Collison: Real-world industry experience is required to discover massive B2B markets
John Collison · Compliance at scale and why TAM is a distraction with Christina Cacioppo of Vanta · Mar 31, 2026 · at 4:19
Stripe co-founder John Collison discusses with Vanta CEO Christina Cacioppo why enterprise problems like SOC II compliance are rarely discovered by college dropouts.
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“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 is people go out and they build successful products in the world and they, you know, do Dropbox paper or they get some experience. And it turns out there are Huge markets available with problem spaces that most normal people have not heard of with things like SOC II, but you have to kind of spend a while seeing how the value flows in the real world work to discover those big opportunities.”
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