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John Collison

President & Co-founder, Stripe

Search every verified John Collison interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. John Collison, president and co-founder of Stripe, discussed the company's focus on AI-driven commerce and infrastructure changes at the Browserbase Navigate event in September 2026. He stated that Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in payments in 2025, a 34% increase, and described 2026 as the beginning of the "singularity epoch" for AI agents. Collison said that agents are expected to handle a significant portion of commerce and that AI-powered product research may surface niche brands, which he characterized as empowering for the long tail of businesses. He also noted that new AI models have advanced cyber capabilities, leading Stripe to increase its attention on cybersecurity. Collison mentioned Stripe's acquisitions of Bridge, Privy, Metronome, and OpenRouter, explaining that OpenRouter was acquired to help businesses use multiple AI models simultaneously. At Stripe Tour Sydney in August 2026, Collison interviewed Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht. During the conversation, Obrecht discussed Canva's transition from a creative platform to a combined creative, productivity, and intelligence platform, and noted that AI has changed the cost dynamics of serving users. Collison and Obrecht also discussed the complexity of scaling a large organization, with Obrecht describing trade-offs between deep alignment and self-contained teams versus a matrixed structure. Collison praised Canva's progress in international payment methods, saying Stripe aims to expand coverage in what he jokingly called the "dark corners" of payments.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“The new models have really advanced cyber capabilities and it's somewhat intimidating because you're realizing that the standard for... the good news is that Stripe has been very paranoid on cyber for many many years and so it's not like this is kind of totally new news for us but we feel like the adversary landscape is getting quite a bit better quite quickly and so it went from something that we already had a ton o”

“The first order change is that we think people's agents are going to be doing a huge amount of the commerce for them. The second order change is it probably changes the commerce landscape a little bit. And so again I don't know what people bought in their experiences but my experience of doing AI powered product research is it often actually surfaces niche brands or businesses you haven't heard of. Like I think it's ”

“AI has totally changed that because the cost of good to serve a user has gone from cents per month to now many many more cents per month. And so, that's really sort of changed the dynamics of the cost to serve and also sort of the dynamics of the business.”

“I think the intelligence and the decision- making and helping users do it for them is just so critical for everything. If you just provide financial advice or provide financial products without the advice I don't want to bash Robin Hood um but you you end up just selling products and trying to get the most margin and it leads you down this way of like let's do day trading or let's do none of these things are bad righ”

“I like innovation is good. Like uh creative destruction is good. It's how you move every industry in the world along. It's what we've seen for the last 100 years. Creative destruction is what drives better outcomes for consumers or what drives better outcomes for businesses. So you need to enable creative destruction. You need to have a level of risk-taking to allow upstarts to take on incumbents. And all too often i”

“I think the individual is you know a largely solved problem even if people aren't doing it um the solved problem is you know the world index fund right and let's invest in the S&P 500 maybe it's just getting a bit getting a little bit tech heavy um when Stripe goes public um at some stage, but that's a almost solved problem if you had people making rational decisions there and like Cleo could dramatically help that. ”

Other executives at Stripe

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