why aren't all 10 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public
record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable
ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't;
assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card:
▮▮▮▮▮ certainty ·
▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
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.”
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.…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”