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John and Patrick Collison on Stripe's Growth, Agent Commerce, and the Future of Software
00:20:02
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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- [00:01]
Patrick Collison
The world is going to need platforms that support millions of transactions per second, billions of transactions per second, which no payment, rail or platform does today.
- [00:12]
John Collison
Where we think things will go is just there will be a huge amount of agentic commerce. And again, we're seeing a little bit of it today. We think there'll be a torrent of it. And that is what unites stablecoins and AI, because we think you're going to need blockchains and better blockchains.
- [00:27]
Patrick Collison
Up until now, the economics of software have been conceived of as fixed costs and then infinitely monetize or monetize as much as possible. That has these kind of winner take all dynamics. But once there are inference costs and custom creation involved, it really shifts.
- [00:43]
John Collison
Finally, one executive who said, oh yeah, we started, you know, augmenting our customer service with AI so people are more productive, but we're just going to go back to doing it the old fashioned way.
- [00:53]
Podcast Narrator
Stripe processed more than a trillion dollars in payments last year. It grew 34%. And according to Patrick Collison, 2026 Q1 may be looked back on as the first quarter of the singularity. That's not a marketing line, it's what the data is showing. The 2025 cohort of businesses on Stripe is larger and performing better on a per business basis than any prior cohort and the trend is accelerating. In this conversation recorded live on tvpn, John and Patrick Collison walk through what they're actually seeing in the real economy. Why agentic commerce will require blockchains capable of billions of transactions per second and a reframe on software itself, from mass produced product to something bespoke, cooked fresh at the moment of use, like pizza. This conversation originally aired on tdpn, hosted by John Coogan and Georgie Hayes.
- [01:48]
John Coogan
We have John Patrick Collison, the OGs from Stripe. How are you guys doing?
- [01:52]
Georgie Hayes
What's going on?
- [01:53]
Patrick Collison
Greetings.
- [01:54]
John Coogan
Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. This is huge. I went through yc. You guys were massively influential in my career and it's a joy to speak to you today on such a big day, but I'd love for you to kick it off with the actual news. What happened? Why are we talking to you today?
- [02:11]
John Collison
We had two announcements today. One is we're launching a tender offer for employees. And that and kind of the valuation everything tended to get a bunch of the headlines. The thing that was honestly more work was we released our annual letter where every year we sum up all the trends that we're seeing on Stripe and Stripe is Growing a lot. We grew up 34% last year because the businesses on Stripe are growing a lot. And there's just, as you guys know, there's a lot happening in tech right now. This is why we need tvpn. This is why we need a non stop stream of everything going on because there is so much happening.
- [02:44]
Georgie Hayes
So yeah, we'll move, we'll move to 24 hours eventually.
- [02:48]
John Coogan
Eventually, I mean, but I feel like there is a ton of AI noise and stories and drama and we are never running out of stuff to talk about. But what are you actually seeing in the data? Because there's always this disconnect between the market and the real economy. Like people are still shopping in retail stores occasionally. Where is AI actually moving the needle?
- [03:13]
Patrick Collison
Well, generally speaking, I would say from the Stripe data, it looks like the economy is in pretty good shape. And there's been, to say the least, there's been some degree of volatility in markets over the last two years and you know, all sorts of different events and deep seat moments and what have you. But if you look at the actual real economy time series, if you look at what's actually happening substantively over the last two years, things, I mean it's, it's always hard to prognosticate the future, but over the last two years things really seem to be in good shape. The thing that's really catching our attention.
- [03:44]
Georgie Hayes
One second because I'm just curious, have you, have you guys tried to think about maybe the businesses are doing well on Stripe because they're, you know, kind of like forward looking, extremely tapped in, you know, working on the right things. And if you look at a bunch of legacy providers, you would see that actually there are a bunch of businesses out there that are slowing down that maybe are feeling effective. Just overall consumer spending. Like have you tried to kind of like break that out or understand that dynamic?
