John and Patrick Collison on Stripe's Growth, Agent Commerce, and the Future of Software
This interview with Stripe cofounders John and Patrick Collison originally aired on TBPN. They discuss Stripe's 34% growth and new employee tender offer, how agent commerce and stablecoins may require high-throughput blockchains built for millions of transactions per second, and why the economics of software are shifting from mass-produced products to bespoke, on-demand systems cooked fresh at the moment of use.
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Patrick Collison on Stripe’s Early Choices, Smalltalk, and What Comes After Coding
Michael Truell, CEO of Cursor, sits down with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe and an investor in Anysphere, to talk about Collison's history with Smalltalk and Lisp, the MongoDB and Ruby decisions Stripe still lives with 15 years later, why he'd spend even more time on API design if he could do it over, and whether AI is actually showing up in economic productivity data. This episode originally aired on Cursor's podcast.
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Hard Fork Live, Part 2: Patrick Collison of Stripe + Kathryn Zealand of Skip + Listener Questions
We’re back with part two of Hard Fork Live (see last week’s episode for part one). This week, Patrick Collison, Stripe’s chief executive, joins us onstage for a wide-ranging conversation about how Silicon Valley could unleash greater progress, from building new housing to curing diseases, and why he believes prestige television is a waste of time. Then, after a quick costume change, Kathryn Zealand, the chief executive of Skip, joins us to talk about her company’s robot pants. We test them out live on a StairMaster. Finally, we end the show by taking questions from audience members.
Guests:
Patrick Collison, Co-founder and C.E.O. of Stripe
Kathryn Zealand, Founder and C.E.O. of Skip
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The Stablecoin Future, Milei's Memecoin, DOGE for the DoD, Grok 3, Why Stripe Stays Private
(0:00) The Besties welcome John and Patrick Collison!
(4:28) Stripe's business evolution: $1T in volume/year, stablecoins, challenging the Visa/Mastercard duopoly, publishing economic indicators
(20:31) Jamie Dimon's leaked rant on remote work and bureaucracy
(34:22) DOGE for Defense: Trump ordered the Pentagon to look at cutting the defense budget by 8%/year over the next five years
(43:51) Crypto Corner: Milei's Memecoin embarrassment
(1:00:18) John and Patrick break down the Arc Institute and its new Evo 2 AI model
(1:18:04) Grok 3 takes the LLM lead, lessons learned from Elon's Colossus scale up
(1:30:22) Science Corner: Asteroid update
(1:35:42) Why Stripe hasn't gone public yet, despite great metrics
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Referenced in the show:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/23/stripes-1point1-billion-deal-for-bridge-marks-much-needed-win-for-vc.html
https://x.com/Zigmanfreud/status/1890202488596492620
https://www.coworker.org/petitions/professional-dignity
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-03/shopify-ceo-tobi-lutke-tells-employees-to-just-say-no-to-meetings
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/19/trump-pentagon-budget-cuts
https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/0316796883
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/16/americas/argentina-milei-libra-cryptocurrency-impeachment-calls-intl-latam/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/americas/argentina-milei-defends-libra-crypto-tweet-intl-latam/index.html
https://arcinstitute.org
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/evo-2-biomolecular-ai
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/grok-3
https://x.com/GavinSBaker/status/1891721991444447343
https://www.amazon.com/Henry-J-Kaiser-Builder-American/dp/0292742266
https://x.com/AsteroidWatch/status/1892338055354159256
https://x.com/AsteroidWatch/status/1892631907646447746
Patrick Collison — Why Silicon Valley's most talented should leave
We discuss:
* what it takes to process $1 trillion/year
* how to build multi-decade APIs, companies, and relationships
* what's next for Stripe (increasing the GDP of the internet is quite an open ended prompt, and the Collison brothers are just getting started).
Plus the amazing stuff they're doing at Arc Institute, the financial infrastructure for AI agents, playing devil's advocate against progress studies, and much more.
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.
Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Advice for 20-30 year olds
(00:12:12) - Progress studies
(00:22:21) - Arc Institute
(00:34:27) - AI & Fast Grants
(00:43:46) - Stripe history
(00:55:44) - Stripe Climate
(01:01:39) - Beauty & APIs
(01:11:51) - Financial innards
(01:28:16) - Stripe culture & future
(01:41:56) - Virtues of big businesses
(01:51:41) - John
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Patrick Collison & John Collison - A Business State of Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.348]
My guests this week are the co-founders of Stripe, Patrick and John Collison. My conversation with John in 2020 is still one of our most popular. A key theme that emerged from that first discussion was John’s boundless curiosity for all things business and this conversation continues that thread. We talk about setting a strategy and culture that attracts ambition, why the returns to sweating the details are high, and how they view Stripe’s progress against their mission to increase the GDP of the internet. Please enjoy this great and wide-ranging discussion with John and Patrick Collison.
