Patrick Collison
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe, known for articulating infrastructure-level thinking and incubation logic.
“Jeff Dean has this famous set of numbers that every programmer should know, bandwidths and latencies and just kind of relevant constants you use to reason about it as you build systems.”
Source→“Google seemed omnipotent and had this immense number of incredibly talented people and essentially infinite access to capital... And just human organizations are complicated and it's very hard to manage to aggressively prosecute 100 different priorities”
Source→“As I speak, the number of new businesses starting on Stripe is up around 2x year over year, which again is the largest relative jump we've seen... the median business is doing better this year than a year ago... the time to revenue for new companies is declining.”
Source→“We're fine. Yes, you can ask the agent or something to compute something for you or to look something up for you. That's a hell of a lot slower than knowing it in cognitive L1 cache.”
Source→“They basically signed up all the AI companies that are selling shit online. And they shouldn't be getting anything like the money they're probably getting from the OpenAIs and Anthropics in terms of interchange fees. But who's got time to optimize that stuff?”
Source→“Patrick was like, I think we should keep it in Stripe. And his — one of the reasons was we want to shepherd this for the long run. And the other reason was that we can pay people tech salaries while working on this. And so we're going to be able to attract better people. And I think that like those are very non-consensus things to like approaches to philanthropy. And they really make a difference.”
Source→“He's doing this stuff with Tyler or whatever, which is another nice example of sort of like downstream of the problem, figure out whatever.”
Source→“I think my views and Patrick's views are actually pretty different. So when people say these two tech guys, like I'm not even that.”
Source→“Radical Numerics | AI for biology | Raised a $50M seed round...Previous investor Patrick Collison also investing.”
Source→“Previous investor Patrick Collison also investing [in Radical Numerics].”
Source→“I've spent more time than I care to think about talking to Patrick about the floral arrangements at Stripe offices and the smell of Stripe offices. Like, not actually a joke.”
Source→“Patrick Collison... Hosted the Stripe Sessions conversation with Altman”
“Podcast: The a16z Show | Participants: A16Z Narrator, Georgie Hayes, John Collison, Patrick Collison”
Source→“We talked in the letter about Bridge having operational issues, not because of Bridge, but because of blockchain congestion. Where you have blockchains both used for meme coin trading and also serious real world payments.”
Source→“This was our thinking behind incubating Tempo because you're going to need really high throughput blockchains for the agents.”
Source→“Where we think things will go is just there will be a huge amount of agentic commerce... And that is what unites stablecoins and AI, because we think you're going to need blockchains and better blockchains.”
Source→“This was our thinking behind incubating Tempo because you're going to need really high throughput blockchains for the agents.”
Source→“We talked in the letter about Bridge having operational issues, not because of Bridge, but because of blockchain congestion.”
Source→“The Collisons' 2026 Stripe letter, reporting 700+ AI agent companies launching on the platform in a single year, is used as primary evidence for the 'beneficent singularity' framing”
Source→“Hemant lingers on those word choices, hopefully, beneficent, because they frame the singularity as an aspiration, not a foregone conclusion.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.