John and Patrick Collison on Stripe's Growth, Agent Commerce, and the Future of Software

**Patrick Collison** (0:00)
The world is going to need platforms that support millions of transactions per second, billions of transactions per second, which no payment rail or platform does today.
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. Up until now, the economics of software have been conceived of as fixed cost and then infinitely monetized or monetized 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. Finally, 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.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:53)
Stripe processed more than a trillion dollars in payments last year. It grew 34 percent. And according to Patrick Collison, 2026 Q1 may be looked back on as the first quarter of the singularity. That's not a marketing line. It's what the data is showing. The 2025 cohort of businesses on Stripe is larger and performing better on a per business basis than any prior cohort. And the trend is accelerating.
In this conversation recorded live on TBPN, John and Patrick Collison walk through what they're actually seeing in the real economy. Why agentic commerce will require blockchains capable of billions of transactions per second, and a reframe on software itself, from mass-produced product to something bespoke, cooked fresh at the moment of use, like pizza.
This conversation originally aired on TBPN, hosted by John Coogan and Georgie Hayes.

**John Coogan** (1:47)
We have John and Patrick Collison from Stripe. How are you guys doing?

**John Collison** (1:52)
What's going on? Greetings.

**John Coogan** (1:54)
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?

**Patrick Collison** (2:11)
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 TBPN. This is why we need a non-stop stream of everything going on because there is so much happening.

**John Collison** (2:44)
Yeah, we'll move to 24 hours eventually.

**John Coogan** (2:47)
Eventually, eventually.
I mean, but I feel like there is a ton of AI noise and stories and drama and we are 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. People are still shopping in retail stores occasionally. Where is AI actually moving the needle?

**Patrick Collison** (3:13)
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 all sorts of different events and deep-seek 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...

**John Collison** (3:44)
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 kind of like forward-looking, extremely tapped in, 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 effective in terms of just overall consumer spending. Have you tried to break that out or understand that dynamic?

**Patrick Collison** (4:16)
It's obviously hard to measure because we don't have that data, we only have our data.