You're watching TVN. We are here live at Stripe Sessions. We're joined by John and Patrick Collison. Thank you for having us. How is it going so far?
It's incredible. We have 10,000 people here. And it is just the center. The economy is replatforming around AI and I think that's the theme of the conference.
Which economy is that? The global economy of which you control 1.6%.
That is the we talk about the internet economy but you know yourself everything is in the internet economy these days. There's very few companies that are not interesting at being at the center of the internet economy. So it's increasingly the whole thing.
And when we spoke back a couple of weeks ago which in singularity time is, you know, a couple months ago or exactly. Yeah. Um we said that we're seeing a significant surge in new business creation. that has roughly doubled again since then. Uh and so as of um
And wait are you tracking that through Stripe Atlas specifically or through just new companies that are onboarding to Stripe as a payment processor?
Both both. So uh March was an all-time record for new incorporations with Stripe Atlas. And then in Q1 overall for just new businesses joining Stripe that was up 71% year-over-year. We showed the chart at the beginning of our keynote yesterday. It is uh it is parabolic. It is exponential. I'm, you know, running out of mathematical terms, but it's it's really very striking.
And do you like the I guess my colors all ruffled. There we go.
And and and and do you like the idea that uh this is driven by AI? This is driven by democratization of more tools, smaller companies, that there's more sort of like lifestyle businesses popping up.
I so initially I thought when I saw these charts that it's um that's about new vibecoded uh businesses that are more abundant in number but on a on any in any given instance uh maybe not as significant or not growing as quickly or you know whatever. What we're actually finding is not only are there so many more businesses but the average revenue per business is also increasing. Okay. Uh and so it's not just more new tiny ones uh somehow um the uh the median business is also doing better.
Yeah. I think even the term lifestyle business, you know, like a bit pejorative. It betrays a worldview. Whereas what we're seeing is there's tons of business now making more than a million dollars a year. Uh uh like that number is really inflecting. And in general, like we think about it in ah you got the little collar service. I mean I just been doing my color myself. Um so uh you also have to look at it almost in coian terms where what we're seeing is more
Citizenship revoked for drinking this.
I just want to clarify that these are full size. These are full size plants. We're just very large humans.
I just want to clarify that it's Guinness 00, which is very good, but given that it's 11 a.m., it's a little early. Yeah.
Oh, just Yeah, we're seeing thanks to AI, you now have more small businesses able to do million dollars plus of revenue and be really impactful. And so, we think you'll probably see smaller firms have a big impact. And and and what's driving this is you think AI is making every little step of entrepreneurship slightly easier, like slightly easier to incorporate, slightly easier to create a contract or to hire somebody, slightly easier to create an ad, and then you add all of that together.
It's the merging of all the functions. It's the fact that you can do your design and your PM and your engineering all yourself as one really effective person. Sam Alman was here yesterday on stage and he was talking about the the return of the idea guy. The fact that if you uh the long maligned idea guy but now if you have really good ideas you can actually go execute them and you have so much more capability to do so and again we are seeing that born out in the stripe data where I think this phenomenon shows up as 71% year-over-year growth in in businesses launching
So I mean it feels like you could do nothing and win Stripe's in the right place at the right time but you're probably not taking
We are not doing nothing I'll tell you that yeah so tell me what you're actually doing how are you accelerating these businesses like what are you changing about Stripe what products are you adding what functionalities are you
So all the commerce is going agentic. Uh we think that people will like people will still be doing stuff but they will do it through their agent. So what does that mean on the consumer side of things? Like we've all had the experience of you know you're in chat GPT and you're re like I was trying to buy a case for my bike and I was going back and forth and I was you know asking questions about you hard versus soft things like that. But anyway at the end of that you just want to uh be able to hit buy rather than like no one wants to fill out web forms. It's not a value add activity. And so we just announced that Google is joining our agent commerce suite. So now we have Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and um Meta all working with us on this agent commerce modality where you can just buy there. That is the consumer side of things. Do you want to talk about the developer side of things?
Well, I'll give you three other things. So first we're seeing a a change across the economy and business models uh where with inference cost with tokens and so forth and so many businesses, you know, in some way taking advantage of AI in their products. We're seeing a shift from SAS from seatbased business models to usage based business models. Uh and I think this is this is pretty profound. So, we acquired a company called Metronome back a couple months ago and we're now integrating that cohesively throughout the Stripe platform. We demoed yesterday something that I think is very cool and as the intersection between crypto/stable coins and usagebased billing where basically you can have streaming payments uh where you're paying for each token as it's delivered in real time.
