🟣 The Collison Brothers LIVE on TBPN | John Collison, Patrick Collison, Henri Stern, Jeff Weinstein, & Zach Abrams

18:28Patrick Collison:Yeah, yeah. It does feel like as we move up the layers of abstraction, we go from, you know, pair programming alongside an AI to being more product manager to almost winding up more in a build versus buy mentality. Yes. And yes, you could vibe code that, but if it already exists or it's open sourced already or there's something you can pull off the shelf and it's going to be cheaper than the token cost, cheaper than the maintenance, like maybe - But again, we'll end up in a new equilibrium where, you know, I think exporting your data will become more important because you'll get back to the Unix philosophy of, you know, you have individual tools that are much easier to interoperate between each other.

19:02So you can kind of pipe your data conceptually between applications. If I can also bring this back to payments for a moment, a very important angle on all this stuff. You guys have probably had the experience of when you are doing something in codex, when you're vibe coding away, you are the adult that needs to reach for things on the high shelves for us. And so it is much better at writing code than you. It's able to architect an application. So what do you need to do? You need to go sign up for an API key.

19:29Patrick Collison:Go get a PDF of a website that it can't access. Exactly. Log in and please get me API keys is something you end up doing a lot. And so one of our biggest announcements this year was something called Stripe Projects, where you are able to agentically do stuff in the wider world. And so you can hook up your codecs to Stripe Projects. And if you want to redemo this, if you want to deploy a website, it can go sign up for Vercel for you. This is huge. And it can pay for it. and so now what was previously a multi-step process where it could kind of do some of it and it could like orchestrate Vercel but it couldn't sign up for it now it can pay for Vercel it can pay for Cloudflare it can pay for browser base if you want to do headless web browsing and things like that it can do all this stuff and so we think the agents are going to get so much more powerful because we're giving them the ability to actually go buy what they need in the wider world and then it can do way more end to end and so that's Stripe Projects which is kind of the second side of agentic commerce is your agent needs to be able to go do stuff on your behalf.

20:28And you're exactly right. Agentic coding agents are not just for coding. They're for doing stuff. You know, we demoed today, write a research report for me, buy some data in the process of doing that research report. But again, that's not, I happen to use a coding agent for it. It is not a coding task. It's a research task. Yeah, yeah, this happened.

20:45Patrick Collison:On the show, I used Codex, I vibe coded a beautiful webpage for some joke we were joking about. And I was like, it's on my local host. I need to send it to Jordi. And actually deploying it was the harder part, which is supposed to be so easy. Stripe projects is the only way you can agentically buy a domain. You don't need to have anything. You don't need to have an account with any of these providers. You can just go buy a domain. It's super cool. And I feel like that's really important.

21:07John Collison:How has recruiting changed over the last few years? Because I feel like so much of what has made Stripe such an incredible company is convincing the smartest, most ambitious people in the world to work in payments, a place that they historically maybe wouldn't have been excited to work. And then now I imagine the job of any person that could get a job at Stripe can probably also get an offer at OpenAI, Anthropic, some of these other labs. And so I imagine you find yourself having conversations with folks and helping them make a decision. Yes. So I mean, so many places you go there. One, as you say, I think we have always encouraged people to think bigger than just payments.

21:48And I think if Stripe was just about payments, fewer people would have been interested in joining. But I think they understand that, going back to tools and the importance of them, I think people understand that the infrastructure that we give people for entrepreneurship actually changes the outcomes, removing the supply-demand curve. And so we can encourage there to be more entrepreneurship. Again, Patrick talked about 71 % year-over-year growth in the number of businesses being created on Stripe. That's not all Stripe, but we definitely contribute to it by making the whole entrepreneurship journey easier.

22:14And then when those companies scale, you know, OpenAI sells ChatGPT, I think, in more countries than it otherwise would have because all that infrastructure is just super available and on Rails. And so it exists that kind of the small getting started end of the spectrum. And for, you know, the biggest companies in the world, the Amazons and Hertz's and Meta's and everyone like that that we work with on projects like this. You probably saw the stablecoin thing. We answered them. Okay. So that's one part of it is like you have to genuinely have a mission that's interesting. and I think we believed and believed that this stuff actually really matters and you can change the end equilibrium.

22:48That's one. Second thing is that it has always been the most competitive time I can remember to compete for talent. I can never remember a time when it wasn't the case.

23:01Patrick Collison:It was easy when you were competing with Mark Zuckerberg. And then it was easy when you were competing against Elon Musk. No man steps in the same river twice because you know he's not the same man it's not the same river like i remember you know when we were recruiting greg brockman who's our second employee who you know we're gonna have speak um yesterday but with sam instead uh because they have a lot going on this week but um but i remember recruiting greg to join stripe as our second employee flying across the country to boston to go meet with him because like you know why would you join this like no-name company that you've ever heard of and that's kind of stuff you do then and like you've stuff and so it's always the most competitive of time that it's ever been with recruiting.

23:39And this is certainly no exception. And, you know, people have a lot of great options. That kind of gets to, I think, you know, people are talking about the death of software engineering. And honestly, the closer people are to AI, the more they're like, oh, you know, software engineering is cooked. You know, it's got two years left. I think those people are all high, honestly. Like, just, you have so much, you are able to work with AI so much better if you understand the underlying concepts and you're so much better prepared for that. And I'd almost analogize it to, remember in the 90s, people had this view that like, okay, the cloud or like a proto cloud back then is coming along, the network is the computer, all this vision.

24:24And people tried to have these leaky abstract, or like abstract, you know, they thought they had a beautiful abstraction where you would have, you know, a folder that just happened to be on the network in the cloud. And you still have that on the Mac today, your iCloud folder and things like that. And same on Microsoft Windows. Those never worked that well because it turns out the network exists and it can sometimes be down in a way that your hard drive wasn't and things like that. And so it was always important to understand disk IO and RAM swap and all these kind of things even if you had useful helper abstractions over them.

24:54I think with AI, similarly, to be really effective working with AI, you need to understand what it's doing and what's going on underneath the hood. You need to understand that the model and then the memory and then you have your harnesses and you've got your skills and everything like that and how they all interact. And so I think all these people calling the death of software engineering are smoking something.

25:15Patrick Collison:Yeah, I mean, there's also just the software engineers are dynamic and intelligent, creative, and can operate at various levels of abstraction. And there have been transitions from different transactions before. Yeah, if you want to make the argument

25:25John Collison:that AI will transform every aspect of the economy, but then engineering, like core understanding of engineering and software engineering will no longer be valuable. And obviously, some of the people that are more bearish on the practice of software engineering have uptime issues. And Stripe is a category where you guys can't really afford to have reliability issues. There's two categories of people I would be super bullish on right now. I think we'll do incredibly well over the coming 10 to 20 years. Firstly, high agency people. We know this at Stripe. The people who are like, I've been talking to customers.

25:59I know exactly what we should do. We got to go fix this. But the people who have that pep in their step and they want to go make Stripe better, they are now so much more empowered thanks to AI. The second is double majors. I think if you understand software and understand finance, or if you understand software and understand marketing, you now can go massively improve the entire marketing funnel for your company. And one person can do what would have taken 20 people dredging through all these systems previously.