Buy a ticket to Patrick and David Senra's live show this Thursday in NYC.
Listen to Founders Podcast
Founders Episode 311: James Cameron
Subscribe to Colossus's New Show: Art of Investing
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.
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Show Notes
(00:03:16) - (First question) - Stripe's curiosity-driven growth fuels enduring success and expansion
(00:08:34) - Why companies should resonate with founders' ideas but also have strong enduring cultures
(00:012:27) - Stripe aims to reduce friction and expand global commerce by solving practical barriers
(00:25:59) - Simplifying processes for startups and large companies to drive growth efficiently
(00:29:11) - Analyzing the enduring stories of ancient companies
(00:35:44) - Success in Hollywood and academia depends on unmeasurable vision and knowledge
(00:40:11) - Stripe's ubiquity, self-serve nature, and collective care drive its unique status
(00:43:16) - Success in tech is grounded in user-centricity, care, and connecting with customers
(00:48:17) - Parental influence on becoming entrepreneurs is complex
(00:50:21) - Adult perspective on parents, admiration for their work, and ongoing philanthropy
(00:52:30) - Stripe's challenges include complexity due to diverse payment methods and global programmable accessibility
(00:57:27) - Aiming for long-term durability, Stripe prioritizes beauty and craftsmanship in its pursuit
(01:02:50) - The most memorable conversation they had between them
(01:05:30) - Why the launch of Atlas was a defining moment in Stripe’s history
(01:06:35) - How their 25-year-old selves would react to what they are doing now
(01:10:19) - The various ways in which they feel proud of each other
(01:14:35) - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for them
Stripe: Patrick and John Collison (2018)
Brothers Patrick and John Collison founded and sold their first company before they turned 20. They created software to help eBay users manage inventory online, which set them on a path to help make e-commerce frictionless. Today, John and Patrick are the founders of Stripe, a software company that used just a few lines of code to power the payment system of companies like Lyft, Warby Parker, and Target. PLUS in our post-script "How You Built That," we check back with Kirby Erdely, who saw a problem with flying beach umbrellas and developed a new kind of tent stake—with a twist.
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#353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe
"If people around you don't think what you're doing is a bit strange, maybe it's not strange enough." — Patrick Collison
Patrick Collison (@patrickc) is chief executive officer and co-founder of Stripe, a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet.
After experiencing firsthand how difficult it was to set up an online business, Patrick and his brother John started Stripe in 2010. Their goal was to make accepting payments on the internet simpler and more inclusive. Today, Stripe powers millions of online businesses around the world.
Prior to Stripe, Patrick co-founded Auctomatic, which was acquired by Live Current Media for $5 million in March 2008. In 2016, he was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship by President Obama. Originally from Limerick, Ireland, Patrick now lives in San Francisco where Stripe is headquartered.
Also, as you can tell from seeing just a selected segment of his reading list shared in the show notes on tim.blog/podcast, he's one of the most well-read people I know. Please enjoy!
Click here for the show notes for this episode.
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VC vs. bootstrapping and how to build big things with a small team
Today I'm visiting Stripe's office in San Francisco to chat with Patrick Collison and Courtland Allen, shortly after they announced their latest round of funding, valuing the company at a whopping $20B.
Patrick Collison is the CEO and co-founder of Stripe, an ambitious company aiming to increase the GDP of the internet. The now 1,300 person company was started in 2010 by Patrick and his brother, John Collison, at the age of 23 and 21, respectively. While young, this isn't their first startup. Prior to founding Stripe, Patrick and his brother started and sold Auctomatic for $5M in 2008.
Courtland Allen is a super talented designer and developer. In 2016 he founded Indie Hackers, an awesome community of bootstrappers and makers sharing their stories. Nine months later Stripe acquired the company. Courtland is also a Y Combinator alumnus and an MIT graduate with a degree in Computer Science.
In this episode we talk about:
Who Patrick and Courtland's role models were when they were building their businesses, and how the right role models today can help build a more inclusive tech ecosystem.
The influence of Indie Hackers on Stripe and why even with the great tech for online communication today, some of the best interactions between its community members happen at meetups.
