ify like everything we do right so we're like very engineering minded such that anything that's like here's a bottleneck we're just like can we automate it **Drew Rogers** (6:44) Yeah. So you start the company moving into Breeze a little bit. What role did Stablecoins initially play? It seems like Stablecoins like the huge, I think we're approaching episode 60 of this podcast and like the whole thread line of this has been about companies Builders, people who have integrated stablecoins into their businesses in really different, thoughtful ways. We've talked with issuers, we've talked with infrastructure, we've talked with exchanges, but stablecoins have been this really unique thread through it all. Where did stablecoins first hit your radar as a completely new primitive for payments? What did that look like in the beginning? **Millie Yang** (7:22) Yeah so we originally started as a crypto payments company in a very different kind of era when like people were saying that the future of gaming would be on the blockchain. We were in Korea and Korean studios like pioneered mobile games right like free to play mobile games and we were there and everyone was like we're doing this and then there would be companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars. **Drew Rogers** (7:41) Tons of money was going into **Millie Yang** (7:42) gaming. And then it was like, okay, this is the future. And like, we can build infrastructure for this, right? And it didn't have to be payments. It was wallets, it was payment. I was like, look, there's infrastructure here to be built and there are businesses here to service. And then like three months after we started the company, FTX happened. And then a lot of these grand plans that people had just like, Slowly evaporated into thin air, right? And then we were faced with that reality of like, okay, what do we do in this new era where stablecoins may not be front end of how like people consume things, but maybe it's in the back end. And so we basically went back to drawing board, talked to like all the businesses we were like interacting with. Why do you use stablecoins? Why is it interesting? How can we help? Back then, MoonPay was everywhere and people were like, I kind of want MoonPay, but I want a different version of this. And I think we just kept asking them questions of what they wanted. I've **Drew Rogers** (8:37) heard MoonPay is also, at that point, I don't know if this is still the case, but very expensive as well. I don't think they were known for being affordable at that point. **Millie Yang** (8:45) Yeah, I think they built like a very specific niche product, which is crypto on ramp for like end users. But some people just look at this product and they're like, oh, I would love to not handle chargebacks or payment processor that settles me in stablecoins. So we then got down to the bottom of what people actually wanted. And the way Breeze is built today is we are what's called a merchant record, where the middle leg of things are in stablecoins, but like people are doing fiat in and fiat out. So like people could pay with a card and we like fully indemnify the entire transaction in terms of chargebacks. People could file chargebacks. We fight them automatically using all these AI agents we've created. At the same time, they don't have to fund the payout treasury because all of that is just done automatically through stablecoins. But consumers don't have to know that they're interacting with stablecoins. It's just fiat in and fiat out. **Drew Rogers** (9:33) Yeah, I love how you went to the customers or the early adopters at that point who, it's always great to have people like that, like in your corner who like, just tell me what I need to know. Like, tell me what you care about. Tell me what you value. When you think back to the, What is now what seems like a very refined and clear go-to-market positioning. What were some of these early glimpses that you had with, it sounds like an early cohort of merchants and customers where you were like, oh, this is definitely really special, or this is really the direction that we need to follow. Were there any like stories or examples of conversations or partners that you felt like there was that little like sprinkle of magic dust on them that gave you this is the direction we need to go now? **Millie Yang** (10:16) Quite a few moments to highlight. So because Moonpay was so big then, all these crypto-native businesses, gaming platforms that we talked to were immediately like, look, I want this, but I want way better approval rates, right? For example. Or they're like, I want that, but I'm like, why do you want that? And they're like, I actually just want stablecoin settlement. People don't really understand payments. I think if you've worked in a payments company and you've spent a lot of time understanding payments, you understand the ins and outs of various things, like how to comply with the schemes, with the banks and the likes. **Drew Rogers** (10:46) What do people miss? What's the most underappreciated part of the stack typically? **Millie Yang** (10:51) I think that there's a lot of like payments context that people miss. When we optimize approval rates, for example, it comes down to like you have to analyze the particular bin, like the particular bank that the card is issued with. And sometimes you can have, let's say the name is passed through, it was like Millie Yang, but Millie Yang is in all caps and suddenly they would decline the transaction. And you could retry that with just lowercase Millie Yang and the transaction would go through. **Drew Rogers** (11:14) It's **Millie Yang** (11:14) like there are nuance things like that where payments is built on very legacy infrastructure. So you can just go and build a lot of automation there. **Drew Rogers** (11:22) I booked my flight here with my, not my legal name, Drew. Andrew is my legal name. I booked it with Drew and it was like, am I going to get stopped at TSA? Even though like, you know, I'm obviously the same person. Sometimes they let you in, sometimes they don't. I can't even imagine all of the payments related Exceptions or nuances that are happening behind the scenes. Yeah, what are some of these systems that you've built to increase approval rates? Sounds like a really big value add in a way that's safe and effective. **Millie Yang** (11:51) I think it's like 95% plus approval rates on first tries. And we literally go in with that to like massive enterprises with massive teams. **Drew Rogers** (11:58) What's typical? **Millie Yang** (11:59) People can have like 80 something percent. **Drew Rogers** (12:01) And be happy with that? Like that's kind of normal. Yeah, like **Millie Yang** (12:03) massive enterprises are probably like 80, 82%, 83%. And I'm like, look, **Drew Rogers** (12:07) You come in with $95. Yeah, **Millie Yang** (12:10) we try to optimize. It depends a little bit on traffic, too. So some people run a bunch of meta ads and you do get bot traffic. So it's like legitimate traffic. But in terms of how we've optimized approval rates, it's really like you look at a single transaction and you could retry the transaction. It could be something as simple as retrying the name and different ways you write it. Or it could be 3DS is not available somehow with this particular bank because banking infrastructure is just kind of old. They're not responding consistently. But there are like various retry logic that we've basically built, leveraging AI, a lot of it. And so that's why we're confident with that thesis. Yeah, and that's all **Drew Rogers** (12:46) happening within split seconds. Extremely quick, programmatic, if-then retries, that's all happening within seconds. **Millie Yang** (12:53) Yes, yes. And I think similarly, the opposite of that. So some people are concerned, if my approval rates are high, then my fraud is going to be high. Because you're letting in traffic that you may want it to reject. So we basically had to go figure out chargebacks and reason codes. What are we comfortable underwriting in a single transaction versus not? When we sell our approval rate product, we sell with chargeback indemnification because it's a little bit of a you want to let in enough traffic but not like bad traffic. **Drew Rogers** (13:17) What does chargeback indemnification mean? How would you define that? **Millie Yang** (13:20) We literally absorb the chargeback losses of a transaction because we're very confident we'd win it. **Drew Rogers** (13:26) I was talking to a merchant in Asia about a year ago. This was a retail marketplace. It was like a high-end shoe company selling like really nice shoes. And they said that their chargeback rates were over 50%. **Millie Yang** (13:43) That's insane. **Drew Rogers** (13:44) Absolutely insane. 50% or more people buy their products and then intentionally will either return or charge back them. It wasn't just returns. It was very, very painful. I can't even imagine that level of payment operation headache What other parts of payment operations do you find are the most like for the operators or merchants or businesses that you're working with? What are some of these other things that are sticky, hairy, painful things that you come **Millie Yang** (14:09) across? If you think about you transacting on any website, when your card gets declined, you want to go talk to someone. You're like, why is my card getting declined? What do I do? And you're like, I'm trying to pay for this flight, right? We have done a lot of work on our side to provide real-time, actionable feedback. If for a given merchant, somehow they have specific configurations that they can't accept a certain card or the issuer is just declining transactions then, then we're like, go and retry with another card. Something as simple as that, real-time feedback, actually really helped increase that approval rate as well. But that's also in the realm of customer support. Traditionally so, companies have had to build massive operational teams to be answering customer to client questions. Or it could be like in payouts when they're like, I want to change my bank account. And then there's a million steps you have to hop through to get that done. So we also programmatically have built a lot of flows there. **Drew Rogers** (15:00) What are you most proud of when you think back to these key pieces of the puzzle that you've built? What are some features or milestones that you think about that feel really powerful or unique? **Millie Yang** (15:12) So we crossed $4 billion annualized volume within four years, which is like something I- **Drew Rogers** (15:17) That's a B. **Millie Yang** (15:18) That's a B, yeah. **Millie Yang** (15:23) It's kind of insane to think about because it's a direct measurable metric of we've gone **Drew Rogers** (15:28) this far as a company. **Millie Yang** (15:29) Once upon a time when we started the company, three months later, FTX imploded. A few months after that, we were back to the drawing board, right? Like we had nothing. And at some point we just figured it out and then we're just able to constantly repeat that motion. We recently partnered with Unity to be like their official verified solution partner to help a lot of games, external in-app purchases, alternative. But it's like things like that, that it's crazy to think about. We're now a way more legit company. We've partnered with a public company. There are many moments to celebrate, but at the same time, I think when you're building a company, you always feel like you can do better. So I'm always like, can we do more? So yeah, it's kind of always like day one. **Drew Rogers** (16:03) Okay, so you started this business. There were some really key like back to the drawing board moments. You've also built through what has been such a wild period of AI and the role that AI plays in money and programmatic money. What has that been like? As a founder, you've been building this in real time. You've seen artificial intelligence explode in real time as you've been building. What has that been like and how are you thinking through applying the upsides of that technology to Breeze? **Millie Yang** (16:33) There's a lot to unpack there. There is a component of how we've adopted AI internally in the company that I can speak about. There's also agentic payments, how we're approaching that and where I think the future is. I can start with agentic payments, which seems like the hot topic right **Drew Rogers** (16:46) now. **Millie Yang** (16:46) My take is actually agentic payments is already here, which is apparently not everyone's take. And I think apparently a hot take, but I think it depends on how you think about agentic payments. Yeah. How **Drew Rogers** (16:54) should we be thinking about it? **Millie Yang** (16:55) Many people were like, when ChatGPT launched, they were like, hey, I want to put a credit card down and then ChatGPT and go buy a $20 t-shirt for me. And then at some point last year, I think ChatGPT killed this product because I think Walmart was like, hey, it's 3x worse conversion. We want to actually own the consumer relationship. This is not happening, right? And then some people have said, oh, Agentic Payments is dead or is not there or whatever it is. But the way I think about it is Agentic Payments has actually already been here for a while if you look at trading platforms. So if you look at Interactive Brokers, Robinhood, Polymarket, Cauchy, Prediction Markets, what happens is institutions or consumers basically fund a wallet of some sort with fiat or crypto, doesn't matter. And then they call a bunch of APIs to trade, right? And a lot of these APIs are driven by algorithms, right? It