26:24Patrick Collison:Famous Paul Graham quote about that too. Yeah, exactly. Typically an entrepreneurship team, a founding team, has a collection of like five or six skills between two founders, three founders. Charlie Munger talked about the importance of being multidisciplinary and multidisciplinary thinking. And implied was that he thinks getting a functional understanding of many disciplines is not that hard. You can just go read the books. Now you can talk to your AI about it. And so I think multidisciplinary thinkers are going to do incredibly well. Yeah. Do we have a minute to talk about stablecoins? We have one minute, yeah.

26:54Patrick Collison:Okay, one minute. But in The Economist in Buttonwood, there's a lot of doom and gloom about the stablecoin winter. I put a ton of money in stablecoins. Didn't make a dime. They're saying it's too stable. But they are saying that the market grew 30 % in the six months up until late October. But total stablecoin assets have barely bunched since. Are we in a stablecoin winter broadly? Are you seeing that adoption is still ramping?

27:24John Collison:Economists not processing that there can be a correction. There can be a correction in crypto asset prices and yet more adoption than ever in actual the utility of stable coins. And the two things are not the same. We're always trying to point out to people the difference between price curves and the underlying activity. And those are very different things. And we're talking about that today in the SaaSpocalypse in the context of SaaS growth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The companies are still growing top lines. Exactly. Top line growth is really good and everything like that. And so kind of a similar story with stable coins where we see volumes continue to grow.

27:57And again, we had this in a lot of our demos. With agentic pay-per-use payments or streaming payments or things like that, you actually have to use something like Tempo. You have to use stable coins because economically speaking, just like what else are you going to do? And so we are as bullish on stable coins as we've ever been.

28:15Patrick Collison:Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Great hanging out. Thanks for having us at the Cheeky Pine.

28:21John Collison:Yes, there you go.

28:22Patrick Collison:You guys are the perfect setup. Have a great rest of Stripe Sessions. We'll grab your headphones as well. And we will bring on our next guest. All righty. Top out. Cheers. Goodbye. And we will bring on Henry next. Welcome back to the show. Last time we were in person. We'll let you put those headphones on. I think last time you were in person. Didn't you help us translate something in French? Something random? Do you remember that? I do. This is my second audition. Yes. It was about. It was fantastic. You can sit here. It's about Meta's acquisitions. Oh, yeah. That's right. Yeah, yeah, because we were interviewed for French TV.

28:59Patrick Collison:Exactly. And we didn't know what they were saying, and you helped us understand it. That was fun. What a wild time. I mean, I guess it's only getting wilder. Have you been struggling with any of the talent wars, or have you been recruiting for your team? Are you growing your organization now? All of the above. I mean, so when we were acquired, this is coming up on nine months. We were about 30 people at Privy. We're about 60 now. Yeah. And then Stripe generally is doing so much more. The soundboard made it. Incredible. And then Stripe is doing a lot more in this space. So generally, I think the talent wars are real.

29:32But also the reality is twofold. First, you had to be a little bit damaged to go into crypto and stable coins to begin with. And so we're seeing these people who are still coming in. And then actually, we're seeing a lot more merging of the two. Which is to say, yesterday was a good demo on streaming micropayments. like there's a lot more that i think stable coins and like you know internet native money is going to enable for agentic use cases it's still very much in its infancy but it's like yeah we just

29:57John Collison:spoke with the collisons around you know the all this issue around ai fraud people signing up for a bunch of free accounts to get access to tokens or people signing up for an account running up a bill and then basically stiffing the the provider and uh and how stable coins could effectively be a solve for that which is like hey if you're if you're if you're going to just sign up and use as tool, that's fine. We don't necessarily know who you are. We don't need to KYC to use a language model, but you might need to use stablecoins to pay as you go so there's no risk. For sure. I think a lot about it in terms of tier one, tier two, tier three ISPs where you'll call between Verizon and AT &T, and then at the end of the month, you'll settle the bill across the tier ones.

30:40I think there's just such an interesting design space for managing token spend payments and so on. using programmable money in the era we're coming into.

30:49Patrick Collison:Have you been tracking the showdown between the stablecoin community and the banks? This was in this Economist article as well. I would hope so. And I want to know if you think that this is a true collision course, if there will really be a showdown. The concept here, as put in Buttonwood in The Economist, the prospect of stablecoin growth spooked America's banks. This is because a loophole in the law lets stablecoins offer deposit-like yield without bank-like regulatory burden. The American Bankers Association warned that a$2 trillion market for stablecoins, if it was all dollar pegged, could lead to a 10 % decline in bank deposits.

31:31Patrick Collison:That would raise average funding costs for lenders by about a quarter of a percentage point, they said, crimping their profits and driving up interest rates on all manner of loans for everyone else. Is this a real issue? Is there a logical solution? Is there going to be some sort of unification where the stablecoin community and the bank and the traditional banking community come across?

31:52John Collison:Did they not get a solution with the Genius Act? I think it's, yeah.

31:56Patrick Collison:Please.

31:57John Collison:I'll follow you.

31:57Patrick Collison:Oh, well, in here it says bankers and stablecoin issuers have since been locked in a fight over the final shape of a follow-up bill, the Clarity Act. And so that's where we are right now. But I want to know where you think it goes from here. So Polymarket, last I checked, has it around 45%. The clarity bill will make it out of the committee and actually pass. And I think the reality is genius was basically as buttoned down as it could be on this specific issue. And this is why clarity needs to exist to set standards and procedures for actually doing this. I think it's a really... They were such a genius, should have provided more clarity.

32:35It's very good. This is why the show exists. Crowd doesn't like it. Crowd says it flopped. For those of you viewing, I see this as the acoustic set versus the Ultra Dome. This is you guys coming in unplugged. But no, I think it's an essential issue. And I think right now you're seeing also a twin thing around tokenized deposits versus stable coins. And like two different formats for how digital assets, I guess, can impact finance and fintech generally. the reality is I think more competition

33:07John Collison:say more about tokenized deposits I can imagine what that is which is like I go to a bank, I give them an actual dollar and tokenize it but then they're keeping the dollar they're lending against it maybe they give me some yield even and they'll run all of the same infra in the back that exists today but you have a digital representation of your deposit that you can use and so in a sense it is akin to being handed a code check ticket uh and you get to walk around with your ticket and at some point you can redeem it at the code check or another code check potentially versus the stable coin where you're actually holding the asset itself um and i think those are the two pathways that are getting a lot of exploration in the space um ultimately i think you know a lot of these rails will merge and i think more importantly the question is one of like competition for the consumer the consumer should have more ways of actually earning on their uh on their assets and so the idea that we need you know greater clarity as it were with uh issuers and institutions that are putting out stable coins is so absolutely clear but i think we should view it first and foremost from the question of like what benefits the companies that are using stable coins or you know the internet generally what benefits the users not how different is this from the current infrastructure that we have because that is you know not a way to build new systems in the world yeah and then i guess there is also the

34:23Patrick Collison:sort of the additive outcome where, yes, you get to$2 trillion in stablecoin assets, but it's for new use cases that are not competing with the traditional credit card lending, mortgage lending, asset-backed loan industry. And so it's not putting that downward pressure necessarily on the traditional banking system. And so I'm sure the banking industry is sort of cautiously optimistic. This is all net new dollars that are being created and used around the globe and for different purposes but if it's but if it does directly come after well this company used to just use credit cards for everything and now they're not paying us then that's maybe has some negative effects and i think the two things you'll see as run-ons is basically how does stablecoin deployment evolve worldwide to what extent is it a western thing versus the rest of the world thing that probably has impact on you know usdt versus usdc market share like there's a lot of interesting run-ons to this exact question the second thing is at least this is why i'm excited to be at stripe And, you know, Stripe isn't doing any crypto things for crypto's sake.

