The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 115 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Collison: European entrepreneurs need EU AI Act curtailed to boost economies
“Entrepreneurs in Europe can boost tepid economies with new tools, but only if well-intentioned yet counterproductive burdens such as the EU AI Act are curtailed.”
Collison: Stablecoins are already the best option for cross-border payments
“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 …”
Collison: Stripe is building Tempo for scalable AI agent crypto payments
“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…”
Collison: High-Agency People Will Win From AI Advances, Low-Agency Will Lose
“My biggest takeaway from all this Has been that around agency where I feel like high agency people are the winners of the advances in AI and within organizations, low agency people will lose out.”
Collison: High-agency, non-expert engineers are ascendant at Stripe thanks to AI
“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…”
Collison: Critics calling vertical AI startups 'LLM wrappers' miss the point
“Some people have called these startups LLM wrappers. Those people are missing the point. The O-ring model in economics shows that in a process with interdependent tasks, the overall output or productivity is limited by the least effective component, not just i…”
Collison: Stablecoin issuers will buy large amounts of US debt and strengthen dollar
“Stablecoin issuers will, in a similar way, be large buyers of U.S. Debt and create more dollar strength.”
Collison: GDPR reduced profits for small European tech firms by up to 12%
“GDPR alone is estimated to have reduced profits for small tech firms in Europe by up to 12%.”
Collison: Stablecoins make global-by-default financial services possible
“And this progress is in large part due to stablecoins, where borderlessness allows fintechs to set up infrastructure that works everywhere. Global by default financial services are for the first time a real possibility.”
Collison: Agents will likely drive most internet transactions soon
“In our view, agents will most likely soon be responsible for most internet transactions, and will likely need blockchains that support more than a million, or maybe even more than a billion, transactions a second.”
Crypto transactions will soon be a large part of Stripe's business
“Crypto enabled transactions are going to be a very large part of the economy and just stripes business in the relatively near future.”
Stablecoin skeptics would not survive long at Stripe, says John Collison
“I don't think they would survive the company very long if someone's walking around like, I don't know, I don't think the stable going thing is going to be a thing.”
Stablecoins will grow 100x from their current scale, predicts John Collison
“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.”
Collison: Small Shopify merchants outperform large retailers in e-commerce experience
“Thanks to Shopify, we are now, I don't think it's hyperbole to say we're living in an inverted world where the very large retailers are worse off in their e-commerce experience. They have, you know, worse systems and lower converting websites than Small busine…”
Collison: AI platforms will become the new aggregation layer, disrupting legacy aggregators
“It feels like step one is, that's going to happen with agentic commerce is, I feel like existing aggregators, if just aggregation is their raison d'etre, then they're going to have a lot of, ah, questions that they need to answer, because ChatGPT and the AI ap…”
Collison: Stablecoin checkout is a few years from mass-market adoption
“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.”
Collison: Silicon Valley over-valorizes unrelated second acts compared to vertical focus
“I think second acts are kind of a bit over-valorized in Silicon Valley somehow, where everyone talks about, oh, we want to do, like, a new AWS is kind of the coolest thing ever, where you do a second thing that is completely unrelated to the first thing, versu…”
Collison: People cannot be sufficiently optimistic about businesses that truly work
“People, people are not capable of being sufficiently optimistic about a business that really works. They, it just, it blows through all their projections.”
Collison: Text LLMs passed Turing test, but voice LLMs are nowhere near
“That's the simpler way of saying what I'm saying is that we have passed the Turing test with text LLMs a long time ago, and we're actually nowhere near that on voice LLMs.”
Collison: Real-world industry experience is required to discover massive B2B markets
“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…”
Collison: Investor updates with lots of words and no metrics signal failure
“I feel like investor updates with a lot of words and no metrics.
Oh yeah, those are bad.
Those are bad.
And actually like, no investor updates is fine.
Like you didn't have to send me.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, no with either very good or very bad.
Yeah.
met…”
Stripe processes $1.4 trillion in 2024 payment volume, up 38%
“Businesses on Stripe generated 1.4 trillion in total payment volume in 2024, up 38% from the prior year and reaching a scale equivalent to around 1.3% of global GDP.”
Collison: 2025 AI agent startup launches on Stripe will eclipse 2024's 700+
“More than 700 AI agent startups launched on Stripe last year, a figure that we expect will be substantially eclipsed by the total in 2025.”
Collison: Stripe reached $1.9T in volume in 2025, up 34%
“Last year, businesses running on Stripe generated 1.9 trillion in total volume, up 34% from 24, an equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP.”
Collison: Tech and data center capex drove nearly half of 2025 US GDP growth
“Economy-wide, demand for software, computers, and data center investment drove nearly half of all U.S. GDP growth in 2025, and will likely soon be a majority of all U.S. Growth.”
Collison: Startups reaching $10M ARR in 3 months doubled in Stripe's 2025 cohort
“The number of companies reaching ten million in ARR within three months of launch was double that of the 24 cohort.”
Collison: 2025 stablecoin payment volume doubled to $400B, 60% B2B
“In 25, the price of Bitcoin dropped precipitously and is now 50% down from October, but stablecoin payments volume doubled to around 400,000,000,060 percent of which is estimated to represent B to B payments.”
Collison: Klarna is the first bank to launch a stablecoin on Tempo
“Klarna, whose CEO was once a self-proclaimed crypto skeptic, became the first bank to launch a stablecoin, Klarna USD, on the Tempo testnet, using Bridge's open issuance to facilitate faster and cheaper cross-border settlement.”
Collison: US small business loan approvals fell to 41% in 2025
“Only 41% of small business loan applications were approved in the US last year, down from 50% in 2015.”
Collison: Stripe Capital recipients grew 27 percentage points faster over one year
“Businesses that received and accepted capital offers grew, on average, 27 percentage points faster over the following year than the otherwise equivalent businesses who didn't.”
Collison: Building for startups predicts future enterprise product requirements
“What the startups were interested in were often better product experiences, and so if the startups want stable coins or usage-based billing or what have you, we should build for those needs, not just because we'll have a good startup business, but the enterpri…”
Collison: AI agents will probably eliminate distinctions between customer service and SDR roles
“Maybe what we're describing is a bunch of swim lanes Have been established by random accidents of software and org charts and everything like that. You do customer service. When people come with a query as of a non-commercial nature, you are an SDR. You know, …”
Collison: Schools structurally cannot provide 1-on-1 mastery learning
“You get way better outcomes with one-on-one tutoring focused on mastery learning, where you only progress through topics once the student has mastered the prior topic, and you kind of move your way sequentially through things. And schools almost definitionally…”
Collison: Elon Musk's companies have historically been unusually capital-efficient
“Elon's companies have always been very capital efficient and like build a bad one and then build a good one. And so the boring company bought a commercial tunnel boring machine before they started developing their own. Tesla had the master plan where they buil…”
Collison: Stripe is shipping 30 percent more code thanks to AI tooling
“I think at Stripe we, ah, we're, we found we're shipping 30% more code.”
Collison: Non-standard European labor laws hinder small cross-border startups
“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…”
Collison: Every AI product will need subscriptions plus overage payments
“I think every AI product will need, you know, they probably want to have some all you can eat, most of what you can eat, subscription with limits, and then the ability to pay for overages.”
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.”