We have John and Patrick Collison, the OGs from Stripe. How are you guys doing?
What's going on? Greetings.
Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. This is huge. I went through YC. You guys were massively influential in my career and it's a joy to speak to you today on such a big day. But I'd love for you to kick it off with the actual news. What happened? Why are we talking to you today?
We had two announcements today. One is we're launching a tender offer for employees, and that and kind of the valuation and everything tended to get a bunch of the headlines. The thing that was honestly more work was we released our annual letter where every year we sum up all the trends that we're seeing on Stripe. And Stripe is growing a lot. We grew 34% last year because the businesses on Stripe are growing a lot. And there's just, as you guys know, there's a lot happening in tech right now. This is why we need TVBN. This is why we need a non-stop stream of everything going on because there is so much happening. So...
Yeah, we'll move to a 24-hour event.
Exactly. I mean, but I feel like there is a ton of AI noise and stories and drama and we are, you know, never running out of stuff to talk about. But what are you actually seeing in the data? Because there's always this disconnect between the market and the real economy. Like people are still shopping in retail stores occasionally. What, where is AI actually moving the needle?
Well, generally speaking, I would say from the Stripe data, it looks like the economy is in pretty good shape. And there's been, to say the least, there's been some degree of volatility in markets over the last two years and, you know, all sorts of different events and DeepSeek moments and what have you. But if you look at the actual real economy time series, if you look at what's actually happening substantively over the last two years, things, I mean, it's always hard to prognosticate the future, but over the last two years, things really seem to be in good shape. The thing that's really catching our attention...
One second, because I'm just curious, have you guys tried to think about maybe the businesses are doing well on Stripe because they're, you know, kind of like forward-looking, extremely tapped in, you know, working on the right things? And if you look at a bunch of legacy providers, you would see that actually there are a bunch of businesses out there that are slowing down that maybe are feeling the effect of just overall consumer spending. Like, have you tried to kind of like break that out or understand that dynamic?
It's obviously hard to measure because we don't have that data. We only have our data. But I think there is some of that composition effect. And we see it, I guess, both in Stripe's data compared to, say, public earnings from others. Like clearly the respective populations are performing somewhat differently. But I guess we also see it qualitatively in the conversations we're having with customers where what tends to happen, say, for some incumbent is they built some business, they installed some system long before Stripe even existed. Maybe there's some sense that, well, it's not broken, don't fix it. But then they decide, hey, we're going to do something new. And when they're doing something new, then they want to use the best infrastructure that'll enable them to move the fastest and launch the most countries and support stablecoins and do things with AI and whatever. And then they tend to launch that on Stripe. And so there is this qualitative sense that once a company decides to do something innovative, new, retool, what have you, they're more likely to come to Stripe.
Are you seeing an overlap between stablecoin activity and AI activity? There's been sort of a new narrative around agents will use stablecoins, but I feel like agents can use legacy payment rails just fine. And then also you can do really cool things with stablecoins that are not really AI-native necessarily. And so I'm wondering how much overlap there is there.
I would distinguish between how things work today and how things will work in the future. In terms of how things work today, agents absolutely can, you know, a lot of people build with Stripe. You know, you can have a one-time use credit card that your agent can go out and spend. But if you look at what's happening, there's lots of, you know, agents having to solve CAPTCHAs to, you know, be able to kind of do stuff on the wider web. Clearly, like the web is not built for agents. And as a result, they have to get creative to actually do any real-world tasks. And that's true in kind of economic activity as well. Where we think things will go is just there will be a huge amount of agentic commerce. And again, we're seeing a little bit of it today. We think there'll be a torrent of it. And that is what unites stablecoins and AI because we think you're going to need blockchains and better blockchains. Honestly, I mean, this was our thinking behind incubating Tempo because you're going to need really high-throughput blockchains for the agents.
Can you take us through some of the historical technologies that led to growth in just internet payments? I'm thinking about like mobile, social commerce, one-click checkout, Apple Pay. Like there's so many things when I think about the agentic commerce boom that's coming. Like it could be hooking a better version of Siri up and, you know, ChatGPT rolling this out very aggressively, but also, you know, smart speakers, smart lamps, like your watch. Like there's so many different pieces to unblock and unhobble the actual agents as they go about their day.
Well, can I answer a slightly different question, but then we can come back to that point. I just, sorry, this is a brother.
We'll tell you the questions, you tell us your answers. So you know how brothers are, but so I just want to make one point per the prior question about, you know, what we're seeing in the economy because...
I feel like, I mean, this is very arbitrary, obviously, but I feel like there's at least a reasonable chance that 2026 Q1 will be looked back upon as the first quarter of the singularity. Maybe in three years in hindsight that'll look completely delusional. I don't know. But what we're seeing, I mean, this kind of the macroscopic picture of the Stripe user base and things overall looking pretty good and so forth and the two modes not quite showing up. But when we look at the cohorts and then when we look at the businesses that signed up in 2023 and their progression and trajectory over the subsequent months, the businesses that signed up in 2024 and then the businesses signed up in 2025, there's been a phase transition in 2025 where there are both more of them and on a per-business basis they are on average doing better, which is really striking because you might think, okay, well, there's this cavalcade of new lightweight vibe-coded applications or something, but, you know, there's not really a lot of substance there. We're actually seeing both numbers move together. There are many more businesses getting started and the average, the median business is in fact performing better. We're only a couple weeks into 2026, but it looks tentatively like 2026 may plausibly be an acceleration even over that significant leap of 2025. So I don't know. I mean, there's, we've had all sorts of dramatic AI inventions and innovations over the last couple years. There's a bit of a question of, well, how and when and how should we think about how it'll translate to the economy. I would say looking at real purchasing behavior on Stripe, 2025, end of '25, beginning of '26 is when I feel like we're really starting to see it.
That's super interesting data. One, because there was some survey that came out yesterday or maybe it was late last week that said they asked a bunch of executives, are you getting any value out of AI? And 80% of them said no. But clearly if you look, when you look at...
Come on, that's hogwash. Like, find me one executive who wants a refund on their tokens. Find me one executive who said, oh yeah, we started, you know, augmenting our customer service with AI so people are more productive, but we're just going to go back to doing it the old-fashioned way, or like we're spinning our code by hand and, you know, we don't need any of this automated Loom, you know, technology, just like...
Yeah, I'm not saying I agree with the pessimist. I could pick out a bunch of reasons why it would be wrong. One reason it might be wrong is they're not in the weeds actually using the tools and so they just think like, well...
They might not even be aware that they're using the tools because it's buried under...
And they're not feeling the acceleration because they're not... I wanted to ask how you guys think about incubations like Tempo. When I look at Atlas and what Jeff and the team have done there, do you think even in your, I don't know, kind of like the most wild projection that you had early with Atlas, like, hey, maybe someday a quarter of the C-corp in the United States could be, you know, built on this platform, anybody would have said that was insane, and yet here we are.
Gosh, I'm not sure what to say really except we just try to pay a lot of attention to the, I mean, as you guys know, there's a lot of pain points that go into starting a company and we just try to take them seriously. And then, you know, it's the line, you know, so much of these things is just a long obedience in the same direction. Like Atlas is now this great overnight success, but we launched Atlas, I think in...
Overnight, '14, maybe 2015.
