Good morning & happy Wednesday! Today, we're diving into AmEx & Perplexity's new AI CFO for small businesses to see what it tells us about who will own the AI CFO for SMEs (what Perplexity gets from AmEx's small-business cardholders, why AmEx kept the agent read-only and the payment side in-house, how the package stacks up against Anthropic's Claude for Small Business & Meta's Muse, and what's next + bonus deep dive into a16z's State of Markets 2026: The AI Playbook for Founders and Investors inside), and breaking down Stripe's deal to buy Parafin, the lender behind DoorDash, Gusto, Amazon & Walmart Marketplace's small-business credit (why Parafin's processor-agnostic model is both what Stripe is paying for & the asset most at risk, why the combined lending business still funds only ~$2B a year next to Square's ~$7B, & what to watch next + bonus deep dives into Stripe, and Sequoia's Private AI Briefing, or Why AGI Is Already Here inside). So let's just jump straight into the...
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