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John Collison

Co-founder & President, Stripe · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutivehostinvestor@collision ↗johncollison.ie ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗

John Collison is an Irish entrepreneur who co-founded Stripe in 2010. He also co-founded Auctomatic and hosts the technology podcast Cheeky Pint.

10statements → 4claims → 1claims resolved → 4.1/5average certainty → 2.3/5average debate potential → 3said about them ↓

0 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 3 assertions · 1 opinion · 4 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how John argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Collison: Bank credit card fraud models rely on 1960s-era neural networks
“And if you look at how the fraud systems that actually back your credit card work today, what happens is, you know, so you have a chaser bank for America or whatever credit card. And there's a set of neural networks that were trained and you're like, oh, cool.…”
John Collison Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:41 a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments

How they sound: speaking style how? →

276 words/min while actually speaking · 2.4 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for John Collison: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to 2,883 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of John Collison is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

Everything John Collison said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Collison: Bitcoin consumes 40 times more power than the Visa network
“Bitcoin is kind of inefficient enough that it uses 40 times the power of the Visa network, despite kind of a much lower throughput than the Visa network.”
John Collison Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 15:33 a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments
Opinion
Collison: Investors should not short Visa or Mastercard
“If I was an equity investor, there's no way I would be short these companies. Because you have the secular growth of just, like, digital payments.”
John Collison Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 15:43 a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments
Assertion Contradicted
Collison: Bank credit card fraud models rely on 1960s-era neural networks
“And if you look at how the fraud systems that actually back your credit card work today, what happens is, you know, so you have a chaser bank for America or whatever credit card. And there's a set of neural networks that were trained and you're like, oh, cool.…”
John Collison Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:41 a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Collison: Software will evolve to create a unified revenue platform category
“The way we see the world, there is no revenue platform right now, and if you look at all the products that we have been building, better analytics on the revenue data that you have in Stripe, a source of truth billing system, things like that, it's moving in t…”
John Collison Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:20 a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments
Insight
John Collison: Underestimating internet market size is a primary founder mistake
“I think the lesson we have all learned from the internet is one of the big mistakes you can make is underestimating how large a market is going to be.”
John Collison Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:19 a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments
Insight
John Collison: No established playbook exists for API-oriented businesses
“As far as we see it, there is not a playbook for building an API-oriented service, and so a lot of that is still emerging.”
John Collison Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:31 a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Collison: Wish increased mobile conversion by 7% using Stripe Elements
“So Wish is an e-commerce company. They flipped over from a checkout they had built on mobile to Stripe Elements. We spent all this time optimizing a mobile checkout just because it's an interest for us to do and not other people. And they saw a seven percent u…”
John Collison Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:49 a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments
Insight
Collison: Global payments are fragmenting around regional apps like Alipay
“As more people come online in more countries, as you know, things are heterogenizing where, you know, now you have a Chinese market available to you, but everyone's on WeChat Pay and Alipay rather than credit cards.”
John Collison Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:20 a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments
Insight
Collison: Measurable metrics create perverse organizational incentives
“Any time that you have, you know, one effect, like a, you know, a positive effect that can be measured and a negative effect that can't be measured, you're going to see all these perverse organizational incentives because people track to the metric that can be…”
John Collison Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 10:22 a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments
Disclosure
Collison: Stripe uses browser JavaScript signals to detect fraud better than banks
“When we're looking at blocking fraud, we're doing stuff like, you know, looking at the, you know, we have JavaScript running on the end customer's web browser, and so we can tell a lot more about the veracity and is this customer who they claim to be than your…”
John Collison Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 17:35 a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments

The other half of the tape: John Collison's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 3 episodes on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Shyam Sankar 1Erik Torenberg 1David George 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0022332026episodesmentions
0232026episodes it came up in
000.51.5132026episodesmentions per episode
2026 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments Jan 2, 2019 12m
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