John Collison
Co-founder & President, Stripe. On 4 shows, 23 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
4shows
23appearances
136statements
37resolved
30supported
3contradicted
81%fully supported
36said about them ↓ Everything John Collison said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Collison: AI agents indexing docs are the ideal interface for complex APIs
“As we add more functionality to it, just the right way to navigate this big product surface area is an AI that's read all the API docs for you.”
Collison: Sportsbooks take ~10% whereas prediction markets take ~1%
“The rate for sports betting companies is around 10%, and the order of magnitude for prediction markets is, you know, one percent or a few points.”
Collison: Mainstream AI chat interfaces still lack persistent memory in 2026
“Still in twenty-twenty-six, if you open a new Gemini chat, or if you open a new ChatGPG chat, it's basically a blank slate. There's no memory.”
Collison: Stripe is building SSH access directly into developer accounts
“And of course, now we're building that because it's like much more relevant in the agentic world”
Collison: AI agents expose the lack of APIs for SaaS dashboard switches
“It turns out there's a lot of switches in the dashboard. Yeah. You know, there's no API for, and we are all as an industry collectively discovering that.”
Stripe's revenue and finance automation suite reaches $500M run rate
“Stripe's revenue and finance automation suite, with billing at its core, has now passed a five hundred million dollar revenue run rate.”
Half of Fortune 100 and one-sixth of new Delaware corporations use Stripe
“From top corporate leaders, half of the Fortune 100 uses Stripe. To hyper-growth companies, we count 80% of the Forbes Cloud 178% of the Forbes AI-fifty as customers. To newly formed upstarts, one in six new Delaware corporations incorporates with Stripe Atlas…”
Stripe-processed revenue is growing seven times faster than S&P 500
“In aggregate, the revenue that businesses process on Stripe is growing seven times faster than that of all companies in the S&P 500.”
Collison: Cursor reached over $100M ARR in just three years
“Cursor, the AI-powered coding assistant, raced to over one hundred million dollars in recurring revenue in just three years.”
Collison: Lovable hit $17M ARR in 3 months, Bolt $20M ARR in 2 months
“We're also seeing the likes of Lovable, which hit seventeen million dollars ARR in just three months, Bolt, achieving twenty million ARR in two months, and Kodo, radically lower the barrier for turning software ideas into working applications.”
Collison: 60% of US small businesses use vertical SaaS platforms
“Today, 60% of all small businesses in America use vertical SaaS platforms to help run their business.”
Collison: Stripe has seen over 92% of processed credit cards before
“When a credit card is used for a payment, there is a greater than 92% chance that Stripe has encountered the same card before.”
Collison: SpaceX uses Bridge for Starlink fund repatriation in emerging markets
“SpaceX uses Bridge to repatriate funds from Starlink sales in Argentina, Nigeria, and other markets.”
Collison: Stablecoin volumes doubled year-over-year as active wallets hit 40M
“Stablecoin transaction volumes more than doubled between Q four, 20, 23 and Q four, 20, 24. And the number of monthly active stablecoin wallets has now reached forty million.”
Collison: An estimated 99% of stablecoin balances are USD-based
“We further note with interest that despite regulatory uncertainty in the United States, early stablecoin adoption has shown a notable US dollar preference, with an estimated 99% of stablecoin balances being USD-based.”
Collison: US productivity reached $104/hr versus $85/hr in Europe
“While the economies of the US and Europe were similarly productive in 1990, there has since been a stark divergence, with US productivity per hour works reaching 104 dollars, as compared with a plateau of something closer to 85 dollars per hour in Europe.”
Collison: Stripe powers over 5M businesses, 90% of Dow Jones
“Our programmable financial services now power more than five million businesses directly or via platforms, including all the top AI companies, many of the largest blue chip companies, 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, most of the biggest tech companies,…”
Collison: 25% of Delaware corporations are formed via Stripe Atlas
“25% of all Delaware corporations are now created with Stripe Atlas.”
Collison: Stripe remained robustly profitable throughout 2025
“Stripe remained robustly profitable in 25, allowing us to continue investing heavily in product development, with over 350 product updates over the last year, as well as acquisitions.”
Collison: Stripe acquired Privy and Metronome
“Since our last update, we acquired Privy, which powers more than a hundred and ten million programmable wallets, and Metronome, which powers the complex usage-based billing models used by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Confluent, and NVIDIA.”
Collison: Stripe's revenue suite on track to hit $1B ARR
“Metronome joins our revenue suite, comprising Stripe billing, invoicing, tax, and more, Which is on track to hit an annual run rate of a billion dollars this year.”
Collison: Most profitable third of US public companies holds two-thirds of market cap
“Today, the most profitable third of publicly listed companies in the United States accounts for two-thirds of the total market capitalization, the highest share since data began in 1963.”
Collison: GitHub pushes jumped 41% between Q3 2024 and Q3 2025
“Pushes to GitHub, which grew roughly 10 to 12% in prior years, jumped 41%. Between Q. Three, 24 and Q. Three, 25.”
The other half of the tape: John Collison's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 27 times in 8 episodes across the shows. 9 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Guy Raz 17Chamath Palihapitiya 4Shyam Sankar 1Michael Dell 1Erik Torenberg 1David Sacks 1David George 1Brad Gerstner 1
Statements about John Collison, by other people (9)
Friedberg predicts Stripe will become the most valuable private company
“That's gonna be the most valuable, valuable company. That's private right now.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs founders and leaders manage over 15 direct reports each
“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.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs embeds technical leads into non-technical teams like talent
“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…”
Lütke: Companies should make original mistakes to generate unique alpha
“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.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs voice models operate on text and audio tokens simultaneously
“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…”
Osika: Lovable's new team plan acquired 5,000 paying users in one month
“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?”
Guy Raz: John Collison was world's youngest self-made billionaire in 2017
“In 2017, John Collison was the youngest self-made billionaire on earth.”
Raz: Patrick and John Collison were 23 and 21 when Stripe launched
“When Stripe launched seven years ago, Patrick and John Collison were just 23 and 21 years old.”
John Collison: Patrick Collison hacked his first website to teach security
“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…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
How I Built This 17
All-In 7
the a16z Podcast 3
2026 5 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- Inside The $100M Bet on the Future of Space | Northwood CEO on a16z
- Palantir CTO on The SaaS Apocalypse & Preventing The Next World War | a16z
- Two Legendary Founders: Travis Kalanick & Michael Dell Live from Austin, Texas
- AI Markets: Deep Dive with a16z's David George
- Epstein Files, Is SaaS Dead?, Moltbook Panic, SpaceX xAI Merger, Trump's Fed Pick
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 4 mentions in 1 episode
2018 17 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens John's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 CHEEKY PINTLEDGER | Co-founder & President, Stripehost | 19 | 115 | 83% 29/35 | full record on Cheeky Pint → |
| a16zLEDGER | Co-founder & President, Stripe | 1 | 10 | 0% 0/1 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| ALL-INLEDGER | Co-founder & President, Stripe | 2 | 10 | 100% 1/1 | full record on All-In → |
| HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-founder & President, Stripe | 1 | 1 | — | full record on How I Built This → |