Patrick Collison on software economics
From Collison Brothers Join, Bill Gurley Joins (Gurlin' Down A Dream) · · TBPN
“Software should be like pizza and it should be cooked right then and there at the moment of use. And so it's this quite fundamental shift where you don't want mass-produced industrial scale software. You want bespoke custom software made for you that moment. That's and that's very fundamentally different. It's kind of the up until now the economics of software have been conceived of as fixed cost and then infinitely monetize or monetize as much as possible that has these kind of winner take all dynamics but once there are inference costs and custom creation involved it really shifts it's kind of the non-Walrasian software regime.”
On , Patrick Collison, CEO at Stripe, spoke about software economics during Collison Brothers Join, Bill Gurley Joins (Gurlin' Down A Dream) on TBPN.
About Patrick Collison
Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, has been active in public appearances discussing the state of entrepreneurship and the impact of artificial intelligence. At Stripe Sessions in April 2026, Collison stated that Stripe now processes more than 25% of all new Delaware incorporations and serves more than 5 million businesses worldwide. He said that the rate of new business creation on Stripe in March 2026 was up almost 2x year-over-year, a spike he attributed to AI. Collison also noted that Stripe businesses collectively generated revenue equivalent to about 1.6% of global GDP, totaling approximately $1.9 trillion in payment volume, up 34% year-over-year. Collison has described the current period as "the singularity," which he said arbitrarily started on January 1, 2026. In conversations with Sam Altman and others, Collison said that productivity is re-accelerating and that "the great stagnation seems to be over." He discussed the role of AI agents in commerce, suggesting that payments may shift from being a moment to a policy set by agents with guardrails. Collison also announced new Stripe products, including the acquisition of Metronome for real-time billing and the ability for businesses to send money between Treasury accounts at zero cost instantly.