Patrick Collison (Stripe CEO) - Craft, Beauty, & The Future of Payments

Speaker 1 Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe.

Speaker 1 Patrick, first question: You have an excellent compilation of advice on your blog for people 10 to 20, and you say there that once you turn 35, you'll write some for people in their 20s.

Speaker 1 What advice do you have for us now? The people in our 20s now?

Speaker 1 When's it coming?

Speaker 2 I haven't really thought about that.

Speaker 2 The one I've been wondering at recently is,

Speaker 2 you know, I said for that advice for people in their teens, they should go to San Francisco.

Speaker 2 And I wonder for people in their 20s if they shouldn't go to San Francisco. And

Speaker 2 I mean, Glib, and, you know, I think there's a significant set of people who should, in fact, go to San Francisco. But the thing that I wonder about is

Speaker 2 for

Speaker 2 there is a set of career paths that I think some set of people

Speaker 2 ought to pursue and would derive most fulfillment from pursuing

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 that are, you know,

Speaker 2 that are really valuable for the world if pursued, that require accumulating a lot of expertise

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 really

Speaker 2 studying a domain in tremendous depth. And I think San Francisco

Speaker 2 valorizes, and look, this is also San Francisco's great virtue. San Francisco valorizes a kind of striking out on your own, iconoclastically dismissing the sort of received wisdom and

Speaker 2 the founding archetypes and lore of the Steve Jobs and the Bill Gates and all the rest. And

Speaker 2 I'm way less successful than most people, but to some extent, Stripe, as much as it fits a pattern, is an instance of that pattern.

Speaker 2 And look, that's great. And I'm kind of happy that that phenomenon exists in the world,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 I don't think that

Speaker 2 just the world needs lots of other things, right?

Speaker 2 And I don't think San Francisco particularly, I mean, I'm again using San Francisco as a kind of metonym for a cultural orientation, but I think that San Francisco doesn't really encourage

Speaker 2 the pursuit of really deep technical depth. And we're here, we're recording this in South San Francisco.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 South San Francisco is most noteworthy in

Speaker 2 the corporate world for, of course, being the headquarters of Genentech.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 Genentech was co-founded by Bob Swanson and Herb Boyer.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they produced cheap insulin for the first time with recombinant DNA.

Speaker 2 Her Boyer couldn't have done that at age 23. Herb Boyer first had to accumulate all of the knowledge and the skills required to be able to invent that over the course of a multi-decade career.

Speaker 2 And then, I don't know what age he was when he finally went and invented it, but he was not in his 20s.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I feel San Francisco perhaps

Speaker 2 doesn't culturally encourage one to become her boyer. Or yesterday, at the time of recording this podcast, Patrick Su, one of the co-founders of ARC, which maybe we'll speak about

Speaker 2 later in the show, this is a biomedical research organization we started a few years ago.

Speaker 2 He announced

Speaker 2 this new phenomenon of bridge editing, which is

Speaker 2 a new recombinase where you can insert DNA

Speaker 2 into a genome. And it's pretty early, but it might turn out to be quite consequential.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 in order to do something like that, you have to

Speaker 2 study for a long time and just acquire a lot of basic and not so basic technical skills.

Speaker 2 And so anyway, the thing, and I don't quite know how to synthesize it yet, but as I think about advice for people in their 20s, look, I'm not going to normatively pretend or

Speaker 1 presume to

Speaker 2 know kind of in like in which direction one should go in one's life. And obviously, there are successful examples of basically every strategy.

Speaker 2 And I'm really glad you're doing what you're doing at what age? Twenty-three. Twenty-three.

Speaker 2 So that's.

Speaker 1 I'm not inventing recognition DNA.

Speaker 2 Look, I think

Speaker 2 information dissemination is a really valuable thing in the world and causes like

Speaker 2 the guy who

Speaker 2 last I heard was

Speaker 2 in the lead for Nat's Scroll Prize.

Speaker 2 Nash told me, learned about

Speaker 2 the Scroll Prize, listening to your podcast, right? So I think kind of increasing the catalytic surface area of certain kinds of information is a valuable thing in the world.

Speaker 2 So I'm very glad you're presenting the podcast. Anyway, I don't presume to know what people should do with their lives, obviously, but

Speaker 2 I wonder, in as much as I was trying to give advice, and especially maybe if they're reading my advice and not someone else's advice, maybe they're kind of thinking about career paths that look sort of directionally like mine.