If there's too much or too little funding in tech and how the investor-founder dynamic changes when you move outside of Silicon Valley.
Why Stripe started a book publishing business (in 2018) and the reading habits of Patrick, Courtland, and others at Stripe.
We of course also talk about some of their favorite products including a product to tell you how you sleep, helpful tools for building your next app, and some “oldies-but-goodies” that you might have forgotten about.
We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to our sponsors, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. 😸
Quotes from This Episode
“How do we help increase the number of successful companies that get started in the world? The number of companies that get started is not some sort of cosmological constant, and if it can be increased then I think it's incredibly valuable to go and do that.” — Patrick
“Indie Hackers the movement wouldn’t have been as possible ten years ago, because there's so much more knowledge being exchanged now and so many more tools to help you build things — it's just easier to do with a small team than it ever has been.” — Courtland
“People are subject to extremely strong Girardian herd effects, so I don’t think investors are unique in this regard — they index on this popular conception of things. I think startups outside of the popular hubs are less popular than they ought to be and that people update too slowly based on changing trends.” — Patrick
“There should be more funding in the world, but more spread out and distributed more evenly.” — Courtland
“It all comes back to this idea of, 'how do we grow the GDP of the internet?'” — Patrick
Companies and Products Mentioned in This Episode
Airtable — Realtime spreadsheet-database hybrid.
Firebase — App success made simple by Google.
JUMP — Electrified, dockless bike rentals.
Emfit — Contactless sleep sensing solutions.
Pocket — Save and read news, articles and videos that fuel your mind.
Retool — Build custom internal tools in minutes.
Uber — Get a ride in minutes.
WhatsApp — Fast, cross-platform messenger.
Yelp — Crowd-sourced reviews for local businesses.
Stripe: Patrick and John Collison
Brothers Patrick and John Collison founded and sold their first company before they turned 20. They created software to help eBay users manage inventory online, which set them on a path to help make e-commerce frictionless. Today, John and Patrick are the founders of Stripe, a software company that uses just a few lines of code to power the payment system of companies like Lyft, Warby Parker and Target. Plus, for our postscript "How You Built That," how Robert Armstrong turned his grandma's cookie recipe into "G Mommas," buttery, bite-sized pecan-chocolate-chip cookies that are now sold in stores across the Southeast U.S.
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Recode Decode: Patrick Collison, CEO, Stripe
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about how the company he and his brother started in 2010 evolved from a service for other small startups into a global payments platform for companies of all sizes. He discusses why Stripe recently hired a new security head, DARPA alum Peiter Zatko, and why our data is safer in the hands of companies like Google and Facebook than it is with hospitals or telecom giants. Collison also argues that U.S. immigration policy, and restrictive housing policies in the San Francisco Bay Area, are imperiling Silicon Valley's ability to continually innovate in the future.
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a16z Podcast: The Movement of Money
As companies expand out from the internet into the rest of the economy — the proverbial bits to atoms — “the business models are becoming more complicated, more interesting, more payment based”, observes Patrick Collison, CEO and co-founder of payments platform Stripe, which enables apps/websites to programmatically move money around.
But as such companies become “the operating platform for commerce”, we also have an interesting paradigm where people, not governments, are controlling the commerce supply — so “It’s not the money supply. It’s the commerce supply,” argues a16z general partner Alex Rampell. This is especially true as payments become easier, as trust and payments become interwoven, and as online, peer-to-peer marketplaces address information asymmetry.
So what does this all mean for advertising as a business model, for trading goods and services directly, or for the future of stores? What does it mean for liquidity, for interest rates as a lever for the economy, and for …the end of cash? And finally, when legacy and emerging non-software businesses are increasingly networked and run on “technologically enabled rails”, what does that mean for geopolitical risk? Collison and Rampell discuss all this and more on this episode of the a16z Podcast, a hallway-style riff on all sorts of money matters.
The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/.
Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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Episode 58: Patrick Collison
Patrick Collison, cofounder of Stripe, is one of the most impressive and interesting CEOs in tech today. We delve into Patrick's story - how he came from Ireland, pursued Stripe while on leave from College, and then built and and scaled his company internationally. Patrick shares advice for entrepreneurs, thoughts on education, immigration, and a whole host of other topics. If you enjoyed the Tyler Cowen or Ezra Klein episode, you’ll also enjoy this one. Edited by @alexkontis Lavish Praise to @patrickc Constructive Criticism to @eriktorenberg