35:24They are doing, you know, how do we build better rails for our users no matter what the rail is under the hood.

35:28Patrick Collison:Yeah. It's less ideological and more pragmatic first principles. This is a very good tool. Exactly. And we should put it to use in ways that betters the experiences. This is where I'm interested in some of, I mean, DeFi has had a very complicated few months with basically a lot of exploits and things like that. And this is still an industry in its infancy. And yet we're seeing a very interesting merging of the rails with, for example, vault curators on Morpho, like, you know, folks like Apollo and others taking part in it. And so we're seeing, again, just a merging of traditional finance and online finance in a way that I think is going to continue to.

36:04John Collison:Recent exploits. Is that more social engineering for the most part? This is not AI led? In those specific cases, my understanding is it is not AI-led. I think it's very much social engineering, you know, bad setups in various places that have led to unfortunate outcomes. And I think it's just the space maturing. I think we are seeing, as a side note, this is very interesting. So we use, at Privy, a number of basically AI tools to do, like, constant pen testing to review every PR that goes out to do a lot of this. And we're also seeing quite a bit of just better bug bounties coming in, much more sophisticated.

36:48But the baseline basically on the bug bounty has gone much better. And you're now able to string together like more complex attack vectors that you couldn't do before. So that evolution is like mega clear. And one of our engineers, Andrew McPherson, used ChatGPT to find an exploit in React. It was a zero day in React. And the fact that React is a 15-year-old library put out by Meta, it's open source, it's been beaten to death because it basically backs every product on the web. The fact that we're finding these now is insane.

37:19Patrick Collison:And do you have more clarity on a zero-day, does that allow someone to potentially get into someone's computer, their browser? Or is it more just like cause the browser to crash in a certain way or be strung together? Because there's like a wide range of what you can do once you exploit something. You can just take the service offline, which is bad. Or you can get into the database. There's a wide range of negative outcomes. Yeah, I'm not actually sure what the ramification of his was. But there's a very good economic market for buying zero days. And the price will depend on what it allows you to do.

37:55Patrick Collison:That makes sense. Have you been tracking any movements in the stablecoin community to do interesting non-dollar-back stablecoins? I'm thinking of like Peter Thiel back in like 99 sort of proposed like a Vanguard total index, like a VTI backed stable coin where you have one dollar, but the dollar is backed by basically a massive basket of assets that includes gold, oil, real estate, a slice of stocks and bonds. And so it's sort of more diversified than even the U.S. dollar could be. And maybe it's less stable relative to the dollar, but you're bought in on the global economy. So I think first we're going to see a rise of non-dollar stablecoins as more people embrace it, especially…

38:41Patrick Collison:And that would just be foreign currencies? Yeah, foreign currencies. Second, I've heard of a few projects that are trying to basically have an inflation stablecoin, which is the stable actually grows with inflation so that you're on a purchasing power parity-like standpoint. Yeah, tips are the famous assets that you can buy from the treasury. Treasury, inflation, protection, something, securities. I forget. That one, but that's the idea of one of them. I think they're really hard to instrument and get quite right, which is why I don't think they've taken off just yet. And then I think the third piece is, this is not a stable coin, but it was a project I heard about recently I thought was very interesting.

39:16There's a company called Pearl that is finding a way to do fast matrix multiplication and back a blockchain on this so you can issue tokens based on how much compute you've got ready to be useful inference. That's interesting. And so there was a question for me of like, what other useful work could you back the currency on?

39:34Patrick Collison:Yeah, I mean, we've talked to Prime Intellect a few times. They've been doing early on some crypto token-backed compute. And interestingly, the 3D rendering community, I don't know if you're familiar with the render token, But basically, you know, most 3D artists, if they're rendering CGI for a movie, TV show, something like that, animation, they will typically have an on-premise rack of GPUs that they use to render the graphics or the final output. And the render network was an effort that I think was pretty successful to basically, well, I'm not rendering my project. I'll render yours and I get tokens that I can put back on the network because each frame is deterministic and separate.

40:17Patrick Collison:So you can render, you know, if there's 24 frames a second, you can render thousands of frames across a whole bunch of different machines. They all will look the same when they come together. And so that was the first example of like, oh, a crypto project that's being done for useful work, marshaling computer. And now you can imagine like a thousand times more ways to. These are hallowed times. While crypto prices are down, and there's so much interesting thing happening in tech, we can actually build very useful things.

40:45John Collison:Prediction time. When we look back on 2026,

40:49Patrick Collison:what's your price for USDC? Price target for 2030.

40:54John Collison:This is John's favorite joke.

40:58John Collison:Hope it's won. Any answer to$100 is a disastrous outcome. What do you think the story will be around the intersection of AI and crypto, specifically agents and stables? It's a great question. Because everyone keeps saying it, right? But I feel like we need to have massive... It's very clear that when an AI tool has product market fit, adoption is extremely rapid, right? You just immediately hockey stick. And so I'm sort of waiting for a hockey stick moment like that at the intersection of stables and agents. So here's my first we're seeing so much activity like 35 % of new privy signups today are for people building agentic wallets.

41:43So they're using the wallet. They're like giving agents, for example, like some allowance. And then they're like, you know, they have an ability to claw back assets that the agent doesn't spend it. They can control spend in a very like particular way. So we're seeing so much tinkering happening here that I think is going to lead to emergent behaviors that are really interesting. My prediction is, first, great use cases are going to happen in the background. There'll be a lot more about business model innovation, things like what you were talking about earlier, which is how do we gate payments in a streaming sense so that I can get paid on a per-token basis much more easily.

42:15Yeah, exactly. With no risk. Yeah. So I think that's where we'll see the first few, and then over time we'll see a much greater pickup of basically agents actually running their own wallets, and that'll be across both Fiat and Stablecoin Rails.

42:27John Collison:Very cool.

42:28Patrick Collison:Red button or blue button? What'd you push? Are you familiar with this? I have no idea what you're talking about. We'll get to it another time. Locked in. Locked in. That's bullish. I don't have time for these things. That's incredibly bullish. It's a thought experiment. You can go check it out online. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is fantastic. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Pop those headphones off. Put them down right there. And we're good to go. Jeff, welcome to the show. We are here live at Stripe Sessions in San Francisco. Good to see you.