Speaker 2 I think my advice might be, I mean, maybe you should do something like what I did or I'm trying to do, but there are other paths as well.

Speaker 2 And I think a lot of really important invention in the world and a lot of the things that I'm most happy are happening happening

Speaker 2 actually require a very different trajectory. And I think there are counterfactual versions of my life where

Speaker 2 I pursued that path. And well, who knows how well it would have worked.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 last point in this, and San Francisco is just very status-oriented, I feel, in this way. I mean, maybe status-oriented is everything is status-oriented, so that's kind of tautological.

Speaker 2 But maybe, maybe, really, what I'm saying is I feel San Francisco,

Speaker 2 the entrepreneurs are

Speaker 2 held in excessively high regard in my view. And look,

Speaker 2 I guess I like entrepreneurs

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 I think look, entrepreneurs as an aggregate

Speaker 2 group in the world,

Speaker 2 all the companies built in Stripe,

Speaker 2 I think are great.

Speaker 2 But there's just a strange version of it in San Francisco that I think is

Speaker 2 should not be

Speaker 2 should not be people's only fixation.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, what I like about this and what I like about you is just like, like you have this sort of sense of like contrarianism of like the things people are expecting to hear from you in any given moment.

Speaker 1 You just really want to just tell them the opposite.

Speaker 1 I don't even know.

Speaker 1 I feel like

Speaker 1 when EA was a little bit more popular, you're like, here's the problems, here's why progress studies are important. And when it was down in its depths, like, hey, guys, pay attention.

Speaker 2 But on this particular piece of advice, Michael Nielsen says that every field in science has

Speaker 2 way too many adherents or way too few.

Speaker 2 But the market is almost never in sort of the right equilibrium. And I think something like that might be, I mean, I think that reflexive contrarianism,

Speaker 2 in a contrarian way, I'll say that I think

Speaker 2 reflexive contrarianism for the sake of it

Speaker 2 is also tired. And

Speaker 2 if you're just contrarian to the prevailing mood, then

Speaker 2 you're just following the prevailing mood, but with a sign-bit inversion or something. So I don't endorse that either.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I think the herd is a really powerful phenomenon.

Speaker 2 Actually, one of the learnings of my adult's life has been that it's very, I mean, everyone knows and kind of says or frequently hears that you should be very wary of following

Speaker 2 the prevailing tides and moods and whims and everything. But it's freaking hard to do in practice.

Speaker 1 So, what practically does that look like to hone your craft in any of these disciplines that take a long time? I mean,

Speaker 1 you've spoken and tweeted about some of the problems with modern universities.

Speaker 1 Is that still the de facto path if you want to be the great biologist that Arc hires or something?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, well,

Speaker 2 in many domains, I don't know, right? So, in like hardware, which is not a small domain, most things in the world involve stuff and things.

Speaker 2 And I just have no facility with or experience with doing things in hardware. And so, if you wanted to become a super skilled practitioner there,

Speaker 2 what's the best career path? I don't know.

Speaker 2 Maybe it's to drop out and join

Speaker 2 SpaceX or something.

Speaker 2 I'm not necessarily endorsing

Speaker 2 just

Speaker 2 pursuing the most establishment and credential-oriented path.

Speaker 2 I think people should try to find the gradient of maximal learning in whatever it is they care most about.

Speaker 2 And yet,

Speaker 2 the question then is what that is.

Speaker 2 For biology, look, not that I'm a biologist, but it is very clear that

Speaker 2 in order to do really good work, there are a lot of bench skills and

Speaker 2 well, there are a lot of bench skills one has to acquire, and then there just is a lot of actual specific knowledge

Speaker 2 where

Speaker 2 the body,

Speaker 2 well,

Speaker 2 any kind of

Speaker 2 any kind of life, you know, wasn't designed with neat fundamental principles the way that maybe physics was.

Speaker 2 A lot of it is obviously evolved and contingent and messy and complicated and all the rest. And so there is a lot of just specific factual stuff to learn.
And I think for those two reasons,

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 there are very few successful pure autodidacts in biology

Speaker 2 where you, at some point, in virtually every case that I'm aware of, have to have had direct experience with

Speaker 2 in and with a top lab where you're seeing how people actually do it in practice. And actually, maybe this also ties back to what

Speaker 2 some of us were discussing previously, where

Speaker 2 your question about the the founders and what they learned from each other and so on. I think

Speaker 2 there's an interesting book, Apprentice to Genius, that follows, I don't know if it's three or four, it's three generations of scientists.