could be like, oh, Jude Bellingham just scored a goal. It looks like he's winning this match. So let me go trade on Cauchy for this. **Drew Rogers** (17:47) Different signals are inputting. Yeah, yeah, **Millie Yang** (17:48) signals that they're ingesting. It could be, oh, there's Wall Street Journal headline on a war is about to break out or something, and then stock traders would go sell like S&P or something, right? But if you think about that, that is a robot trading, right? And that's a robot transacting with money, buying and selling. It's just that the constraint here is not that it's all open, **Drew Rogers** (18:06) it's **Millie Yang** (18:07) very constrained within **Drew Rogers** (18:07) a platform. **Millie Yang** (18:08) So it's constrained within a predictions market platform or it's constrained within a trading platform. But I do think it is the closest analogy to agentic payments. Now, I think the next question is what that looks like in the future, right? So I think it's actually really interesting because I have really thought about this. And I think what is really interesting to me is we do a lot of anti-bot things on the checkout page. **Drew Rogers** (18:34) So **Millie Yang** (18:37) if you go on a checkout page and you're coming in from a foreign country or a random IP or whatever, you would see a Cloudflare captcha. **Drew Rogers** (18:45) It's **Millie Yang** (18:45) like, hey, verify that you're a human. That's anti-agent. And then you have 3DS which is like almost a 2FA on payments itself when they think hey you're transacting with a larger dollar transaction and then they have to verify that you're a human so you get an SMS to verify like this is me. Those things are all anti-bot because the assumption was that bots were malicious. But we're entering into this era when we think of agents as all good, right? Like, I'm trying to transact and it's a legitimate transaction. But because of all these anti-bot, anti-agent things that we've built in the past, the agent isn't able to transact. **Drew Rogers** (19:19) Those are barriers. **Millie Yang** (19:20) Yeah, naturally so. Like, that checkout page has to evolve. At the same time, you don't want to accept fraud. So there's great tension there in the traditional rails. **Drew Rogers** (19:29) How do you think about the way that checkout is going to change? Because I feel like we've lived in this 20-year basket of goods that you buy on a website. I feel like that's going to change pretty significantly in terms of how we actually purchase and transact with things. Because an agent isn't going to go through that flow, I would imagine, or need to. And maybe speak a little bit, since you brought up Cloudflare, some of these protocols or approaches to payments for agents that are more native. How do you see that? **Millie Yang** (19:57) So I think one very interesting thing that's happening, and two, I'll answer the checkout question, that the unit of commerce is just changing. Used to be that like, we'd buy a $20 t-shirt or like a $1 in-game digital good right on the app store. But now the way machines charge is 0.0001, right? It's like not even a BIP, not even like a hundredth of a BIP, could be a millionth of a BIP. Right. And Fiat rails were just not built for that. Like Fiat rails were built with some sort of flat fee, some sort of exchange rate, some sort of variable fee. People would make negative margins due to those transactions. Yeah, would **Drew Rogers** (20:28) make sense. **Millie Yang** (20:28) Yeah. Even if we're talking about like PIX in Brazil, like or whatever it is, we actually literally need to get to the bottom of the cheapest rail that is available here with 24-7 settlement, which in my opinion is the blockchain. **Drew Rogers** (20:39) I feel like that's why gaming was so hot in that period, because gaming is such a great paradigm to start thinking about value transfer with, all these different microtransactions and streaming value. And it makes sense why gaming was this like, oh, that makes sense, that use case. What do you think about the maturity of that or the evolution of that into more of really where you see, you mentioned trading, high frequency use cases with that. What other use cases or practical ways are you seeing What is interesting is I think consumers are actually quite split on how they think about agentic payments. I myself love going on Claude to plan a trip and I'm like, take my credit card. And then Claude is like, I won't take your credit card. **Drew Rogers** (21:30) I'm like, why wouldn't you take my credit card? **Millie Yang** (21:32) Just take my credit card and go do this thing, right? I live in 2026, is how I think about it. And yet I have to go on the manual website, type all this information, right? People do approach things very differently. Some people are very anti that, and some people could be pro that, right? So I do think the checkout page itself has to evolve. The checkout page was built for a human consumer. It's not built for machines. Right? If you think about how even websites today, if you go on like, I think it was Linear or Vercel, they literally have a version of their website that's human readable that you can go on. And then they have a markdown of a website for machines to read. And we did the same thing at Breeze. We had to create a machine readable website because it helps with geo. And the machine readable website is a markdown file. There's not many images, right? It doesn't appeal to you. There are no animations. You're not like triggered to go and look at things. Instead, it's just content. If you think about the checkout page today, it's all optimized for, oh, how does a human think about clicking this button versus that button? How many clicks do they have? Machines don't care about that. Machines just want to transact. Right. Instead, you have to basically remove the friction that we discussed earlier, which is like the CAPTCHAs, the 3DS. And I do think blockchain transactions themselves is very much built for this. I can just send money and I can confirm that you've received money and this is like unlocked. **Drew Rogers** (22:47) Yeah, it seems like getting this right over the next few years for really the merchants, like companies, whether they're big or small, who are building their business, they're selling things, they're What would have been marketing themselves on a website? Getting this right, how you present yourself or be discovered by agents for commerce seems like one of the most interesting lanes to go learn more about because right now, Companies have spent decades positioning their entire platforms for human consumption and human readability. What are some of these things that you're seeing modern enterprises do correctly? And maybe this is kind of where Breeze comes in a little bit with like