42:56John Collison:Great to see you.

42:57Patrick Collison:Throw a headset on, sit down, introduce yourself again. Yeah, you can sit here with that headset. Hello, hello. Introduce yourself for the fans, the viewers, the chat. Howdy. I'm Jeff Stripe on the product team. Jeff Weinstein, good to see you all. Good to see you. This is the first time I ever met you in person. We've been talking on Zoom for 10 years. Have we met in person? Wait, is that actually true? I don't think I've ever met you actually in person. It's like one of these things where you've met so many times with a computer. it's like true.

43:27John Collison:That's crazy. That's crazy. No, I, yeah, I, I, I, I assume we had met multiple times. Crazy. Great to see you in person. Yeah. This is amazing what y 'all have done. Uh, how have you, do you ever visit Delaware? When you show up in Delaware, people just start, people just start cheering when you walk out of the airport. You're basically like an athlete that, you know, wins a world cup. They're coming home and they, they do like a parade. I'm assuming I got to meet. So before we get into this, Jeff, Jeff runs Atlas. He created Atlas. You're responsible for like a quarter of all new new C Corps.

44:00Atlas is now incorporating about 26 % of the new gong moment. I think it's a gong moment.

44:08John Collison:I think it's a gong moment.

44:10Patrick Collison:Oh man, this is a life honor. But there we go. Fantastic.

44:15John Collison:Yeah, it's got a really good ring.

44:16Patrick Collison:26 % of all new C Corps, right? That's the focus. Correct. Yeah, and today we're celebrating our 100 ,000th new Atlas business was incorporated recently, and we brought the founder, and she runs this incredible business for AI software to help power plant owners run batteries in a better way. It's fantastic. So it's been a great thing. I've been recently focused on all this crazy agentic stuff we're doing. What is actually changing about Atlas? Because I've used it several times. I think I probably used it five years ago or something. I don't even remember how old it is. We used it for TBPN. We used it for TBPN a couple years ago.

44:48Patrick Collison:Fantastic. And it was like fine, and I didn't really have any product requests.

44:52John Collison:It's not fine. No, no. It's so beautifully. It was like job's finished. The point is that you don't think about it. Exactly. You're like, that is how it should have worked. Exactly.

44:59Patrick Collison:And I'm always fascinated by products that are like, okay, yeah, thumbs up. It did my job. I'm going to make you go back and use LegalZero.

45:08John Collison:I'm going to make you go use LegalZoom.

45:09Patrick Collison:Hey, that's a passing your staple. It's one of these products that you just want it to work, like electricity under the... Exactly. So how do you keep it? How do you keep it there?

45:17John Collison:So I want to ask you about, is there and do you think there will be an incorporation apocalypse? Because theoretically, I could just have, I could tell a smart agent that can use my computer, that can use the internet. Hey, do you like go, I need to create a C Corp in Delaware. It turns out that the agents want to use Atlas. They'll use Atlas. Yes, and not to preview too much, but coming up, Atlas CLI. Okay. There we go. And another exciting thing. Generate me 10 ,000 C Corps. Generate me 1 million C Corps.

45:47Patrick Collison:I think that would be a lot of money. Yeah, Vibe Incorporation coming. Yeah. Another exciting Atlas update is now that you can do full, safe fundraising through Atlas. And coming soon, you'll be able to move the money from investors directly into your treasury account. and just have these amazing little fundraising links to be able to quickly raise money along the way. So we think it's another way we can help entrepreneurs get going. Though my recent focus has been all this great AI stuff we're doing to help commerce businesses succeed in the next wave of the Internet, all the link CLI work, so you can have your robot help you shop along the way safely across the Internet, machine payments protocol to have robots send stablecoin to each other in small bits.

46:26It's been a really whole new world.

46:27Patrick Collison:Do you see the customer segmentation, target customer ramp? Are you rerunning the Stripe playbook? Like Stripe was adopted by a lot of startups. It was sold through developers, which was very unorthodox at the time. You used to sell through the CFO. Now you're selling through the CTO or just some developer who chooses Stripe. Are you trying to be the incorporation platform for every tech company, every startup, every software, small business? and then you're going to go into restaurants, you're going to go into Fortune 500, the next Fortune 500 companies. I mean, I guess it doesn't quite map to Stripe because the big companies don't necessarily need Atlas if they're already up and running.

47:09Patrick Collison:But how do you think about landing and then expanding? Yeah, I think that we are trying to get all the technology businesses in the world to start on Stripe. Start with, you know, just as a project. Use Stripe projects to be able to configure your entire stack. I mean, do you remember having to go and make a hundred little accounts to test a database here or test a CDN provider? Oh, should I use this particular thing for email? And then you have to go type in password and be like, no, you need$2 signs or$1 sign. And you got to go get the secret keys and like put in the wrong place. And then you got to rotate this like a whole mess.

47:44And so we're excited to take, basically continue to make everything programmable, making corporation programmable, make selling online programmable. and now we're making provisioning entire new stacks. So we think we're going to see, we did 100 ,000 Atlas startups over about eight-ish years. I can imagine doing the next 100 ,000 in another year, another two years, we're just seeing the curve of new businesses grow so quickly. I think it's tools like this agentic provisioning of an entire stack quickly, which is going to really ignite the next wave of founders to go from just vibe coding to like an entire vibe business.

48:17John Collison:How much attention are you paying to how Atlas shows up in LLM results? Because there's a lot of companies, Profound is one, James, the founder has been on the show, that help you optimize that, understand it. I think it's helpful to just create a product that's loved by everyone that uses it and ultimately gets talked a lot about sort of naturally. Is that something that you're putting time directly into or is good awareness in LLMs a byproduct of just building a great product? You have to make your business legible to the agents. You need, you know, if you want your checkout page to have bright colors, like that's not what the agent wants.

48:59If you want your homepage to have a crazy JavaScript thing that like loads only in certain browsers with the GPO turned way up, that's also not what agents want. Agents want perfect information about what your offer is, what the tool is, what the SKU is, what the service is, what the shoe is. And we're basically helping businesses just make their entire checkouts, their entire SKU offering legible. And Atlas is actually part of that too. It itself is a business. Atlas actually runs on Stripe. And so we make sure that the agents have access to the full LLM formatted markdown text. We bake it into all of the places where agents can self-serve and learn about our products.

49:41And then we make everything at Stripe a programmatic primitive, such an agent can use it directly. And so we've seen that the CLI, the command line interface for interacting with Stripe, which is not like a side project for Stripe, but kind of an advanced tool for developers who never want to touch the dashboard, like sort of a terminal purist. This has become this incredibly fast-growing part of Stripe because the agents are like, yes, I love the fact you have perfect information about all the things I can do on Stripe. Of course I'm going to do so versus try to...