Speaker 2 So someone who mentored somebody else, who in turn mentored another scientist, and they were all extremely successful.

Speaker 2 And the book is kind of

Speaker 2 this reflection on, I mean, this description of what they all did, but also this kind of reflection on, well, like, what is it that was transferred?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 for example, one thing it describes is, well, one of the most important

Speaker 2 and subtle questions in science is problem selection. Like, just how do you choose what to work on?

Speaker 2 No one tells you what to do.

Speaker 2 And you do have to answer this question multiple times. Like with a company, in some sense, you just have to decide like once, and then

Speaker 2 it's kind of, well, maybe it's an iterative process from there. Whereas in science, you're frequently pursuing completely new problems.

Speaker 2 And of course, you need to choose something that's sufficiently important and hard that it would be important if you succeeded, but also that

Speaker 2 it's not so intractable that you can't actually make any progress. And so the book describes how

Speaker 2 this is part of what the mentees describe that they learn from their mentors. Another thing they talk about is just learning about high standards

Speaker 2 and what high standards actually are.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 when I talk to people in other domains, this is so frequently the thing that I hear from them,

Speaker 2 that when they worked with X person or at Y organization or in Z environment or whatever, that they learned what great actually is. And that just permanently changed their sense for

Speaker 2 what their own standard for their work ought to be.

Speaker 2 And so maybe one version of the, you know, what people in their 20s should do is,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 get some ideas to domains you're interested in or care about, but then figure out where you can learn the highest standards, where are the highest standards embodied, and

Speaker 2 where can you go and experience that firsthand?

Speaker 1 Before we get back to Stripe and Arc Institute and everything, I want to touch on the Parker study stuff for a second.

Speaker 1 So there's a view that says, listen, if we improve the NIH 10% or whatever percent,

Speaker 1 are we really making a dent in the fact that ideas are getting harder to find over time? And

Speaker 1 how much of a difference do institutions make anyways?

Speaker 1 it just like if it's just about the number of researchers and how many people in your society you can put into research it's like it's not like singapore can have a much more effective scientific institution that lets it compete with america and science or something like that do you

Speaker 2 what's wrong with that intuition noah smith and others have talked about um

Speaker 2 i can't remember the the the term he used

Speaker 2 something like uh moneyism um uh he had a a funny a funny phrase um but but sort of this idea that we um

Speaker 2 that we assume there is some

Speaker 2 um kind of constant elasticity between investment in some particular outcome like building a semiconductor factory in arizona or a new bridge or whatever and the outcome of you know the factory or the bridge uh and one the conversion rate between you know those um uh

Speaker 2 those inputs and the output is uh you know is is not a cosmological constant. Like maybe any of these things could be done for a half or a tenth or whatever of the cost.

Speaker 2 But two,

Speaker 2 there's

Speaker 2 you know, there are even deeper questions as to like, you know, is it possible at all? Or

Speaker 2 what else would have to change for it to be possible? And what are the other constraints?

Speaker 2 Like, by kind of just talking about these things in funding and dollar terms, you're kind of making the implicit assumption that the only relevant constraint is the financial one, where in practice, maybe it's permits or it's labor shortages or

Speaker 2 it's other things. Anyway, in the context of the NIH and science and RD,

Speaker 2 I'm really skeptical of

Speaker 2 this same approach being brought to bear where

Speaker 2 we can just talk about the amount that we're spending on R D and think that that's implicitly a useful measure of the output.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 to a fairly close approximation, there were around 1% as many practicing professional scientists in the US pre-World War II as post-World War II.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 or say even 1950, and the other epiphenomena in papers or patents and so forth tends to

Speaker 2 follow pretty similar ratios.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we got a lot of pretty good stuff

Speaker 2 in the first half of the century.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 despite increasing the amount that we spend by

Speaker 2 between two and maybe

Speaker 2 slightly more than two orders of magnitude, not quite three.

Speaker 2 It's not clear to me that there is like a direct linear relationship. And so

Speaker 2 when

Speaker 2 analyzing the NIH or how we should pursue any of this stuff,

Speaker 2 I'm inclined to try to get way more, I guess, concrete and tactile and try to think, okay,

Speaker 2 what would success here look like at, well, what is happening today at the micro scale?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 what are the actual problems? And then what could success look like at the micro scale

Speaker 2 and then what might it look like to scale that up and just to give one kind of pointed example of that we ran a survey of the fast grants grant recipients

Speaker 2 after fast grants asking about their their normal work and not not about anything to do with fast grants itself and we asked them um if they had flexible funding um that is to say if they could spend their research dollars uh their their current research dollars however they wanted so not if they like had more research dollars just if they could spend

Speaker 2 if they could direct their current dollars however they wanted, how much their associated research program would change.

