A Startup Is Trying to Buy PayPal… Craziest Deal of 2026! | E2312

Hey everybody, welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex. Today is July fifteenth, 2026, and that means it's a Wednesday, and that means it's time for yet another Venture Capital round table. And we're recording this right after news broke that Stripe wants to buy PayPal. We're also gonna talk about AI's next bottleneck, how startups can build defensible software, and more. But to help me grok the market, I have brought along two Crackerjack VCs, and they are Eric Bond, one of the founders of Hustle Fund, a super early venture capital firm currently investing out of its fourth fund. Hustle function is back companies like Webflow, agree.com, Boom, Charter Space, and others. Eric. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Alex. Happy to be here. We also have Jeff Morris Junior. He's the founder of Chapter One, investing out of its third fund. Chapter one has backed companies like Superbase, Mercury, Flex, and uh Metify, a company that I also love. Jeff, welcome to the show. Great to be here, Alex, thanks for having me. This week in Startups is brought to you by MongoDB. AI assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. Start building at MongoDB dot com slash AI. Rippling. Don't settle for AI, that's all talk. Head to Ripling.ai slash twist and get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your business and take complex actions across your entire organization. That's R I P P L I N G dot AI slash twist. Sign up for exclusive access today and agree.com. Stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract to cash stack. Go to agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get fifty percent off for life. Well we'll get to all the startup stuff and founder stuff in a minute, but I want to start with this enormous possible transaction because it blows my mind. The news is that Stripe.

A private company may purchase PayPal, a public company, for more than$50 billion. So just first reactions, Jeff, let's start with you. Uh, did this deal surprise you? Do you think it's smart? What was your kind of first page analysis? Yeah, I think it did surprise me. The uh you know, when you picture PayPal and you hear the name. You just think they're not acquireble, right? And You have this private company stripe who really is in world building mode and wants to

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