Yeah, exactly. Today there's a kind of credit extension that implicitly happens with any uh you know token token billing when you're when you're build at the end of the month and so forth which is actually pretty tricky because if you've token thieves if you've you know some failed billing after somebody's racked up a million dollar uh uh credit card tab or something you know that that that's a real problem for the provider. So anyway we're doing a lot around usage trace billing and this economywide structural transformation. Then secondly to this fraud point we're seeing I mean conccommittent with the enormous increase in new business creation we're also seeing a lot of fraud um and um there's
Yeah. So uh you know when you um you can't resell access to software and so if you got illicit access to some SAS tool two years ago there wasn't much you could do with that to monetize so to speak. There wasn't much incentive to steal SAS.
Um but you can resell tokens. It's very lucrative to do so. Uh and so all these new AI companies and all these new AI products, growth is not really a problem for them. They have a surfet of growth, but they're also a lot of people um token pilferers uh looking to uh to near do well.
Exactly. Looking to uh run away with these uh these, you know, this precious value
And and and walk us through how that would work, how that works in practice. Is that somebody spinning up a bunch of free accounts and then like hitting them with just kind of the bare mining motivation distillation or actual reselling?
So, it's really both. Yeah. So, so there's definitely just straight resell, but there's also more sophisticated attacks of distillation. So, anyway, like we've seen that one in six new accounts across this ecosystem are fraudulent. Um uh and for many providers, it's actually difficult now to offer free trials uh because you know the uh um the illicit accounts that set up for these free trials, they drive so much expense that it's hard to make the overall economics work out. Anyway, we're extending Stripe Radar to use the intelligence of the Stripe network to help any of these companies not only score payments, but score customer signups, to score trials, and we're, you know, turning Stripe Radar into this um into this uh sort of um X-ray vision uh for the AI economy to try to prevent these new and more sophisticated attacks. I think this is really important in that we're not going to have an internet with self-s serve access unless so uh just to repeat it back to you the the
If if somebody signs up and they can basically pay for tokens streaming with stable coins that would enable like let's say a big AI company to be able to offer a self-s served product and not worry about come someone coming in running up a big to token bill and then saying like see you I'm not even in the country.
That's exactly right. But we're also going to try to protect the regular signup flows as well and the kind of more straightforward consumer access.
If you run any physical store, you have to worry about shrinkage and you know no one wants the direction of travel where you know you go to a CVS and everything is locked up behind a painting you know good uh uh you know upstanding people suffer from you know the small percentage of crime that happens. It's the exact same in the AI land where similarly they are selling a you know product that has you know real value real resale value exactly real cost associated and so therefore they need to prevent fraud not just for financial loss for themselves but also so they can continue to offer a great experience to all the good users
I I want to go way deeper but I know you have a hard stop do you have something else to say
Well I was going to say one thing before I have to scurry away which is um uh you know so we're we have this usage based billing stuff we have the agent commerce stuff that John just described we have these this new fraud functionality and then The other thing is Stripe started out of course as a payments company, but we've, you know, over the last couple of years, Stripe has uh been becoming uh a uh a broader programmable financial services platform. And that's a bit of a mouthful, but what it means in practice uh is that not only should you be able to get paid with Stripe, but you should be able to hold money in Stripe, be able to pay people around the world, to be able to orchestrate your entire financial services business. uh sort of be an operating system for for global money movement. And so we announced Stripe Treasury where businesses can hold balances in Stripe. They can dispatch money to more than 150 countries. The instant free Stripe Stripe account transfers and so forth. And so rather than stripe this sort of conduit where money ephemerally passes through, Stripe is becoming a home. And this is very valuable we think because Stripe's expertise in building programmable tools and APIs and CLI functionality and all the rest. This is obviously much more important in the tech era.
Was sorry to cut you off. Was this in the seed pitch deck?
None of this was in the seed pitch deck.