Speaker 2 And we give them three options, not much, a little, and a lot. 79% said a lot.
So four out of five said that their research agenda would change a lot

Speaker 2 if this constraint was removed. And so

Speaker 2 like, should the NIH funding level be you know X or 1.1X or 1.2X or whatever?

Speaker 2 That seems to me like a bad way to analyze this question as compared to, for example, perhaps, how bound and constrained should an NIH grantee be in choosing their research agenda?

Speaker 2 Maybe, I mean, if their judgment was way better than that of the committees, not saying it is, but maybe it is, who knows?

Speaker 2 And maybe there's a 5x improvement to be generated just by making that one switch.

Speaker 2 So yeah, I'm just very skeptical of

Speaker 2 these financially oriented frameworks.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 maybe the financial is not the right word for it, but just like trying to map inputs to outputs is the framing which you're using to compare the pre-World War II

Speaker 1 inputs to what's happening now. And if it was particular to the scientific institutions, you would expect, for example, that things that are disconnected from like the NIH-specific structures.

Speaker 1 I mean, obviously, you've talked a lot about the idea that it's getting harder to find paper. And you know, like a sector through sector, it's not like NIH is finding more slaw progress, right?

Speaker 1 But even there, you see you need exponentially more researchers to keep up the same level of progress.

Speaker 1 So it does seem important to have these level effects that are one-time in the case of something like COVID, where, like, yeah, we need that level effect right now.

Speaker 1 But when

Speaker 1 we're framing it in terms of like hundreds of years from now, we're going to be, this is going to be the thing that increases growth rates, which is a sort of framing that is also supplied when talking about these progress of these things.

Speaker 1 Does that make sense in that context when like all these sectors are seeing these slowdowns, which seem consistent with just like, yeah, this is how the economy and science progresses over time?

Speaker 2 I don't know is a short answer. I think it's really puzzling.

Speaker 2 I think the

Speaker 2 constancy of

Speaker 2 US GDP growth is, I think, just like one of the weirdest things. And I don't know if there's a good explanation for it.

Speaker 2 But also, I don't think that it's, or sorry.

Speaker 2 An obvious thing to do would be to shrug and say, okay, well, just

Speaker 2 it's over-determined or something, and that's just like how countries work. But you can look at other countries where it's obviously manifestly not the case.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, what is it that's weird and special about the US? The thing that I wonder at in a lot of these cases is

Speaker 2 you could get many of the observed system phenomena and characteristics if

Speaker 2 we weren't actually adding productive capacity.

Speaker 2 That's a simple way to explain a lot of it. And that if you're just adding exponentially more unproductive capacity,

Speaker 2 then

Speaker 2 on a stylized level, a lot of this stuff would just fall out of it.

Speaker 2 Now, I'm not saying that we're necessarily doing that,

Speaker 2 but it could be that

Speaker 2 maybe we're making them

Speaker 2 well

Speaker 2 there's lots of ways where that could be the

Speaker 2 that could be what's effectively going on, even if it's not the case that like the marginal people or things or organizations themselves are bad.

Speaker 2 It's just kind of somehow how the how the components interact.

Speaker 2 But the fact that you could get these

Speaker 2 exponentially diminishing returns through the addition of

Speaker 2 ever more non-productive capacity

Speaker 2 makes me

Speaker 2 not persuaded that the low-hanging case is necessarily true

Speaker 2 and give some weight to the prospect that yeah it is it's fundamentally structural cultural or or organizational

Speaker 2 and you know just to to give a

Speaker 2 sort of

Speaker 2 you know a micro example there and it's a it's it's a very you know

Speaker 2 basic and an obvious one, but

Speaker 2 I think it's interesting to compare the

Speaker 2 SpaceX SpaceX R D budget and the NASA R D budget and

Speaker 2 to actually look at those two time series together. And

Speaker 2 it's

Speaker 2 well, maybe we're just returning to the

Speaker 2 financial point again, but

Speaker 2 it seems pretty clear that as NASA has

Speaker 2 that the trajectory of NASA's efficacy

Speaker 2 has not fully followed the trajectory of its inputs.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Although the point about

Speaker 1 the marginal inputs we've put into science have not been as highly, effectively used or as high quality as what was before. Like the 1x is a much higher quality 1x than 100x.

