Every great trade route becomes a cultural gradient. The Silk Road wasn't just about moving silk—food, music, language, and entire ways of thinking were transformed by the people who traversed this route. Each city along the way became a fusion point where ideas mixed with commerce.

I saw the same pattern emerging in the internet economy. So while most fintech companies were relying on the typical brand strategies, I told objectively interesting stories that explored how digital commerce shapes culture.

The work was deliberately autonomous: physical books with actual spines, feature documentaries like We Are As Gods, narrative podcasts exploring our relationship to infrastructure. Each project had to stand alone as art, independent of Stripe's business interests. This wasn't content marketing—it was cultural archaeology.

People constantly asked why a payments company would publish books. The answer was in the question itself. Commerce has always been the engine of cultural evolution. When you're building infrastructure for the new economy, you need to understand the deeper currents: How do transactions become traditions? How does technology change the way societies think about progress?

We weren't selling payment processing. We were mapping the digital silk roads—following the flow of value to understand how culture travels with commerce.