how you equip them, how you work with them, stuff like that. **Millie Yang** (23:30) Yeah, we don't directly touch the marketing side of things today, but I have seen that because we work with a lot of companies that have a lot of consumers, right? And we service the consumers. To us, the most important thing is the customer satisfied. Because if the customer is satisfied, meaning they get the responses to their questions answered quickly, then they'll leave a good review. If not, they go on Reddit and they complain. And actually Reddit is apparently where a lot of LLMs are ingesting a lot of information. So whenever you go on like Plot, OpenAI, Gemini, whatever it is, and you ask them, hey, what do you think about this business? A lot of the times they're pulling in feedback from Reddit. And so that has a direct correlation to how good your customer support stack is. So I think the only way in which we're helping businesses in that regard is we just have 24-7 agents responding to all these long tail edge case questions instead of businesses having to staff a team up to do it, right? And then that in turn means they get better review and better feedback and that directly helps with their GEO. **Drew Rogers** (24:25) Yeah, I know you had some takes on stablecoins before we move on. What do you think on bull versus bear case for stablecoins? You've gotten a very front row seat to the benefits, the overhyped nature of them, what they do well, what they don't do well. What is your take on stablecoins? Are they overhyped? What's your current standing on that? **Millie Yang** (24:45) The most interesting thing about stablecoins to me is that the blockchain itself is a double entry ledger, right? And then the US financial system, if you look at it, is running on banking hours, correspondent banking infrastructure. It is a very old rail, right? So it's not crazy to think, hey, the future rail looks Way more advanced. We live in 2026. That itself is probably like the bull case for stablecoins and the reason why Genius Act is happening. Everyone's like running to it. So I think the bull case for stablecoin is pretty obvious in my opinion at this point. I think the bear case of stablecoin has something to do with cybersecurity. Yesterday, I think last night, OpenAI had a cybersecurity bug related to Hugging Face on OpenAI, where somehow using like 5.6 Sol, the program was able to escape an isolated sandbox. Even in crypto, there was a Zcash minting bug. So I think the kind of bear case for stablecoins, in my opinion, is that as AI is getting more and more advanced, agents in general are uniquely designed to spot vulnerabilities. And the reason for that is because robots can run, like, the entry point for a program could be here, and then the exploit could be here, so it's eight steps removed, right? And then the human, when writing tests, don't think eight steps ahead. Instead, they probably tested, like, step A, B, C instead of the full chain. And then suddenly, robots are uniquely great at, like, running every single test case possible to exploit your program. And then it could be exploited, in which case there was a minting bug with Zcash. What if there's a minting bug with, like, stablecoins? Which is wild to think about, but it takes a few of these headlines to hit for people to doubt the beauty of tech itself. And it has nothing to do with stablecoins, technically. It has something to do with the rails it's run on. It could happen to traditional payments infrastructure, but it so happens that smart contracts are published outright. Everyone can go take a look and everyone can figure out how to exploit the contract. **Drew Rogers** (26:42) From your vantage point, Breeze works with both fiat stablecoins and you're going to deal with both. You're going to have to. From your vantage point, what are some areas that both uniquely shine compared to the other? What are some things that you're like, oh yeah, if we had a choice or if we were to recommend using one or the other for certain things, are there obvious examples where one wins or loses in your mind? **Millie Yang** (27:05) The fiat one is actually pretty easy. I was having this conversation today with a travel company like Hospitality in general. It's very interesting like rails that's like thinking about stablecoins. But I think one of the biggest challenge I got was Millie, there's only USDC and EURC. I have all these different currencies. How are you going to handle those? I don't want them converting back to US dollars or Euros and then converting back to like local currency. It's extremely inefficient. Which I think is the unique nature of fiat. We do have multiple currencies and the world does not just run on US and EU rails, right? That's like one unique benefit of fiat. Another unique benefit of fiat is that people can spend that money really easily. It's very easy to go get a card issued on your bank account and go spend it. Whereas when you have a stablecoin wallet, it is still very difficult to go spend that money. So the liquidity is there, but there are a few steps removed. The beauty of stablecoins, however, in my opinion, is you go pay for a transaction, you wait a few seconds and it's done. I think it's the most beautiful thing ever. You go buy a digital good, you pay and then it's unlocked and you see it. And then as a business, I would love to receive the money earlier and I can earn yield on it. I could do a lot of things off it. I don't have to wait until traditional rails settle me in T plus one or T plus two. And then I think another unique benefit that a lot of businesses that we service use is actually that they don't have to reserve over the weekend liquidity for payouts because they're like, oh, I can just fund you in stablecoins whenever and wherever, 24-7. I don't have to go reserve three days of balance with you. And programmatic like dollar, I think yield bearing stablecoins, very attractive. You don't have to manually go send money to a yield bearing account and then send it back. I think it's very obvious what the benefits are **Drew Rogers** (28:41) there. We went to Mexico City recently and we were meeting with a couple of teams that were really focused on that FX piece or local fiat piece on like tokenized sovereign bonds, for example, like with EtherFuse is doing some really interesting work with that. When you were saying that, I was like, The Dave Taylor EtherFuse VAT signal is going up. The problem that I think they're going after is if we can bring the localization of money on-chain in a way more efficient way, we're not having to go in and out all the time. But there are obviously some hurdles to that. What are some other misconceptions that you see people have, especially in the relationship to programmatic commerce? AI payments, kind of asking this for myself, like where are people