- [04:16]
Patrick Collison
It's obviously hard to measure because we don't have that data. We only have our data. But, but I think there is some of that composition effect and we see it, I guess, both in Stripe's data compared to say, public earnings from others. Clearly the respective populations are performing somewhat differently. But I guess we also see it qualitatively in the conversations we're having with customers where what tends to happen, say for some incumbent is they built some business, they installed some system long before Stripe even existed. Maybe there's some sense that, well, if it's not broken, don't fix it, but then decide, hey, we're going to do something new and when they're doing something new, then they want to use the best infrastructure that will enable them to move the fastest and launch in the most countries and support stablecoins and do things with AI and whatever and then they tend to launch that on Stripe. And so there is this qualitative sense that once a company decides to do something innovative, new, retoolable, what have you, they're more likely to come to strip.
- [05:16]
John Coogan
Are you seeing an overlap between stablecoin activity and AI activity? There's been sort of a new narrative around agents will use stablecoins but I feel like agents can use legacy payment Rails just fine. And then also you can do really cool things with stablecoins that are not really AI native necessarily. And so I'm wondering how much overlap there is there.
- [05:39]
John Collison
I would distinguish between how things work today and how things will work in the future. In terms of how things work today. Agents, Absolutely. A lot of people build with Stripe. You can have a one time use credit card that your agent can go out and spend. But if you look at what's happening, there's lots of agents having to solve CAPTCHAs to be able to do stuff on the wider web. Clearly the web is not built for agents and as a result they have to get creative to actually do any real world tasks. And that's true in economic activity as well. Where we think things will go is just there will be a huge amount of agentic commerce and again we're seeing a little bit of it today. We think there'll be a torrent of it. And that is what unites stablecoins in AI because we think you're going to need blockchains and better blockchains. Honestly. I mean this was our thinking behind Incubating Tempo because you're going to need really high throughput blockchains for the agents.
- [06:34]
John Coogan
Can you take us through some of the historical technologies that led to growth in just Internet payments? I'm thinking about mobile social commerce. One click checkout, Apple pay. There's so many things when I think about the agentic commerce boom that's coming, like it could be hooking a better version of Siri up and you know, chat GPT, rolling this out very aggressively. But also you know, smart speakers, smart lamps like your watch. Like there's so many different pieces to unblock and un unhobble the, the actual agents as they go about their day.
- [07:13]
Patrick Collison
Well, can I answer a slightly different question? But then we can come back to that.
- [07:17]
John Collison
Yeah, go a point.
- [07:19]
Patrick Collison
I just, Sorry, this is a.
- [07:20]
Georgie Hayes
We'll tell you the questions, you tell us your answer.
- [07:25]
Patrick Collison
So you know how brothers are. But I just want to lose one point per the prior question about, you know, what we're seeing in the economy, because I feel like, I mean, this is very arbitrary, obviously, but I feel like there's at least a reasonable chance that 2026 Q1 will be looked back upon as the first quarter of the singularity, and maybe in three years, in hindsight, that will look completely delusional. I don't know. But we're seeing, I mean, there's kind of the macroscopic picture of the Stripe user base and things overall looking pretty good and so forth, and the tumult's not quite showing up. But when we look at the cohorts and then when we look at the businesses that signed up in 2023 and their progression and trajectory over the subsequent months, the businesses that signed up in 2024 and then the business signed up in 2025, there's been a phased transition in 2025 where there are both more of them, and on a per business basis, they are, on average, doing better. Which is really striking because you might think, okay, well, there's this cavalcade of new lightweight vibe coded applications or something, but it's not really a lot of substance there. We're actually seeing both numbers move together. There are many more business getting started, and the average, the median business is in fact performing better. We're only a couple of weeks into 2026, but it looks tentatively like 2026 may plausibly be an acceleration even over that significant leap of 2025. So I don't know. I mean, we've had all sorts of dramatic AI inventions and innovations over the last couple years. There's a bit of a question of, well, how and when and how should we think about how it'll translate to the economy? I would say looking at real purchasing behavior on stripe, 2025, end of 25, beginning of 26 is when I feel like we're really starting to see it.
- [09:29]
Georgie Hayes
That's super interesting data. One, because we were. There was some survey that came out yesterday, or maybe it was late last week, that said they asked like they asked a bunch of executives, are you getting any value out of AI? And 80% of them said no. But clearly, if you look, when you look at.
