In this episode, Lex chats with Steven Schwartz, CEO and co-founder of Whop, the Brooklyn-based marketplace where almost 100,000 people earn money each month selling software, education, communities, physical goods and clipping campaigns through a single API-first stack.
Lex and Steven discuss how Whop went from a license-check tool for a handful of Mac and Windows apps to a global commerce platform settling nearly $500M a month in top-of-funnel income to users, and why Tether’s $200M investment at a $1.6B valuation makes stablecoins the only unifying rail capable of paying earners in Morocco, Nigeria, Vietnam or El Salvador the same way as earners in Brooklyn.
Steven explains why Whop treats customer acquisition — not payments or user management — as the real wedge against Stripe and Shopify, why the platform now has more agent users than human users, and how an API that lets an LLM spin up an LLC, a storefront and a running ad campaign in one prompt reframes what “starting a business” means. They explore the trajectory from a billion earners to a public listing, and whether a creator-economy fintech can meaningfully invite its own users onto the cap table.
Recorded September 2026. In the weeks after this conversation, Whop closed a $200M Series D at a $5.1B valuation — a 3.2× markup on the $1.6B Tether round discussed in the episode — led by Sequoia Capital and Shopify Ventures, with Tether retaining its February stake.
NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS:
Whop’s wedge is customer acquisition, not payments. Payments, user management and hosting are table stakes already solved by Stripe, Shopify and Discord. What sellers actually struggle with is their next incremental customer — and Whop’s take rate (3% on direct sales, 30% on Discover-sourced sales) only makes sense when read against that top-of-funnel claim.
Tether’s $200M isn’t a crypto bet, it’s a global payouts bet. Whop services more countries than Shopify, Stripe, Square or Cash App because stablecoins are the only rail that works equivalently in Morocco, Nigeria, Vietnam and the US. Card-spend, DeFi access and local off-ramps all come “for free” once the balance is USDT; a bank-rail version of Whop can’t exist.
Whop has more agent users than human users. On-platform traffic now skews toward LLMs, and Schwartz’s claim that he can tell a Claude instance to spin up a business “in one shot” is the product spec, not a demo. The strategic position is explicit: don’t play the model game, be the stack those models call out to.
47:02