applying stablecoins where they're not really needed? I think there's a lot of hype around micropayments and stuff that Cloudflare's coming out with, X402, all this stuff. What if this is actually solved already with non-stablecoins versus like, yeah, that's really interesting. **Millie Yang** (29:36) Well, I think the primary use case for stablecoins for us right now is as a substitute to a U.S. bank account. So a lot of the foreign businesses we service want stablecoins because then they don't have to manage a U.S. bank account, which is true of the merchant or record solution. You're servicing foreign companies. The foreign company doesn't want to establish a U.S. entity, U.S. directors, whatever, and they need a bank account and they can't get a bank account, right? So stablecoins in general are uniquely good at that. Where it isn't great, I think on-ramp and off-ramp fees is probably the biggest headache. **Drew Rogers** (30:05) What stablecoins are you mostly dealing with at Breeze? USDC. USDC. Have you considered other approaches like issuing your own or using others? **Millie Yang** (30:13) Yeah, we are going to. The reason why we haven't done that is really because that's always like new product priorities that come up. But essentially, if you're looking at one to three days of float and you multiply that number by 5%, you have to run a ton of volume for that to make significant revenue. But I do think like the prime example I love to give is a company like Airbnb. The company actually has money transmitter licenses. And the reason why it went and got money transmitter licenses is because when you pay for an Airbnb travel booking, You don't actually stay until three or four weeks later. So what happens during that period of time is Airbnb holds your money. **Drew Rogers** (30:46) That float is great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And **Millie Yang** (30:48) I think it was something like $225 million or something like that in like three months or something. Yeah. Or is it a year? I don't know. They just built a massive **Drew Rogers** (30:54) bank. **Millie Yang** (30:54) Yeah, they built basically, I mean, Starbucks also, right? So like Starbucks is a whole like different program. But Airbnb's program right now for marketplaces in general, like you can build out with stablecoins very easily. And you don't have to go get your own money transfer licenses. You can go partner and be like, hey, this is the backend currency that's working under the hood. So maybe that is actually the point where a lot of people are like, oh, I'm trying to launch my own stablecoin. And I'm like, does this stablecoin have to be front end that consumers can see? Or does it just exist in the backend? Airbnb could launch their own stablecoin in the background, but the consumer doesn't have to see it. It's just an internal treasury operation to optimize on yields, but the consumer doesn't have to pay with Airbnb USD. I do see a lot of people rushing towards, hey, I'm launching my own stablecoin. We get pitches like this all the time. **Drew Rogers** (31:38) From the infrastructure side? **Millie Yang** (31:40) Yeah, yeah. From people who are issuing new stablecoins, they're like, why don't you support the stablecoin on your checkout page? And I'm like, what liquidity do you have on your stablecoin? Who's using it? And I think that they're trying to build liquidity because clearly Circle had a phenomenal IPO. Tether makes a ton of money, apparently the most per capita of any company in the world. Everyone's looking at this opportunity and they're like, I want this opportunity, right? But there's no clear reason why they have to go create a new stablecoin. **Drew Rogers** (32:05) How do you think about the, because you mentioned like just thinking about what it would look like for Breeze to issue their own. It doesn't really make sense to go and like, because right now we've seen this, a lot of companies, actually the majority of them will start with USDC or USDT because of all these reasons. And then they'll get to a point where they're like, You know, it probably makes sense for me to, like, own a little bit of this upside and have a little bit more control. And they'll typically go to the issuance layer of the Brails or the MZeros or the Bridges, Paxos, Anchorage. Like, when you're thinking about that decision, what's really important to you? What matters in terms of who you might work with there? **Millie Yang** (32:43) Genius, OCC, Charter. I think everyone's rushing to actually do this right now. **Drew Rogers** (32:48) And Agora. Forgot about you guys. Sorry. Of course. **Millie Yang** (32:52) But I think that there are companies with conditional approval. I think Anchorage is the only one that's actually like been operational with an OCC charter since **Drew Rogers** (32:59) 2021 **Millie Yang** (33:00) or **Drew Rogers** (33:00) something. **Millie Yang** (33:01) But I think that there are many people that are rushing to do that. To me, it's more like I'm trusting someone else to hold my dollars, right? So my dollars better be secure is how I think about it. So that's probably like first and foremost and obviously fees. But I think it's those two and third was like infrastructure. Like, can I trust it with reliability? Like it has to be always available. I have to be able to get my cash. It's a little bit like opening a new bank account and putting a bunch of money there. **Drew Rogers** (33:24) Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let's bring this back into the current moment with Breeze, AI Payment Operations, and where you go next. You're talking with, at least today, you're probably talking to a lot of different companies, but a travel marketplace or company in that world, like who are you mainly wanting to speak with on the commercial side of things? What is the perfect bullseye customer size example of like, If this is you and you're listening to this podcast right now, please fill out our lead form. We would love to talk to you and sell you Breeze. **Millie Yang** (33:55) We're actually talking to a lot of enterprise companies that have somehow not really established a massive payments team. So when we talk to like massive enterprises, I can't really name them, but like the most like the biggest like enterprises you can think of, a lot of them have massive payments teams. So like 100, 150 people. And then whenever we talk to them, they're like, okay, Approval Rates, we've solved it. Chargebacks, we've solved it. Like all of these things. And it's like really tough. These **Drew Rogers** (34:19) people are like, so you have 100 plus people in these big organizations. What are they typically doing? Like what are the core roles that these teams are serving? They **Millie Yang** (34:27) could be like launching new markets. They could be analyzing