50:11John Collison:Computer use around the website. Yeah, it's a little clunky. At some point it feels almost like a Dilbert style of using computer, whereas the agents can just use it directly. Can you take me through maybe like day in the life today is probably pretty different

50:29Patrick Collison:than like two or three years ago. I'm sure AI has seeped in a bunch of places. But maybe if you go back to like, you know, a little bit earlier, like how has your day to day changed over your career? And what is it like now? We're really just following what customers want. And they're coming to us. I mean, I've worked at Stripe for eight years. They are coming to us with a veracity of new needs. Before it was like, hey, let's kind of put a meeting on the calendar next week to talk about how to grow your business in the next country. Now they're, I need to launch in 50 countries this afternoon.

51:06Sorry, what is sales tax in all those places? how can I mimic all these fast-growing startups that are going at light speed? And so basically we're taking everything that we built at Stripe and turning it into sort of a managed service. We have managed payments so that you can sell in all these countries. We have the machine payments protocol where you can say, hi, I've been using, you know, I spent 20 years selling to consumers. Now I need to sell through agents. Take all the tools we have and make things available to agents. So my day-to-day is basically almost a whiplash of customer meetings where they're coming to us with either a new type of fraud vector they're seeing through AI, they want to expand into new countries, and we're just trying to take the pieces, the programmatic primitive pieces we've built over the last 15 years and turn them into these sort of CLI tools.

51:57Normally, we would put out a beta or we'd put out some wait list and we'd wait for a couple people to sign up and then we'd email them, then we'd send them the docs, then they'd be on vacation, you know, or like get busy. And then like you'd hear from them next week. Now we put out a beta. Developers send their agents after our beta page. They will go around our wait lists to use it. They'll give us feedback from their agent logs about how the agent was using our developer tools in like minutes. And so the development cycle at Stripe is just increasing, increasing, increasing, increasing because the customer feedback loop from the highest taste developers is so now agentic that we don't even have basically time for meetings.

52:40It's just like putting these betas out there and getting fast. So you think like less meetings now? I think it's less meetings.

52:45Patrick Collison:I was wondering if you were yeah, if it was like, I imagine that you're a fan of like talk to your customers. I am. That's a big piece of what you do. It's very much your job. Of course you have internal meetings but you're probably talking to a lot of customers. But the shape of the feedback is changing these days.

52:58John Collison:I was hoping that with AI, you wouldn't have to talk to customers anymore. You would just throw like 10 slot prompts and then just say like, you know, I don't have time. We're very fortunate slash cursed with that our customers are not shy. You know, they are extremely happy to hop in Slack with us and just bombard us with their needs. But now they're pasting the context windows from their agents along with them. and so it's sort of this back and forth between our agents and their agents trying to like winnow our way to the best product and you know so again i think just like the clock cycle on stripe has just dramatically increased which is why i saw so many of these announcements recently and and we're really proud that a lot of this stuff we're doing is just like ga you can use the link wallet today to delegate transactions to your agent a super safe way it's very slick and a push message oh hey time for my agent to you buy me that gift like fantastic thank you agent and so we're just we're putting this all out there and really encourage people to try you are you forcing yourself to constantly use agents to buy stuff because like right now i feel like a bunch of people want to and there's certain instances where they can but it's not exactly easy everywhere yes it's a two-sided it's sort of like a three-sided marketplace you know you've got on the seller side they need to be able to accept payments from agents that's why we have the machine payment protocol or all our APIs are being upgraded so that you can just use, you can, agents can check out.

54:22John Collison:And I go through this all the time where I will like see a product that I'm interested in. I'll be on my phone. I will click add to cart and then I will get to the cart and I'll see they're not on Shopify. And then I'll just churn because I'm like, I don't, I don't have time. I don't like, I don't have time to go through, fill this out, punch in my credit card. And so I'm really, really excited for this moment where it's like, I want to buy this thing. Please buy it for me. Totally. Yeah, it's in some ways we have this incredibly modern world in which everything's available at our fingertips. But then it's like, unfortunately, overly available only on our fingertips where I'm sitting there typing in 16 digit numbers, like trying to like peck my way through a check checkup page, even the Stripe checkout page was like pretty high performing.

55:00I'm still like, I can't believe they don't use link. I can't believe I can't just like have my agent go buy this. So on the seller side, we're making it incredibly easy for any of the 5 million businesses on Stripe to just accept payments from agents. That's like one side. Another side is on the consumers, they need to be able to have a way to super ergonomically on their phone, slick mobile app and link, say, hey, agent, I approve$50 transactions for the next 30 minutes in the following topic. Go, agent, go. Bam. With, you know, 2FA, Face ID, whatever, I can now approve an agent and it can safely shop for me on the internet, like giving a rambunctious intern, like a perfect card that can only be spent where I want.

55:41And so the third side of the marketplace is agents themselves, whereas we're working with Copilot and Meta and ChatGPT and Gemini so that baked into their services, they have access to all of the buying and the customer mandates so that we can make Agenda Commerce this super slick, super safe way to buy online. I think we're now finally getting all the infrastructure in place. We can get this flywheel starting to spin. And with the model progress, I think you're going to see amazing new applications in Agenda Commerce.

56:08John Collison:Is there a sentiment internally that the company got kind of lucky by focusing so intensely on developers and then accidentally getting the benefit of being extremely well built? I guess it's like, you guys are, well, incredibly smart, incredibly forward thinking. But when you guys started focusing on the developer experience intensely, I don't believe that you were thinking about AI agents a decade later. This is a surprise for us, too. It's a useful externality to our non-religious religious obsession with programmatic tools. Secular and religious.

56:53Patrick Collison:Religiously secular. There's not too much which is like a faux pas at Stripe, but saying, yes, let's put this incredible piece of financial infrastructure behind a gate that no one can use. You have to call and go through a maze to get some. Steak dinner. Yeah, exactly. You're not a steak dinner company. Yeah. We showed how many users are now signing up for Stripe each day, which is in the many tens of thousands a day. And that's a lot of steak dinners to get each of them turned on. So it sort of actually surprises us how few companies in the world actually provide self-serve services. And I can say that.

57:31But I also know that there's 10 ,000 people at Stripe who are doing the work to make those things. Of course, there's steak dinner every once in a while. Yeah, and I would like to get a steak dinner, personally.

57:40Patrick Collison:For the 100th Atlas sign-up. Yeah, 100 ,000. 100 ,000, sorry.

57:44John Collison:How ambitious is Treasury? I imagine you've been getting the customer feedback from companies forever saying, hey, I incorporated, like, why are you pushing me out to these other financial products when you already have all my information? I know you guys can store money. I know you guys can move money. But how ambitious is that product? Yeah. that Stripe Treasury is going to be this incredibly straightforward way for a business to be able to store any currency from any country, move it around the world, and just handle all of your banking and money management activities in one place. And I think this is something that we've been building the infrastructure for for so long, you know, the ability to do currency conversion instantly or be able to pay out cross-border.

58:28But we've finally decided that because of Stablecoin, now is the time to make this a truly global product from the beginning whereas years ago we would have had to make sort of a country by country decision to do a thing like treasury but we're going to go really global out the gate and get to 160 countries by the end of the year and so that's that's really where our ambition comes from is how to make this global infrastructure and then of course it's going to have a super slick ui it comes with a metal metal card two percent cash back, really super easy to use. And if you use Stripe to earn money through your customers, everything's in one place.

