John Collison

“John and Patrick Collison, and then Ned Friedman and Daniel Gross, they were just really interested in investing, so they just came in and took the whole round... 2021 was 23 and a half million dollars.”

“Two places that we're seeing tons of interesting stuff is one, any kind of cross-border use case, where if you want to send money to a hundred countries, it's already the case that stablecoin's a much better way to do that than anything else. And that's where …”

“The second, and this is where Tempo, our new initiative, That you guys were nice enough to work with us on is coming in is very scalable crypto payments, and obviously agents is what we have in mind as we're developing Tempo, where, you know, if you want to pa…”

“In our models now, it's going to be a combination of not only operating on phoneme level, you also operate on the text level. You operate kind of, In both in sync, because when you are predicting the context, you need to understand how that sentence will get c…”

“Both me and my co-founder will have over 15 direct reports each that, that we'll work with, and most of those people will have that same scale of direct reports.”

“Even in non-technical teams, Having a technical resource. So, you know, we will have a person in ops or in talent that will, we have effectively a tech lead for that team. That helps them automate a lot of that, that, that work and helps up level the rest of t…”

“We do at our, like, little weekly All Hands Weaver recurring segment of Just Walk the Store, where we, like, click around in the dashboard together, and we're tripping over, like, why is that modal there, and that's a bit confusing or whatever, just so we're, …”

“You talk to university students and often their ideas for companies are pretty half-baked. Yeah, it's find my friends. It's like a college textbook exchange app, you know, but you know, there's like the five apps or whatever. Whereas so frequently what happens…”

“High work ethic people. Who maybe weren't the best engineers you know, previously or now, those people are massively ascendant, as far as I can tell, because they suddenly got the exoskeleton, you know, and like, they always have the ideas as to what we should…”

“A lot of founders, Guillermo's a good example, John and Patrick were examples of this well, are like excellent brand marketers, but that does not a predictable revenue engine make on its own.”

“He said, within your own organization, you do a great job of being both demanding and supportive. Cross-functionally, when you don't think somebody's good at their job, they're dead to you.”

“And I think the Collinson brothers are two of the smartest guys in the business.”

“Part of the reason this is an evergreen pitch is because companies don't actually have all their data at their fingertips. Companies do not eat their data infrastructure vegetables.”

“I feel like there could be a product in the next 10 years for finance people, where in hindsight, it is obviously the correct UI, but just like the spreadsheet kind of came out of nowhere as a UI, it may feel like it came out of nowhere at that time.”

“There's a lot of charts of the shape of Stripe, I don't know if it's this way of Microsoft, where obviously March, 2020, you saw this discontinuity, right? Much more e-commerce activity happening, and we saw the rate of online business creation because, you kn…”

“What's different here is, one, you have AI. So all the integrations for the merchant are much easier. It's much less of a lift than previous Times when things like that, this have been tried.”

“People still have no idea how big stable coins are going to be. And I think they discount us because it feels like it's a lot of hype right now, but we're going to look back when stable coins are a hundred times bigger and just think of this moment as so cute.”

“Stripe was much more his idea than mine.”

“I think there'll be something similar with stable coins where they'll be offered at the point of checkout way before people Become super familiar with them, but we're probably only a small number of years away from some mass market.”

“You will make mistakes, make them original, so there's alpha in it, so that you accrue some additional knowledge that now is unique to you.”

“I think I mentioned to you that a few weeks ago, my product management team held a hackathon and within just three hours, they had put together real viable prototypes on products that I would want to fund tomorrow. So with no eng, no design.”

“Obviously that growth curve does not apply to many AI companies.”

“Yeah, so we launched the team plan a month ago, and we've already have more than four, I think, 5000 people who paid more to get on the team's plan where you collaborate, and that's done by a company, right?”

“I think at Stripe we, ah, we're, we found we're shipping 30% more code.”

“I've shared this viewpoint with Patrick and John, and they give me some variant of, oh, well, we're just a small Irish family company. Please don't tokenize my shares.”

“We got our first paying customer way before we raised any money for the business.”

“One is where the regs are just bad, and the second is where the regulations are not standardized, where places where, you know, employment law is really annoyingly different across European countries, and so if you're a ten-person startup and you employ people…”

“He and his brother, John, are two of the smartest guys I've ever met, and a lot smarter than me.”