declines. They could be doing customer support ops, chargebacks, KYC related operations, compliance. I think we really nail it with companies that are either hyper-growth, so they've managed to grow to a certain scale without scaling a payments team, and then they're now thinking about it. Because they're like, look, if I can lift my approval rates by 1% or 2%, I can make this much more revenue. That's perfect for us. Or it could be enterprises that are launching in new markets, and they're like, I want to quickly test Australia, Japan, Korea. We can do all three of them. And we're like, okay, we'll be your team there, basically. And it's complimentary to their current offering. It's just their finance team doesn't want to go hold JPY, KRW, like Indonesian rupee or whatever. A lot of these kind of either hyper growth companies that are like they've grown without thinking about payments and then now they want to think about payments. It's a pretty perfect fit. Or massive enterprises where they're like, oh, I want to launch in a new country, but I don't even want to deal with the hassle of that. I think those two are like pretty fitting categories. We currently service companies in the production market space, skill-based games, marketplaces, digital goods, subscriptions. Travel, I don't know yet. I just had one conversation today. It's interesting, but it's complicated. **Drew Rogers** (35:44) Yeah, so there's a lot of people dealing with a lot of manual, expensive problems that could be automated. How does this practically take shape? So if I have a marketplace business or I'm selling a subscription, I want to ideally sell this thing to as many people as possible all around the world. So I'll have a handful of these different partners that are really good at each of these specific regions and Breeze is kind of It sounds like fighting for as much of that pie as possible globally. So you're, it sounds like maybe often playing nice or around others who are in certain markets or you'll come in for like, we're going to do these four markets really well as you scale. Is that typically how it works? **Millie Yang** (36:25) When companies go through hyper growth phase, they've probably on board one payments partner. **Drew Rogers** (36:29) And they're just using them for everything. **Millie Yang** (36:30) Yeah. So sometimes it could be like they're selling internationally and they're like an EU business, let's say. And they're like, I want to move US transactions domestically. And there's a lot of reasons why you want to do that. You have way better approval rates. Approval rates is a massive one, which directly translated revenue. And then we look at companies like that and we're like, we can be just your US rail. And they're really happy with that because then they don't have to open US bank accounts, set up US teams or whatever. Or it could be like vice versa. Hey, EU launch. Or it could be like Indonesia, Australia, whatever it is. **Drew Rogers** (36:59) Are there typically downsides as well to not being located in that region? Like, you know, if I'm based in some country, I'm doing a lot of business in another country. I'm assuming even for us, like if I'm invoicing a client or customer and they're like in France or something or Germany, it's like, The idea of being an expert everywhere is really hard, especially when there are these emerging use cases or new markets or things that are not your core. Are you finding that Breeze is maybe coming in in that very helpful for growth or emerging markets where there's like specialty that's needed and then maybe that's like a wedge to grow the business, like land and expand kind of? **Millie Yang** (37:36) Yeah, so we currently primarily focus on digital goods. Digital goods themselves have lots of different sales taxes implications around the world. **Drew Rogers** (37:44) How do you define in the payment code of digital goods? **Millie Yang** (37:48) It could be like a subscription, it could be like an in-game digital good. **Drew Rogers** (37:51) NFTs are technically in that, right? Is that kind of where that wedge came from? Yeah, **Millie Yang** (37:55) that started there. But digital goods themselves have sales taxes, like even in the US, different states have different sales taxes and you're supposed to remit that. And then many companies don't want to do that. Actually, funny enough, Apple's in-app purchase product does that globally. Apple themselves is a giant merchant record, but they charge you 30% for it. So a lot of our pitch is actually like, hey, now that Apple has opened up the floodgates, now you can just use Breeze and you don't have to use Apple and we're way cheaper than that. But it's like local tax remittances, those operations are also not easy. But even like opening bank accounts, maintaining treasury, those are all operational toil things. **Drew Rogers** (38:34) We were to sell access to, let's just say for example, we wanted to package this episode that we're having right here as insight packet for sale, like a micropayment. An agent can, instead of a human listening to this, an agent can come in and they can Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, **Millie Yang** (39:13) Or like fitness classes. We have all sorts of merchants like that. I don't understand why there's a million people paying for Pilates classes online, but they're paying for Pilates classes online. So like **Drew Rogers** (39:22) ICPs here would be like Hormozy, School Platform, WAP, these big like, that's where a ton of opportunity is. **Millie Yang** (39:29) Yeah, there is a ton of opportunity there. There are a lot of new creators selling all kinds of things online. **Drew Rogers** (39:33) Yeah. **Millie Yang** (39:34) Yeah. **Drew Rogers** (39:34) Okay. As we close here, when you think about opportunity, we're now at year four of the business. Is that right? Yes. Almost five. **Millie Yang** (39:41) No, almost four. **Drew Rogers** (39:42) Almost four. **Millie Yang** (39:42) We're not even four yet. **Drew Rogers** (39:45) When you think about four years ahead, doubling the length of the company, what does success look like? When you think about the future and you're honest with yourself and your team of like, this is what we're trying to achieve here. What does that look like for you guys? **Millie Yang** (39:59) So I do think four years is too long of a timeframe, given how much AI is moving. I think we used to plan everything on a three month basis. And then now it's like every one month, actually every week, pretty much. I was **Drew Rogers** (40:10) joking with my wife. I was like, I was like yesterday, I was like, you know, two or three of these spots open. And she's like, you don't, you have a whole studio booked and you have only a couple founders booked for this thing. I'm like, you don't get it. Like