59:05All the money settles quickly. It really feels like one of these kind of better together products where in my head, I've written documents that say, hey, this will be a lot easier. And then when you actually go to use it, you're like, oh my goodness, this is like much easier.

59:18John Collison:Very eloquent way to say we're coming for everyone. You know, there are many services in the world that we're not going to by accidentally be able to be better than. But I also will note that everything we're building Stripe Treasury on is available for anyone else to build. And so we're going to see some much more specialization, I think, in financial related tools. And we're excited for Stripe users to be able to do it really quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the agents coming to finance will be a big story of basically the next two years. Because as somebody who started my first real business while in college, and then I was realizing like, wait, okay, so we've signed this contract.

1:00:03John Collison:And then there's like these invoices, but then like the invoices get sent around and then there's like all multiple stages of approval. And it's like, why does it need to get approved if it's already in the contract? And you go, like, understanding, like, the complexity of money movement and how many humans are in the loop to every process. And it can be great that there's humans in the loop because it prevents fraud and hopefully prevents errors. But it also creates errors and it also slows things down a lot. And so when you think about in the future where these things can be handled by machines, I think it's going to be very exciting.

1:00:42Yeah, I think that's like dangerously skipped permissions and money tends not to be exactly the joining parameters you want. We want smartly suggest permissions. I look forward to the day where I get a notification from my smart robot that says, hey, here's all the ways you can improve your business. Here's the things you should be able to do to close your books. Here's the things you can do to handle the invoice. I'm looking forward to those permissions. You know, I don't want to be... Yeah, but even something like,

1:01:09John Collison:so imagine a business owner receives an invoice from someone. This happens, like, still, like, if you've worked with freelancers enough, you will have experience where a freelancer sends you an invoice. It basically just has a number. It does not have, like, any account details. You're like, okay, and then you're replying back, okay, how can I pay this? Maybe it has an email. But a world where you receive the invoice, you just drop it into your own kind of agent and you say, pay this. I'm approving this already. I have approved this. And the agent can go email the person. It can confirm everything.

1:01:41John Collison:And it can just process it. It's like that historically is something that I've done with having like maybe a part-time part-time like back office financial operations person where I'm like, this is approved. Pay it. And it's like that doesn't need to be like a it's not like really high leverage work. It probably doesn't need to be something a business is paying a thousand, couple thousand dollars. We used to sort of joke that every chat app will eventually become like a banking app. But now it's like every banking app is actually now becoming a chat app. And so I think we're going to see the human agent interface related to the full life cycle of your business to become the new modality by which we run our businesses.

1:02:18And you want that to be in a super programmatic, super safe place that works globally. And that's what Stripe, Stripe Treasury, all this new payment stuff are doing for Genente.

1:02:28John Collison:I think you guys are culturally very humble. But the more I'm processing every conversation I've had today, I'm like, wow, they're actually coming for everything. They're incredibly well positioned. Everything's going to be programmable. Agents are going to be doing everything. We succeed exactly when our customers succeed. I sleep very well at night knowing that our business model maps exactly to our customer success. What else do you have on that thing, by the way? We've got a lot of stuff. Founder mode. Okay, what about the bottom right one, just for fun? What's the bottom right one?

1:03:01Patrick Collison:Bottom right one? This is a gong. Perfect. Okay, great. That's a good one. Okay, cool. We have a whole different setup there. We got so much stuff. Do we have time for one more question, you think? Or is Zach ready to rock? What are you thinking? Oh, there he is. We got a couple minutes? Yeah. Okay, cool. Hypothetically, like 21-year-old new grad, college grad comes to you, and one maybe wants to join Stripe. The other one maybe wants to build a business on Stripe. How are you routing them in 2026? What are you talking them through? Well, I love that those are the two options. Yeah. If that were the case, that would already be a win.

1:03:37There's many amazing companies. Sure, sure, sure. I think that people should follow their passion. I mean, look at the two of you, what you've built, right? I've gotten to know you over so many of your awesome new entrepreneurial attempts, and I remember you telling me you're going to do this TV show, and I wasn't thinking, you know, I wasn't like, no, but I was like, okay. Certainly I will never be on that show. Sure, yeah. and stop by that crazy thing. We're not going to make a pub and then have you do college game day in front of you. That'll be very strange. So I mean, look, you followed your noses on this topic and you have a good sense of it.

1:04:09And if you talk to someone who's got that kind of passion, the tools to build something today are what all of us, I mean, dreamed of. Imagine having what we have today when we each started all of our startups in the past. And so I honestly, I really encourage them to try it. And I will also say, if they're considering joining, I mean, look, Stripe's a 10 ,000 person company. We're probably in a reasonable high echelon of like low communication costs, but there's 10 ,000 of us. It's like a higher communication cost than you and your co-founder. But look, the Stripe projects thing where you can provision all these third parties, that got started seven weeks ago by six people.

1:04:44Patrick Collison:Wow. You know, we put the link for Agents for Wallet, that was 10 weeks ago. And again, it's built on all the stuff we have, but we're benefiting from all of these new tools as well. So I would tell that person, I hope she finds the passion that she has, especially in an area where it has a personal interest and just go at it hard with the new tools. And otherwise, you know, Stripe.com slash jobs.

1:05:09John Collison:What's underrated about working at a big company for a long time? I'm on year eight. What's underrated? Overnight success. I, you know, you, you, presumably, I mean, you've had, you've had, how many, I would guess like a hundred really talented people have tried to convince you to join their effort or leave or, hey, let me give you like$50 million to go after this thing. Have that one call me. The other ones, no. But I, you're joking, but like you could easily go out and raise like 50 on 250 for some like payments related. I could make a rival TBPN. We need more of those.

1:05:53Patrick Collison:You're not saying I'm going to go build a rival stripe. This one seems to work out very well for you. I could spit wise. I think that what's really kept me very energized and more so is I tell people on your worst day of work, if you're looking forward to your most unhappy customer, then you found your place. And I want to hear from an entrepreneur somewhere in the world who's got a serious problem with Stripe and I want to get on the phone with them. And that is just, that's enough of a jolt to keep me going. You heard it here first.

1:06:32John Collison:If you have a problem with Stripe, DM me. I will give you Jeff's personal phone number. Cell phone number. Yeah. 410-913-2877. That is it. Give me a text. I couldn't possibly get more spam. So let's add to it, which is another thing I think we could solve with machine payments for a couple of different days story. Good point. Good point.

1:06:51Patrick Collison:Well, thank you so much. Okay. So good to see y 'all. Thanks for coming to our festival. I'll find you after. Okay. We'll hang out after. Let's take that off and let's bring in Zach from Bridge. Coming back on the show second, third time. We've talked to him a bunch, right?

1:07:04John Collison:A couple times.

1:07:05Patrick Collison:Zach, he's bringing the world's smallest cheeky pint. Cheers. Ooh, yours is nice and frosty. Welcome back to the show in person. Nothing like a non-alcoholic micropint. Wait, yours is non-alcoholic? Because I got 0%, but I asked for 0 % non-alcoholic beer. Oh, right. So my beer is 100 % alcoholic beer, 0 % non-alcoholic beer. But I still tell everyone I'm drinking 0%. But you can't tell. You can't tell. So you have no idea what you're drinking. I have no idea. Yeah.

