John and Patrick Collison on Stripe's Growth, Agent Commerce, and the Future of Software

0:00The world is going to 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 of as fixed costs and then infinitely monetized or monetized as much as possible.

0:35That has these kind of winner-take-all dynamics. But once there are inference costs and custom creation involved, it really shifts. I mean, 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.

0:53Patrick Collison: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 TBPN, 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.

1:39Patrick Collison:This conversation originally aired on TVPN, hosted by John Coogan and Georgie Hayes. We have John and Patrick Collison from Stripe. How are you guys doing? What's going on? Greetings. 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 today? We had two announcements today. One is we're launching a tender offer for employees and that and kind of the valuation and everything tended to get a bunch of the headlines.

2:20The 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 nonstop stream of everything going on because there is so much happening. Yeah, we'll move to 24 hours eventually.

2:47Patrick Collison:Eventually, eventually. I mean, but I feel like there is a ton of AI noise and stories and drama, and we are, you know, 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? Well, generally speaking, I would say from the Stripe data, it looks like the economy is in pretty good shape. And to say the least, there's been some degree of volatility in markets over the last two years, and all sorts of different events and deep-seek moments and what have you.

3:30But 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 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... One second, because I'm just curious. Have you guys tried to think about maybe the businesses are doing well on Stripe because they're forward-looking, extremely tapped in, 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?

4:10Have you tried to break that out or understand that dynamic? It's obviously hard to measure because we don't have that data, we only have our data. 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.

4:52But 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 the most countries and support stable coins 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, retool, what have you, they're more likely to come to try.

5:15Patrick Collison:Are you seeing 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. I'm wondering how much overlap there is there. 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 can. A lot of people build with Stripe. You can have a one-time use credit card that your agent can go out and spend.

5:53But 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 will 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. I'm going to say, I mean, this was our thinking behind incubating Tempo, because you're going to need really high throughput blockchains for the agents.

6:34Patrick Collison:Can you take us through some of the historical technologies that led to growth in just internet payments? I'm thinking about like mobile, social commerce, one-click checkout, Apple Pay. Like 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, ChatGPT 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 unhobble the actual agents as they go about their day. Well, can I answer a slightly different question, but then we can come back to that.

7:17Yeah, go ahead. A point I just, sorry, this is a... We'll tell you the questions, you tell us your answers. So you know how brothers are. I just want to lose one point for the prior question about 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. 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, the Stripe user base and things overall looking pretty good and so forth, and the tumult not quite showing up.

8:01But 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 businesses signed up in 2025, there's been a phase 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 there's not really a lot of substance there. We're actually seeing both numbers move together.

8:41There are many more businesses 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. We've had all sorts of dramatic AI inventions and innovations over the last couple of 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 2025, beginning of 26, is when I feel like we're really starting to see it.

9:29That's super interesting data. One, because there was some survey that came out yesterday, or maybe it was late last week, that said they asked a bunch of executives, are you getting any value out of AI? And 80 % of them said no. But clearly, when you look at... Oh, 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, 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. Or like, we're spinning our code by hand and, you know, we don't need any of this automated Loom, you know, technology.

10:11Yeah, I'm not saying, I could pick out a bunch of reasons. No, no, I'm not saying I agree with it. I could pick out a bunch of reasons why it would be wrong. One reason it might be wrong is they're not in the weeds actually using the tools, and so they just think like, well.

10:25Patrick Collison:They might not even be aware that they're using the tools because it's buried under two layers of the stack. And they're not feeling the acceleration because they're not. I wanted to ask how you guys think about incubations like Tempo. When I look at Atlas and what Jeff and the team have done there, you think even in your, 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 C-Corps in the United States could be built on this platform. Anybody would have said that was insane. And yet here we are. Gosh, I am not sure what to say really, except 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.

11:23And then 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 2014, May 2015. And so, you know, 10 years of compounding and now it's at some pretty meaningful scale. I think tempo will probably be the same shape where we think it, again to this AI discussion and us sounding a bit unward and untethered, I think the world is going to need platforms that support billions of transactions per second, which no payment rail or platform does today. But even in a success case, it's not going to be an overnight thing.

12:12and it's going to be five, six, seven years and then maybe we'll have conversations about how Tempo suddenly became an overnight success or something. I think Patrick's a bit the fish in water 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 reason about things. Yeah, you should never say we want 1 % of global GDP. We're not even running on. No, we didn't. All this kind of stuff. Exactly. You guys never, wait, you guys never pitched that? No. Companies, we actually never thought about Stripe in GDP terms until one day we realized, oh, hang on.

12:55Oh, wow. I can see you. That's such an important lesson because so many, so many, like, how many founders, how many pitch decks have you seen over the last decade? We're like Stripe. They're like, yeah, we just need 1%. It's a meme. 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 MBA would have told you that the adjacency of incorporation makes no sense. It's not related to what's our right to win.

13:29It's all these things people say, whereas you actually go talk to founders, they're like, guys, 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 have coins or blockchains both used for kind of meme coin trading and also serious real world payments and so we just want 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

14:12Patrick Collison:What specific products are you excited about in the unhobbling of agentic commerce?

14:22We lay out in the letter basically these levels of agentic commerce. Because I think, like everything in AI, people want to sell a hype-y store. And so they talk about how the machines will buy everything without 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?

14:58And so a lot of the work Stripe is doing is building the infrastructure or working with all the big retailers that you would expect, the Etsys and Shopfys and Best Buys and Walmarts and folks like this to make product catalogs buyable 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 more abstractly, we've been in this specific agent of commerce thing and then there was just the general question of how software will change because of agents.

15:40And 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 prepare it at the sort of moment of consumption. But we're actually going to, you know, software should be, like Pete's incentive, 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.

16:29Up until now, the economics of software have been conceived of as fixed costs 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-Walrussian software regime. I don't know, I don't quite know where it goes, but I think it's going to look very different.

16:56Patrick Collison:Last question. Pineapple on pizza, yes or no?

17:02Ireland was big into pineapple on pizza. Ireland, not a big pineapple growing country, I will concede. But a lot of pineapple on the pizza. Good memories. A very large fraction of the banana market, don't forget. So we punch above our weight and fruits that don't grow there. There we go. There we go. The round is exciting. The overall growth of volume is exciting. but we wanted to hit the gong for how many books you guys are selling.

17:30Patrick Collison:Oh, yeah. Can you give us the numbers there? The scale of that operation. Stripe Press and just, well, actually, from the letter we sold our millionth book. But in fact, since...

17:47Incredible. No, look, books, we actually now sold our 1.1 millionth book. So we'll go through the next gong at two. but we love books, and they're very AGI-proof.

18:01Patrick Collison:Oh, yeah. 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 you're doing. Great to have you guys on, and congratulations to the whole team. Congratulations to you guys. TBBM is an amazing startup, and it's super cool to see you guys to grow and built on Stripe. Built on Stripe. In the streaming world and our sector needs. Incorporated on Stripe, built on Stripe. Our first ad deal ever was a live read at a live conference.

18:38Patrick Collison:I think we charged$50 and I sent someone a Stripe link. We're talking about the 1025 homework being the fastest ever. Yeah. Well, we'll have to have you to our internal Stripe show. So we'll follow up on that. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations. Thanks, guys. Cheers. Goodbye. 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 podcast and spotify follow us on x at a16z and subscribe to our sub stack at 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.

19:31Patrick Collison: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, A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.