founders move like every 24 hours. As long as you ask them like a day or two before they'll say yes or no. It's just the way, like, People, founders and teams, they just, they're so focused on like the next couple days or a week. It's like, but how do you, yeah, you gotta balance that too, you know? **Millie Yang** (40:32) Yeah, yeah. Like the most exciting thing that is happening to this world right now is definitely AI. **Drew Rogers** (40:37) And **Millie Yang** (40:37) the way we're thinking about AI is like, the reason why enterprises love Breeze is because we're very reactive, we're very responsive, we go build a feature, we go launch a new market, we go lift the approval rate, whatever it is. They tell us a pain point and we're like, we can do it, right? I want to scale that with AI. Imagine that you can go from ingesting like a sales conversation all the way down to an agent actually building a feature, deploying that into production. If it's a compliance thing or legal thing, go escalate to the right teams or partnerships, whatever, and then get that unblocked as quickly as possible. That's our current goal right now. And we call that generally Breeze as Intelligence. **Drew Rogers** (41:11) I wrote this doc internally, Breeze as Intelligence. I created the **Millie Yang** (41:15) new doc at the company and I was like, guys, this is the future of AI. This is the future where we're going. We need to build our whole stack to make it ready for this. Yeah, **Drew Rogers** (41:23) I think I missed this in some of the things we wanted to cover. So the adoption of some of these things internally. Not only is this like topic of discussion, macro, external, like agents are going around, they're going to want to transact, but these are also the primitives here are very powerful internally. Let's expose that a little bit more. When you think about building the business itself or the team itself and how you think about Growth, Optimization, Scale. How do you even make sense of that right now? Like, how do you define Breeze as intelligence? **Millie Yang** (41:53) Yeah, like January of this year. It's crazy to think that that was just January. In January of this year, I think Opus 4.6 just launched. Everyone came back from their holidays. I was living in San Francisco. I swear if you had a graph of how many hours people slept in San Francisco, it would have dropped off a cliff. **Drew Rogers** (42:07) Because of **Millie Yang** (42:07) AI. Because of Opus 4.6. And then I think OpenClaw basically launched close to the end of that month in January, and I got my hands on that. And the second I did that, I slept for three hours every day of that week. And it was because I was like, there are so many applications I can build that's beneficial to Breeze. There are all these things I want to do, and we're officially entering a new era. **Drew Rogers** (42:26) What was so magical about that? Because I think a lot of people felt that, but what was it in your experience that was so magical there? **Millie Yang** (42:32) It was the first time I really felt like I had a team of people working for me, a team of agents. Basically, I provision all sorts of API keys. These are all personal things, not corporate things. My security person blocked me from that, but personal hobby projects, beneficial to the company, external to the company, but if I were an external vendor, I could sell this to Breeze, basically. But like, I would- **Drew Rogers** (42:55) Maybe, maybe you could. **Millie Yang** (42:56) Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that funny story here is some vendor, which I cannot name, was trying to pitch me a product. And I was like, okay, I'll go Vibecode this. I was going to build that. Yeah, no, no, because they gave me a very offensive pricing arrangement. And I was like, come on, like, I can't pay that. I was like, Vibecode your application. And I think we literally went back to them and went like, our CEO Vibecoded your platform. **Drew Rogers** (43:14) What was, without naming who it was, what was the actual function they were selling? What did you build? **Millie Yang** (43:18) If I talk about that, it would be too clear. It's a piece of software where you can ingest some sort of information and then be able to build it anyways. But I think essentially, OpenClaw had this capability of deploying many different agents and it had memory. Agents weren't dumb anymore. Agents remembered what was happening, the context that they were given. And so you could have one agent do something very specific, another agent do something very specific, and then it had a whole Slack channel to monitor what every agent was doing. It was the first time it really felt like a team. And I was like, oh, there are all these applications I want to build. Previously, I had to go human configure certain things, even on Vercel, like human configure certain deployments or go on some API platform, configure those things, and it would take me hours. And now it's done in like minutes. I just had to do the setup once and then it was all done. **Drew Rogers** (44:04) Why is this so powerful for the conversation that we're having around the group of people that you're kind of selling into the 100, 150% fraud, chargeback, compliance, like bring us a little bit into why having these agents work for you in this way is so powerful in that context. How far can you get? **Millie Yang** (44:21) That's related to like, Breezeless Intelligence. The thesis of Breezeless Intelligence is a customer, whether it's an end user or a business, can come in and complain about something. Let's say a business is like, I want to launch in X country, or a customer is like, why is my car getting declined and whatever. We would be able to go and figure out that information, that data, or sometimes the code change or whatever it is, some middle process, that's all automatically done internally, and then we'd be able to give them an output quickly. Right. So to an end user, it could be, oh, your card is being declined for insufficient funds. Why don't you try with a different card? Which actually is like really the massive conversion rate uplift because some people just don't realize their debit card doesn't have money. **Drew Rogers** (44:59) Really dumb example. It's kind of like, I am not a guy who's into cars or knows how they work or anything. When I get a check engine line, I'm like, We gotta take this thing in. Like, I'm not gonna go try to fix this. My brother has one of those very simple devices, which I thought was magical, but apparently they're very common, where you just stick it in the car and then it'll give you a code. And then that code will tell you exactly what's going on that essentially the guys at the auto shop do anyway. It's kind of like that. Typical payment denied or whatever. It's like, no, we