1:07:39John Collison:All right. Let's start here. Okay. The Economist says stablecoins are over. Fire back. Oh, man.

1:07:44Patrick Collison:In The Economist. Oh, man. In print. Speaking of things that are over. In print. I love this. It says two stablecoins. Yeah, print media says the thing that is over says the new thing that is coming is over. Where are the shots fired? Why the stable market is fizzling. The stablecoin market is fizzling. They say stablecoins are, to proponents, the respectable face of crypto. I think it's a pretty respectable face right here. Oh, man. I hope so. In contrast to volatile Bitcoin, let alone speculative meme coins, they should be backed by holdings of treasury bills or other dollar-denominated assets.

1:08:20Patrick Collison:On paper, this makes them safer store value than many fiat currencies. But they say after growing by 30 % in the six months to late October last year, total stablecoin assets have barely budged. Is this true? Is it over? Oh, man. Yeah, it was really nice knowing you guys. This is actually my last session. Yeah, yeah. This is the last time you will ever let me on this show again. Taking it all in. So, I mean, there are a bunch of different predictions in here. The stablecoin market's worth$300 billion. Some people are calling for$2 trillion over the next three years, four years, five years. But all of that is very macro level.

1:09:01Patrick Collison:I want to hear about what you're actually seeing in terms of adoption, new use cases, glimpses of, you know, new areas to deploy stable coins, and then just what the big market movers are. Totally. I mean, we, I mean, our, so our business, you know, we shared this in the annual letter last year, grew 4X last year. Our business continues to grow enormously. Like we grew 20 % over the last month alone. So, you know, we certainly don't see stable coins slowing down. And I do think total supply is, you know, flat. But these things always go through.

1:09:41John Collison:Yeah, if you want to look at when you have a correction in general digital asset prices, then trading activity at times falls. And then it looks like you have a slowdown in adoption. But then you actually have to look at how people are actually using stable coins for non-trading related activities. Exactly. Like stablecoin transaction volume is growing enormously. The number of transactions are growing enormously. And we certainly see that, you know, the number of folks building with stablecoins is growing enormously. Like we have folks from, you know, a bunch of banks now are leaning into stablecoins.

1:10:13Pretty much every fintech that you could think of that is meaningful is doing something with stablecoins and probably doing it with us. I mean, we obviously announced yesterday with Meta paying out folks in stablecoins. So I do think that this like the hyperbole around stable coins is dying down a little bit and that creates the opportunity for some of this this like FUD. But, you know, at the same time, we're like, you know, there was this thing. I think Henry said it yesterday, which is like funny, like the crypto world where for a long time, people were like pointing at every problem and being like crypto solves this.

1:10:49And now they're no longer pointing at every problem and saying crypto solves this. But you guys are happy to solve problems with crypto. Yeah, like very, very quietly under the hood, it is solving a number of problems like banks for cross-border payments. We're seeing it for working capital needs. We're seeing it for just infrastructure for cars and infrastructure for global expansion. So it's certainly not slowing down.

1:11:12Patrick Collison:So there's like some very big, meaningful categories. The cross-border payments one is very tractable, huge. is there a coming intersection of like vibe coding and stable coins that you're seeing glimpses of i'm just thinking about like yeah like there was this moment when iphone games became fairly easy for like a kid to build in their bedroom and you got flappy bird and i think it was 99 cents and i'm wondering if if micro payments stable coins there's some sort of intersection there where you get vibe coding and you get some sort of new flourishing ecosystem of smaller transactions. I mean, people don't love micropayments, but there's something that people I feel like could play with if they're spinning something up in an afternoon.

1:11:58Totally. I mean, one of the reasons why we started Bridge is I was reflecting on the fintech space generally. This was like in 2020 or so. And I realized or one of the realizations that I had was that the cards were basically just the entirety of fintech. Yeah. Everything was like, you know, and people talk about platform shifts, like AI is this big platform shift and mobile was a platform shift. But in financial services, platform shifts take a little bit of a different shape. And cards were this new form factor. And cards combined with the internet was like 90 % of all or more.

1:12:32Patrick Collison:You're talking about like credit cards from like the 70s. Yeah. That boom. Because we rode that boom for so long. There was a time when people would pay by doing like reverse debit. and there were so many hacks on top of the credit card. Totally. It was a new platform. It was a new primitive on top of which all these new financial services got built. And cards were like growing meekly for a while. And then the internet came along and they were like uniquely well-suited. Obviously, Stripe, this is what we do, but uniquely well-suited to solve payment problems on the internet. And then they just took off.

1:13:00It became reflexive. You know, more people were paying on the internet, so more people had cards, and more people paid in person, so then more people bought stuff on the internet. And then it just took off. but it was this like brand new platform shift in payments tied to an external platform shift. Our view is that stable coins represented another platform shift in payments. And I think AI could be the corresponding one that helps drive adoption of stable coins. And I think that all the payment problems that we're solving now are like fiat payment problems and there's big markets and so on. But I think the much bigger market will be, you know, the new means of payment that are going to be required in these agentic services.

1:13:36like in you know just simple things like the incrementality of payments is going to be very different very small the velocity of payments is going to be very different very fast uh the reversibility of transactions like cards are you are not well suited in a situation where you don't want transactions to be to be reversed or disputed um and so i think there's a lot of benefits to stable coins but we're like at the very very early stages so you're kind of squinting and like looking like way down the tunnel and like trying to predict what what will happen but it feels like

1:14:06Patrick Collison:it's there can you explain the tension between the traditional banking sector in the stable coin world oh man um what are you saying if if there was a you know someone with a bank and they say like i make my money by taking deposits and i'm heavily regulated i have to cover those costs with uh you know with interest and you're going to be able to do it without as many regulations you're going to outcompete me? Should I jump on the stablecoin boom? Is there a world where we work together? How should the traditional banking system interface with the stablecoin world? I mean, it is, I would say, complicated.

1:14:48Do you spend much time in DC? I went earlier this year, and it was actually, like, mean, it was, like, very heartening. I don't know if y 'all have spent spend time there but like i hadn't been to dc since i was in high school and like a high school trip i grew up in north carolina so we could like take the school bus up there and uh i went into you know like you're working at like a tech company or something like stripe and it feels like impossible to understand all the ways in which stripe is growing and then when you zoom in it's like literally just like one developer coming to stripe and signing up and like you know one person selling and and then i went to dc and dc feels like this this incomprehensible like you know complexity of decision making and stuff.

1:15:32And then we just met with a bunch of folks and you realize it's just like one person talking to another and like them trying to learn. And then they're, they're going to talk to another person and they were like genuinely curious. And these folks are like voting, you know, debating stuff on like agriculture and like, you know, airline safety. And then coming in and talking to me about like the minutia of like stable coin regulation. And they were like pretty well versed. So I think that like one speaks to how, how high on the docket it got for them and like how important it is. And it has like, you know, I spent time there at the beginning of the year.