“John and Patrick were the first marketers at Stripe because they were developers themselves. They truly understood the developer community. And when that audience for Stripe was squarely developers to begin with, they knew exactly how to authentically reach th…”

“You don't want to design your policies around, like, the bottom five percent of the company. That would be a horrible mistake. Yeah, you want to design your policies against the top talent.”

“It is not good for early career people. We can actually measure it in our productivity data before the whole discussion about remote work happened during COVID, and it's bad from a work point of view.”

“This is our life's work. You know, we're not going anywhere. We'll be very happily running Stripe in 10 years' time, in 20 years' time.”

“You know, design certainly does make, you know, business sense, but even if it didn't, they would still do it, and I think that, that, that's that x factor. That's the thing that's gonna make, you know, hard decisions along the way possible. And certainly wort…”

“In 2021, we raised one hundred and sixty million dollars onto our balance sheet to become like an evergreen permanent capital vehicle. And we raised that from a mix of You know, very well-known entrepreneurs, people like Reid Hoffman, but also John and Patrick…”

“You are one of the best people I've ever worked with at solving problems three through a hundred, but I need you stuck on problems one and two.”

“As soon as somebody showed any sign of interest, they would say, awesome. Do you have your laptop on you? I can just set you up right now. I'll do it for you. And they would literally brute force get customers on board. The person would open up their laptop an…”

“My wife Faith she's a pretty low key person, but she was actually it's a debate whether she was the first or second or maybe, maybe third, we'll see, but employee of Stripe, you know, and she was, you know there with John and Patrick in their apartment, you kn…”

“Patrick and John, until a very, very long time, as the company was scaling, and to a point where you wouldn't expect the founder to do so they were talking to customers. They were talking to users, and not only that, in many cases, they would kind of, you know…”

“Basically separate the effort involved in kind of building something with the effort you want to put behind talking about said thing. And that, that doesn't have to be the same features that you talk about.”

“Overall, from both, I sort of learned the importance of setting the culture you want simply by consistently being an example of the behaviors you want to replicate in the organization. So instead of kind of talking about values, I saw both of them just kind of…”

“John is interesting in that, like you know, he is He's one of the rare people who can do, I think, who kind of can do, and I've seen him do all three really well. In fact, there were many times when like John was managing certain teams on an interim basis at S…”

“That's gonna be the most valuable, valuable company. That's private right now.”

“Without him, we might still be working on it. So, well, we'd probably be out of business at this point, but we probably would have worked on it for another year or two.”

“Now, they're spectacular. They're literally, like, they are in the set, you know, along with, you know, the entrepreneurs that, you know, I've invested in, you know, the Brian Cheskis and the Chris Hermsons, the entrepreneurs that I learned from, they are magn…”

“At the time, Patrick and John at Stripe, when all they had was an idea and not a single line of code, because they were remarkable and they were daring.”

“It was John Collison, the co-founder of Stripe. And this was in the relatively early days of Stripe before it was the massive success that it was today. John was a pilot. I met him through a friend and we went out to dinner or talking about what we were doing …”

“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…”

“Sort of our kind of dispute resolution framework is kind of much more around which of us cares more than kind of which of us holds this title or that.”

“Aaron Levy had Facebook messaged John and we'd never heard of him, and we hadn't heard of most people in Silicon Valley but he'd Facebook messaged us, like, very early on asking to invest in Stripe and I think John didn't know who's this random guy and so we n…”

“When Stripe launched seven years ago, Patrick and John Collison were just 23 and 21 years old.”

“After I'd built it, Patrick taught me a lesson in in security. You know, I was probably 14 at the time, and I cobbled together this website, and there were vulnerabilities and issues and stuff that Patrick then hacked the site just to teach me a lesson on that…”

“In 2017, John Collison was the youngest self-made billionaire on earth.”

“At every moment you should be reading the best book you know of in the world. I mean, I don't mean kind of the absolute best for everyone, but sort of The best book for you. But like as soon as you discover something that that seems more interesting or more im…”

“I'm a landowner in San Francisco. John and I own a house together, and I hope its value declines”

“The head of a bank is going to take a nineteen-year-old startup founder seriously? It seems pretty implausible, right? But they were good enough that they were able to convince these banks to work with them.”