can actually go in. We can see exactly what's happening. We can identify specifically what's going on and then address it, deal with that in a very programmatic, fast way. Instead of taking my car to the shop, waiting and being pissed, it's such a more delightful experience. **Millie Yang** (45:43) And the same is true for businesses. When businesses tell you, hey, can you fix this thing? It could be something very minute. It's like somehow we just don't support it in our API docs and they're like, can you support this? And then we're like, okay, we're doing it. And then currently a human goes and prompts an agent to do it. I want that entire process to be frictionless. **Drew Rogers** (46:00) Yeah, where is that exchange happening? Is that like on the API docs in some sort of like chat? No, on Slack. So usually on **Millie Yang** (46:06) Slack, they're like some engineer. Yeah, they could be like, oh, I want to pass the payment fee to the end customer. And we're like, oh, for this specific rail, we don't support that at the moment. But an agent could code that very easily and we can have a human to review that. But currently it's a human takes that and then goes in prompts and then create a PR and then a human reviews that and then get back. And they already think we're like really fast. We're like, we can get this done by end of week. And they were like, wow, you guys are so responsive. I want that to be way faster. Because I generally think that the biggest bottleneck to like growth is your roadmap itself. And you can keep disrupting that if you can implement as much AI as possible. **Drew Rogers** (46:42) Wow. AI is modernizing, changing, optimistically, cynically, it's displacing, it's hurting. There's like all of these haters as well. I feel like there are a lot of people too who are probably in roles that are like, you know, I'm thinking about the 100, 150 person payments operation. And, you know, I'll speak for my own perspective, like with some of these tools, you're not going to need all of these people anymore. And we're starting to see that. If you were to give advice To that organization or someone in that organization on how to stay alive and stay relevant and stay employable and valuable. Specifically in the bucket of this payments, operations, fraud, compliance, what would be your advice to them in order to really like continue to bring value to the organization? How do you see that? **Millie Yang** (47:30) Two things. So internally, we have ops people when Millie is on a Slack channel deploying all these applications, the ops person was apparently freaking out, going like, my job is going to be replaced by AI. Because **Drew Rogers** (47:41) Millie's doing all these things, my ops person, internal **Millie Yang** (47:44) ops people. It's like, my job is going to be replaced by AI, and I heard from... A lot of people are afraid of that. It's a very big **Drew Rogers** (47:50) fear, I think. **Millie Yang** (47:51) And then I think what ended up happening was I was like, look, we had a month-long AI hackathon where it was like there was a non-enduring track and an enduring track. And then the non-enduring track was think of things you're doing manually and just automate that. And then we just kept pushing people to use AI. And then they realized that they freed themselves up to do a lot more things. So it's like, oh, previously I had to go manually click this and that and that and that. And then they went and built an agent to automate that process. And then that meant that they had more free time and they can do more things. And they're now way more efficient, right? So that's how we've been pushing that internally. And that's how we approach some of these conversations, which is, hey, you don't want payments to be your bottleneck. We can make that easier and you can free yourself up to do many other things that you can optimize on. And that's how I generally think about work and AI too. Like I think the shape of work is changing. Engineers these days are sitting there and prompting, right? Engineers are no longer writing code. Jobs are just like changing shape. **Drew Rogers** (48:44) And it sounds like being open, adaptive, using these tools, being aware of where pain is or where optimization could happen, and then building that muscle up as quickly as possible so that you're firing yourself First, in some ways. What did we miss around your story, Breeze, what you're building, where you're going? I know we covered so many different pieces of this puzzle. Are there any pieces that you felt like we haven't covered that deserve some spotlight or flowers that we've missed? **Millie Yang** (49:16) I think we did a very thorough coverage. This is your first long-form **Drew Rogers** (49:19) interview. How'd we do? Was it okay? **Millie Yang** (49:23) Yeah, it was okay. It feels like it's way longer than I expected. Didn't **Drew Rogers** (49:26) spill too many beans. Well, cool. Millie, thank you for this. Excited to continue to be in relationship with you, see this awesome journey unfold. And where can people find you? Yeah, what's the best place to learn more about Breeze? I know that you have a new website coming soon. Hopefully by the time this episode comes out, we'll see **Millie Yang** (49:41) it. New website coming soon. I am posting a lot on LinkedIn. Would welcome anyone to engage. I'm trying to scale up X. It's like a different challenge. It is a different **Drew Rogers** (49:51) beast. **Millie Yang** (49:51) Yeah. I see a lot of AI slop content on X lately. It's **Drew Rogers** (49:55) getting better. **Millie Yang** (49:55) It's getting better? It's **Drew Rogers** (49:56) getting better. One, X has gotten so much better. We originally started the business on LinkedIn and that was like really where I felt like our community and following was with Zach and myself. And then when we launched the live show, like X is so much better for video. And so most of the visibility and like this conversation is going to do so much better on X because that's where people are mostly consuming video. Same with YouTube. But LinkedIn is professional and it's kind of like where you build professional relationships and network, which is everything we've talked about. The people who are actually going to care are professionals probably listening for their jobs. It is a weird tension because LinkedIn is really bad for certain things, but it's also really good for others. X is, what they have introduced though is the dislike button. So if you see a bot or comment or something, you can dislike something and flag it as like, this is an AI thing or whatever. And so I have just been going on rampages with people because you see these things all the time, right? We'll pause here. We don't need to waste people's time. Millie, thank you. This was fun. Appreciate your time.