- [09:48]
John Collison
Come on, that's hogwash. Like, find me one executive who wants a refund on their tokens. Find me one executive who said, oh, yeah, we started augmenting our customer service with AI. So People are more productive, but we're just going to go back to doing it the old fashioned way. Or like we're spinning our code by hand and, you know, we don't need any of this automated loom technology. Just like.
- [10:12]
Georgie Hayes
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not saying I'm not. I, I could, I could pick out a bunch of reasons. No, no, I'm not saying I agree with it. No, I could pick out a bunch of reasons why it would be wrong. One, one reason it might be wrong is they, is they're not in the weeds actually using the tools. And so they just think, like, you
- [10:25]
John Coogan
might not even be aware that they're using the tools because it's buried under.
- [10:28]
Georgie Hayes
And they're not. They're not stealing. They're not feeling the acceleration, because they're not. They're not.
- [10:33]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [10:34]
Georgie Hayes
I wanted to ask how you guys think about incubations like Tempo. When you look at, When I look at Atlas and what je have done there, you think even in your. I, I don't know, kind of like the most wild projection that you had early with Atlas, like, hey, maybe someday a quarter of the, of the C Corps in the United States could be, you know, built on this platform. Anybody would have said that was insane. And yet here we are.
- [11:03]
Patrick Collison
Gosh, I am. I'm not sure what to say really, except we just, we just try to pay a lot of attention to the. I mean, as you guys know, there's a lot of pain points that go into starting a company and we just try to take them seriously. And then, you know, it's the line. So much of these things is just a long obedience in the same direction. Like Atlas is now this great overnight success. But we launched Atlas, I think, in overnight 2014, May 2015. And so, you know, 10 years of compounding and yeah, now it's at some pretty meaningful scale. And, you know, look, I think Tempo will probably have the same shape where we think it. I mean, again, to this AI discussion and us sounding a bit unmoored and untethered, like, I think the world is going to need platforms that support millions of transactions per second, billions of transactions per second, which no payment rail or platform does today. But it's even in the success case, it's not going to be an overnight thing. It's going to be, you know, five, six, seven years, and then maybe we'll have conversations about how, you know, Tempo suddenly became a overnight success or something.
- [12:20]
John Collison
But done. I think, I think Patrick's a bit the fish in water. Who can't, you know, who doesn't know things are wet? My framework would be, you can't get too MBA brain about new products. You can't have your spreadsheet that's like, oh, the TAM is this and just like reason about things.
- [12:39]
Georgie Hayes
Yeah, you should never say we want 1% of global GDP.
- [12:44]
John Collison
No, we have this kind of stuff. Exactly.
- [12:46]
Georgie Hayes
You guys never, wait, you guys never
- [12:48]
John Collison
pitched that well companies.
- [12:51]
Patrick Collison
We actually never thought about Stripe in GDP terms until one day we realized, oh, hang on.
- [12:55]
Georgie Hayes
Oh, that's such an important lesson because so many, so many, like, yeah, any founders, how many pitch decks have you seen over the last decade? They're like, yeah, we just need 1%. And it's kind of, it's a meme.
- [13:08]
John Collison
You can go back in the Wayback machine and find the early Stripe websites, but we're very focused on payments for developers and making that experience good. But where I'm going is I think you have to reason in product specifics. And so again, I think any NBA would have told you that the adjacency of, you know, incorporation makes no sense. It's not related to, you know, what's our right to win. You know, there's all these things people say, whereas when you actually go talk to founders, they're like, guys, it's like this is the single biggest issue I ran into starting my company. And similarly with Tempo. And just as we think about incubations, we're trying to solve a real problem here where we talked in the letter about Bridge having operational issues not because of Bridge, but because of blockchain congestion where you know, you have coins that are or blockchains, both used for kind of meme coin trading and also serious real world payments. And so we just want to low latency, high throughput payments and we're going to need much higher throughput for the agents. But anyway, I think you have to reason in very specific product terms.
- [14:12]
John Coogan
What specific products are you excited about? In the unhobbling of agentic commerce?
