John and Patrick Collison on Stripe's Growth, Agent Commerce, and the Future of Software
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
Transcript preview
Preview only
The world is gonna need platforms that support billions of transactions per second, billions of transactions per second, which no payment rail or platform does today.
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.
Up until now, the economics of software have been conceived about as fixed cost 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.
By only 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 gonna go back to doing it
the old fashioned way. Stripe processed more than 1,000,000,000,000 in payments last year. It grew 34%. And according to Patrick Collison, twenty twenty six 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 twenty twenty five 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 TPPN, John and Patrick Cullison walk through what they're actually seeing in the real economy, why agentic commerce
We have John Patrick Collison The OGs. From Stripe. How are you guys doing?
What's going on? Greetings.
Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. This is, 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?
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 at 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 TBPN. This is why we need a nonstop stream of everything that is going on
Keep exploring with a free account.
A free account preserves the short preview. Upgrade to Pro for the full transcript and episode chat.