1:16:07We've spent more time recently as like Clarity Act has come about. And we think that, you know, it has certainly put the banks and the more stablecoin friendly folks at odds. But my experience has been that that is not universally the case. Like there's a whole group of banks coming together. There's multiple groups of banks coming together to launch stablecoins. there are multiple community banks that we're actually working with on different stable coin initiatives that the one sort of outlier is um is some of the other folks that have more directly you know jp morgan has their own stable coin and like their own thing that they're trying to push forward so there is some competition and and that sort of thing there but um i i hope that we can all like work together but it certainly has been contentious at times give me a price prediction

1:16:54Patrick Collison:20, 30, if I put$1 ,000 in stablecoins, how high can it go? What do you think is possible? Oh, man. I mean, I think you are going to be exactly as wealthy then as you are today.

1:17:05John Collison:That's fantastic. With inflation.

1:17:11John Collison:Advice to founders that want to start a company today but maybe feel like they're too late as part of this AI boom. because I feel like when you started Bridge, there was big stablecoin companies that had been created. Maybe you felt at times that, am I too late? But clearly you were very early and the timing was perfect because you got to sit out a terrible bear market and then you were like, wow, I'm a genius. That's certainly not what everyone told me. Many people in the midst of it told me I was wasting my time. Yeah, I would say, I mean, the lived experience for me, and you kind of see this now in some of these hotter spaces, is that folks kind of build what they think others want them to build.

1:17:59Like, think about something in AI. You're building this thing for this market that isn't a thing that you deeply believe in. And so you're building what you think an investor wants to fund or what you think other people in the industry will think is interesting. And what happened for me is like I was building something that I deeply had conviction should exist. And that is what enabled me to persevere through like some really dark times and build a company that, you know, ended up, you know, hitting the sort of timing situation at like the perfect moment. But like literally, you know, if I didn't have that conviction, I would have pivoted, you know, a year before.

1:18:40You know, I mean, I mean, literally, you know, Terra Luna blew up. Then FTX blew up. Then SVB went under. I mean, it was like one stable coin went under. The whole crypto market was done. And then USDC de-pecked. And so we got booted off of it. Yeah, that's why it's not funny when you make this joke, John. Yeah, I mean, we got booted off like four banks before it got started.

1:19:02Patrick Collison:I assume stablecoins are going to stay stable, but I understand there is risk. There is a new technology. Can you help me understand the interaction of AI coding agents, AI code review in stablecoin software development? And historically, I have always had the perception that anything in crypto is not just higher stakes, but more technically complicated. It's more like, I don't know, writing a compiler than, you know, a front end website. And so it's high stakes. LLMs do make mistakes at the same time. The new models, mythos, 5.5, like superhuman. And so there's probably a way to integrate that successfully.

1:19:46Patrick Collison:What works? What are you hearing or seeing that makes sense? Are we still in the Centaur era where you need a great software developer working alongside AI? Is this something where you can just throw an agent at it and it's, you know, oh, there's no more risk anymore. It's not going to hallucinate. I mean, I would say for us, it kind of feels like we are one or two steps behind where, like, you know, it feels like some of the folks are who are in pure software where they're like, oh, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna, you know, have this long running agent vibe code an entire browser and ship it in a week and be fine.

1:20:25Uh, we're nowhere close to that. Like we couldn't, we, you know, there are big parts of our business that are pure software in a ton of ways. Like think about like transaction monitoring or stuff like that. But the risk from a regulatory reason of having things off and then missing things and then not being able to appropriately justify it because someone vibe-coded a thing, it's just not possible. So the ways in which we use it end up being different. And another very quick example is we're standing up a national trust bank. As part of standing up a national trust bank, there's a bunch of requirements.

1:21:01One of which is that every commit has to be approved by someone else. You literally cannot have... It's over from fast takeoff. Fast takeoff's cooked. This is the most bearish thing. Still got it, humans.

1:21:20Patrick Collison:FDA for AI. This is something somebody was saying. It is like the Jevons paradox of employment. We're just going to have to hire more and more and more code reviewers.

1:21:32John Collison:I was talking to someone, small business owner, who was very, very fired up on Vibe Coding. He told me specifically he hadn't slept in four nights. I was asking him the product that he was working on. He was like, this is something I've thought about building forever. I was like, well, have you ever thought about rebuilding this sort of vertical SaaS fintech platform that you run your whole business on? and he was like, no, it's$1 ,200 a year. It's like, they give me so much. It would never make sense. It's like the one piece of core technology that he runs his business on. He's so fired up on VibeCoding.

1:22:10John Collison:He's like, I'd never rebuild that. It would never make sense. So there's two things. There's a value equation and then there's a potential risk cost equation. And I feel like with stable coins specifically, in crypto, the potential cost is so astronomical where like saving a little bit here to then introduce like a hundred million dollars of risk. Yeah, but there's a bunch of other things that are amazing. Like for us, we have like re-architected a lot of our infrastructure to be able, like before, you know, one of the hard things in crypto is adding a bunch of different blockchains. Like every, a lot of blockchains can kind of be the same, but many are very different.

1:22:51And so it's super tedious to add a bunch of different blockchains. we, or the same thing is true of like adding new payment rails. So, you know, you might add a U.S. bank and then you need a redundant U.S. bank and then you need a European bank and then you need a bank in Mexico. And then, and all of these integrations kind of look the same, you know, it's like you're, you're getting money in, you're checking the money's in, you're sending money out, you know, and what we have built is the ability to sort of add all of these things very, very quickly. And so we took like, you know, what used to take two weeks to add a new blockchain now takes, you know, someone actually did it in a meeting the other day of like adding a new stablecoin on a new blockchain all with a bunch of clod.

1:23:36John Collison:Does that mean we need 10 ,000 new layer ones? That is the Jevons paradox of blockchains. Because it's easier to use a new chain we need 100 ,000 more, a million more. Yes. Maybe, honestly, one for one, every American should have their own letter one. We're just maximalists across every dimension.

1:23:57Patrick Collison:There was a moment in stablecoins maybe last year where it was like, this small county in New Mexico is going to have their own chain? That was a stablecoin. Yeah, Wyoming. Wyoming has its own stablecoin. So we're going to have every state's going to have its own stablecoin. Every state's going to have its own blockchain. Maybe even every city. Yeah. Yeah. You could have your own blockchain. Yeah, neighborhood. There you go. Yeah. The mission stablecoin. Yeah. Yeah. The Presidio stable coin. Which one would you buy? Soma.

1:24:27John Collison:I'm going for the Mavericks stable coin. The Mavericks stable coin.

1:24:31Patrick Collison:Okay. It's just a taste thing. Anything else, Randy?

1:24:33John Collison:No, this was great. Thank you for coming on. Thank you so much for coming on. Great to meet in person. You can close it out with us. Close it out with us.

1:24:39Patrick Collison:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. We'll be back tomorrow in the TBPN Ultra Dome, 11 a.m. sharp. Thank you for tuning in.

1:24:50John Collison:and have a great day goodbye it's been an honor cheers goodbye