Stripe's John Collison on How Agentic Commerce Will Reshape the Internet

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

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Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:22)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

So Tracy, another episode where I can mention that I've been vibe-ridden. No, but you know what, here's something that I may have mentioned before.

Tracy Alloway (0:32)

I'm sure you have, Joe.

Joe Weisenthal (0:33)

But I'm not 100% sure. I think I've mentioned it. It's actually very easy. You just come up with an idea, and you type it in English, and then it's there. You know the hardest part?

Registering a domain name.

Tracy Alloway (0:43)

Yeah, you complained about this.

Joe Weisenthal (0:45)

Everything else is so smooth, right? You just type it in English, and then you have your little app or whatever. And then it's like, oh, I want to put this somewhere on the web. And then you go to a domain name registrar. I had been using GoDaddy for a long time. And then it's like, this field for this field, this field for this field, and toggle this, and this worker, this pages, and the A field, and the app field, and the B field. And I swear, it's so maddening. I just hated it so much. It's so annoying. It's the hardest part of the whole aspect.

Tracy Alloway (1:15)

I have terrible memories as well about dealing with Bluehost and things like that. Is this the first time you've ever set up a domain?

Joe Weisenthal (1:21)

No, this is the other thing. I've done it before. Like I've done it before and it's still incredibly annoying.

Tracy Alloway (1:28)

Progress comes slow to domain registration.

Joe Weisenthal (1:31)

I mean, there's probably a good reason for it to be complicated. You don't want it to switch in the wrong direction. Anyway, I was very excited. It's a couple of weeks ago. It was actually while the two of us were in Madrid, the company Stripe, the payment company, announced that there was going to be some agreement with Cloudflare, which does a lot of web hosting stuff, where you could just have the agent buy a domain name for you. So you think of one and you just type it in, buy this domain name and host it there.

I mean, it would be like, oh my God, I wrote about it in the newsletter. It's like this would have been so nice a month or two ago.

Tracy Alloway (2:02)

Yet another thing that you will never have to do again.

Joe Weisenthal (2:04)

Exactly. Let another.

Tracy Alloway (2:06)

I mean, I saw the Stripe News and it generated a lot of buzz, and it all comes under the umbrella, I guess, of agentic commerce. So this idea that you can have agents that are actually directly transacting on your behalf with other agents or other websites. And I have to say, as someone who shops online a lot, this is the first time I feel disintermediated by AI.

Joe Weisenthal (2:29)

I'm actually particularly excited about this episode because I'm very curious, basically what you specifically will ask, as someone, as a professional shopper on the web. I was going to say as a person of taste.

Tracy Alloway (2:43)

Oh, thank you.

Joe Weisenthal (2:44)

As a person of taste, I have seen you say, scrolling very nice paper, like websites like wallpapers and things like that.

And I'm curious, what does it mean for that if your AI bot, two years from now, knows you so well? It's like, Tracy, I thought you needed this new wallpaper because you're doing this. I just went ahead and ordered it to you to be delivered tomorrow. This changes the world.

Tracy Alloway (3:06)

It brings up so many interesting questions about discoverability and taste, as you mentioned. And also just the nature of the internet. Because when I think about the internet, like a lot of other things, it's basically built to sell you things, whether that's products or information, content. And we know that it also runs on those sales in the sense that a lot of the internet is driven by advertising, which is related to traffic. Obviously, we actually did that episode way back about how the internet runs on millions of ad auctions.

Joe Weisenthal (3:38)

That's right.

Tracy Alloway (3:38)

And so this topic of agentic commerce and the payment system, obviously, it's of interest to anyone who shops and does stuff online, but it's also really relevant to the actual evolution of the internet.

Joe Weisenthal (3:51)

Couldn't agree more. And I would go further and say it's really important for culture itself. Advertising is the creation of culture. Ads are influential. Ads do all this stuff. What if there's a changing advertising? All these kinds of stuff. Anyway, let's stop hearing from ourselves. We really do have the perfect guest, someone we've wanted to talk to for a long time, someone who's right in the thick of it and all this stuff with agentic commerce and payments. We're going to be speaking with John Collison, the president and co-founder of Stripe. So John, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.