Stripe has one of the strongest communication cultures of any company I’ve seen. From their website to documents for developers to their actual API, they know how to get to the point and communicate in an effective way to their specific audience.

Their recent “Sessions” event in 2026 was no exception. I was skimming through the keynote looking for interesting data on recent work trends and was really impressed by what I saw.

I thought I’d call out a few slides and say what I liked about each.

Consider the following slide. It clearly breaks one of my principles: vertical flow. But it still works. Why?

Because the slide fits perfectly with the context of the event and the type of delivery. It’s easy to force-fit a title onto every slide. But sometimes you just don’t need it.

Stripe Sessions slide listing new abuse prevention features

If I don’t have context, this is confusing. But the hidden context here is that we are already at an event announcing new product launches. Emily Sands is going one by one through the list. The “New” button on the top left is a reminder that these are new features. This is simple, there’s no excess text, and it works exceptionally well for a live spoken presentation.

Next, this slide’s title also fails the vertical flow test, not telling us why this matters.

Stripe Sessions slide showing inference consumption per request

But this works for a keynote presentation because the role of the slide here is not to communicate the message but to support the speaker in delivering the “so what?” The speaker is the key focus here, and it’s up to them to deliver the meaning of the message.

The reason this slide works so well is that it easily passes the ten-second test, and then Emily can quickly add context about why this matters.

Next, we have a slide from Patrick Collison at the beginning of the keynote about Stripe’s role in the economy.

Stripe Sessions slide showing payment volume, year-over-year increase, and global growth

Looking at it quickly, you can see the data is central and that Patrick thinks these three data points can communicate an enormous amount of information without much additional context.

The slide works because of a few things:

  1. Stripe talks about these numbers a lot. Their messaging often circles around simple phrases about what their customers are building.
  2. Patrick reinforces this slide verbally, but you can quickly determine: Stripe is huge and is growing much, much faster than the broader global economy.
  3. Finally, it is central to Stripe’s goal, which is highlighted everywhere: “grow the GDP of the internet” (also highlighted on their homepage).

I once wrote about how Stripe has the only good careers page on the internet. Read that here if you want more on Stripe.