No, but but I imagine like you're in the fund. You're you're telling people we're in the funds flow at some point or another. We won't just pass this back to their bank account. We'll actually be able to unlock the value of the
That wasn't in the seed pitch deck. And in general, you know, the secret to being a Silicon Valley founder is you have to like get lucky for many many years in a row and then you go back and you pretend that that was, you know, your plan all along, you know, resell. Exactly. Yeah. You do a lot of recconing. That's that that's very important. However, what I will say is interesting is
We did focus from the very beginning on developers. Uh, and we thought developers were very important under serve. I mean, Stripe's original name was SLDev/payments and you know, payments for developers was that you can go back in the wayback machine that was the tagline on the uh on the website. I think what's interesting now obviously is that the you know all the agent coding tools need something with well doumented APIs with everything being available on an API basis and so I think we have always thought that companies should take developers more seriously I think we're now seeing just industrywide companies that took developers seriously are now really benefiting from this AI moment because they built their stuff for the agents
Also everyone's a developer now going back
And and agents feel like they are developer shaped at least
Agents want good DX developer experience even more than humans do. And so if you don't have it, I mean, it's it's a real problem. I think you're going to kill me if we keep you any longer. We'll let you get out of here. We did want to sign this plaque. Can you explain to us what this is and what it what it stands for? You familiar? This is the original print that went into How did you get that? That's
It was given to us and we want you to sign it
Here and here. We have a museum of business where we try and uh accumulate signed objects of historical.
This is the new poor Charlie paper cover.
Hey, this is the paperback paper cover of poor Charlie.
It's heavy. It's this is how we made the original hard cover if you have it of poor Charlie's almanac. So, sorry. And we'll have right over there.
And this will live on the literal gold master of business. And we will let you get out of here. Uh and we will go way deeper. Stay with us. We are going to continue our interview with John Collison from Stripe at Stripe Sessions here in San Francisco. Uh, thank you so much, Patrick, for taking the time to come chat with us. Really appreciate having you on the show. It's always a pleasure and congratulations. We do want to hit Have you Can we have you hit the gong?
What is the headline number? Let's
Is it 1.6? Is that the headline?
That is the 2025 number. Stay tuned for the 2026 number.
Powerful, powerful hit. Powerful hit. I see what you can tell. He's been lifting.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Uh well, thank you. Have a great rest of sessions. We really appreciate you coming on the show. Uh I want to just shift over to another Stripe Press book. This is uh Maintenance of Everything by Stuart Brand. And in here, the general thesis is uh what what maintenance of everything. I I mean, I'd love to know what you took away from this, but uh maintenance is what keeps everything going. It's what keeps life going. and he gives a ton of really interesting anecdotes about cars and repairs and weaponry and sailing and there's so many interesting anecdotes and I'm wondering about your thoughts on maintenance in the age of AI and what you feel and see in this like we're in this maybe there's like this job replacement thing AI does everything but then there's so much that goes on in the maintenance
Acceleration of technical debt
And so I was wondering if you could just reflect on like brands work in the age of AI
So Stuart Brand is obviously amazing and um uh you know is maybe famous for the uh the whole earth catalog originally which you know Steve Jobs talked about in that uh that famous commencement speech but Stuart Brand has been around for the entirety of Silicon Valley history. Like if you go back and read the uh the Tom Wolf book, the electric Kool-Aid asset test. I don't know if you guys are big Tom Wolf fans, but was talking about like the early LSD culture of the 1960s in the Bay Area having these parties. Stuart Brand is in the book, you know, he's like there at those early parties and everything like that. Yeah. when like the uh you know the Grateful Dead and everything like that and so he's just been like there for everything all along. He was the uh he was the manning the computer at the mother of all demos. You know the angel famous demo. So
Is where the the original mouse was demoed.
Exactly. Where where the mouse was shown. Exactly.
Among among a ton of other things.
Exactly. So and Stuart Brand is still you know he just published this book. And so Stuart Brand is so intertwined with the uh the history of technology and Silicon Valley technology and obviously what this book is getting at and also uh the whole earth catalog is this passion for tools and taking care of your tools and kind of thinking about tools and it's interesting you bring that up in the context of AI because one thing that I get excited about in the current moment is this idea of individual empowerment and you know you could have different visions of AI and I definitely have an adverse reaction to this, you know, very passive uh, you know, I think the term slop is, you know, the term we use for this just, you know, being a passive recipient of AI generated stuff and no one wants the, you know, brave new world soma uh, kind of vision and instead h if you look at something like um, like OpenClaw, I get very excited about that because you are giving
Computing power and the ability to do stuff with programming and tinkering with technology. It's the homebrew computer club all over again. It's this tinkering energy that's back. And so I just get really excited about how I think tools and passion for
Surprising how much negativity there's been towards the entire like Mac mini open claw movement when it's like