- [14:21]
John Collison
We, we, we laid out in the letter basically these, these, these levels of agent commerce because I think like everything in AI, people want to sell a hype historian. So they, you know, talk about how the machines will even consulting you and people aren't actually, that seems far off. They're not that excited about that. You can start from just the basics of why are we filling out forms like that? You were talking about the progression of commerce. Why can't I just send something to a link to ChatGPT and have it buy it or why can't I search outside of just doing a basic keyword search or something like that. And so a lot of the work Stripe is doing is building the infrastructure. We're working with all the big retailers that you would expect, Etsy's and Shopify and Best Buys and Walmarts and folks like this to make product catalogs viable within the AI apps. And there's basically a ton of boring API and protocol and infrastructure work which we love. That's our business. But people just want to be able to do shopping, do discovery, do purchases within the AI apps and maybe just
- [15:28]
Patrick Collison
more kind of abstract lady. We've, there's kind of the specific agent of commerce thing and then there was just the general question of how software will change because of agents. And I've been thinking about it. Maybe software becomes a bit like pizza. That is to say software historically has been created not like pizza. Some would say months, years beforehand and then freeze dried and whatever you, you prepare us at the sort of moment of consumption. But we're actually going to, you know, software should be like Pete said, it should be cooked right then and there at the moment of use. And so it's this quite fundamental shift where you don't want mass produced industrial scale software, you want bespoke custom software made for you. That moment that's very fundamentally different. It's kind of the. Up until now the economics of software have been conceived of as fixed cost and then infinitely monetized or monetized as much as possible. That has these kind of winner take all dynamics. But once there are inference costs and custom creation involved, it really shifts. It's kind of the non Walrusian software regime and just. I don't know, I don't quite know where it goes, but I think it's going to look very different.
- [16:57]
John Coogan
Last question. Pineapple on pizza, yes or no?
- [17:03]
Patrick Collison
Ireland was big into pineapple on pizza. Ireland, not a big pineapple growing country, I will concede. But a lot of the pineapple on the pizza. Good memories.
- [17:13]
John Collison
A very large fraction of the banana market, don't forget. So we punch above our weight in fruits that don't grow there.
- [17:19]
John Coogan
There we go, there we go.
- [17:20]
John Collison
I love fruits.
- [17:21]
Georgie Hayes
The round is exciting, the overall growth of volume is exciting. But we wanted to hit the go for how many books you guys are selling. Oh yeah, can you give us the, the numbers there?
- [17:33]
John Coogan
Scale that operation stripe press just.
- [17:36]
Patrick Collison
Well actually we announced in the letter we sold our millionth book. But in fact since.
- [17:47]
Georgie Hayes
Incredible.
- [17:49]
Patrick Collison
No, look, look, books. We've actually now sold our 1.1 millionth book, so. But we'll go through the Next Ganga too, but 1 billion soon. We love books and they're very AGI proof.
- [18:02]
John Coogan
Oh yeah. No, we've been a huge fan of so much of the Stripe press catalog. I haven't read them all, but I'm collecting them one at a time and I'm working through them and every time one drops, it's always a moment and we love them. So thank you for everything.
- [18:16]
Patrick Collison
Yeah.
- [18:17]
Georgie Hayes
Great to have you guys on and congratulations to the whole team. On. Incredible.
- [18:21]
Patrick Collison
Incredible. TVPN is an amazing startup and it's super cool to see you guys grow and built on Stripe in the streaming world.
- [18:31]
Georgie Hayes
And our sector needs Incorporated on Stripe built on Stripe.
- [18:34]
John Coogan
Our first, our first ad deal ever was a live read at a live conference. I think we charged $50 and I put and I sent someone a Stripe link.
- [18:43]
John Collison
We're Talking about the 2025 cohort being the fastest ever.
- [18:46]
John Coogan
Yes.
- [18:48]
Patrick Collison
Well, we'll have to have you to our. To our. To our internal Stripe show, so we'll follow.
- [18:51]
John Coogan
That'd be great. Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations.
- [18:55]
Patrick Collison
Thanks, guys.
- [18:55]
Podcast Narrator
Cheers.
- [18:55]
John Coogan
Goodbye.
- [18:59]
Podcast Narrator
Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to, like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X16Z and subscribe to our substack@a16z.substack.com. thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management, LLC, A16, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.