Speaker 1 It's not clear what you do to fix that. If it's just a case that there's a limited amount of John von Neumans in your society that are part of the pre-World War II 1x,

Speaker 1 it's not like we can just put 100x more John Monte type physicist into science.

Speaker 2 If the binding constraint is the number of Johnny von Neumans, then yes,

Speaker 2 that's bad news, I guess.

Speaker 2 There's not a lot we can kind of do on the margin. But I'm not sure that it is.

Speaker 2 I think the, I guess I keep going back to the cultural and the sociological point where

Speaker 2 so Gertie and Carl Corey,

Speaker 2 they ran a lab at the University of Washington, St. Louis, and six of their students, if I recall correctly, went on to win Nobel Prizes.

Speaker 2 And they had a well-known lab and

Speaker 2 they got good students, but they weren't the most prestigious lab in in the world. It's not like they got to cherry pick every year like the single most promising person.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 something was going on there.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there's a book about it and it tries to get into this a little bit. And

Speaker 2 I don't know that I can figure out quite what it was. And there was also some good fortune where they got into molecular biology at a good time.

Speaker 2 But I think there were these kind of hopeful data points where,

Speaker 2 again, they were obviously extremely brilliant people, but I think that the thing that distinguished them and their students was not that they were these, you know, seven sigma Martians.

Speaker 2 I think rather that they found organizational structures and cultural practices that really worked. I think those are at least in principle more replicable.

Speaker 2 Now, you might still say, okay, fine in theory, but how do you actually do that?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think that's the big open question.

Speaker 1 Okay, I think

Speaker 1 that's a great point to talk about Arkinstud.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, I mean, I think you just kind of answered this question basically, but

Speaker 1 it's not exactly like biology research is

Speaker 1 something that society has neglected. So what's the theory of change here?

Speaker 1 Is it just a story similar to Stripe in that if you get the right people, even though there's like tens of billions of dollars of biology funding, getting the right people and the right culture and right dedication is what it takes?

Speaker 2 Even though there are lots of scientists and

Speaker 2 lots of universities, there's a lot of homogeneity today in

Speaker 2 how science and in particular how biomedical science is pursued where and kind of basic

Speaker 2 research in an academic context, before there's any commercialization or prospect of it in sight.

Speaker 2 And I don't know that the model is necessarily a bad one.

Speaker 2 Certainly, we're not particularly claiming that it's a bad one, but sort of the construct of universities, labs, PI, a principal investigator running the lab, that person applies for grants primarily to the NIH, maybe supplemented by other

Speaker 2 sources, and grants reviewed by committees with pretty

Speaker 2 study sections as they call them with kind of pretty rigid scoring criteria and so on. Like that's the structure.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it just seems suboptimal to me. I mean homogeneity is bad in basically any ecosystem, especially ecosystems where you're

Speaker 2 you know where you're where you're producing or excuse me where you're seeking tail outcomes

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 we thought that for a variety of reasons,

Speaker 2 like, well, from first principles that other models should be possible, and that

Speaker 2 we had specific ideas as to how one particular model

Speaker 2 might be a good idea and complementary to the status quo. In very short terms,

Speaker 2 what's different about ARC is one, scientists are funded to pursue, scientists are funded themselves to pursue whatever they want.

Speaker 2 So it's curiosity-driven research, whereas NIH grants are given for projects.

Speaker 2 Second, we build a lot of in-house infrastructure so that scientists can draw upon other platforms and other capabilities capabilities that they don't have to go and build and maintain themselves.

Speaker 2 Whereas again, in the kind of standard university academic context, scientists

Speaker 2 would virtually always have to do that in-house. And because of the natural skill constraints on any given lab,

Speaker 2 that effectively circumscribes the ambition of a possible research program.

Speaker 2 And then thirdly, we try to provide career paths for people to remain in science if they don't want to become principal investigators, where the university structure kind of commingles the training purpose of

Speaker 2 academia with

Speaker 2 the execution, where the people who are doing the work are typically the

Speaker 2 grad students and the postdocs who are both themselves, at least nominally, on the career path of themselves eventually becoming principal investigators. And

Speaker 2 there are lots of people who, for all sorts of different, very valid reasons, like love science and love the pursuit of research but don't want to be a manager running a lab choosing their own research programs and dealing with all the overhead and typically grant applications that are concommitted with that

Speaker 2 and so with arc we have a real emphasis on hiring uh scientists who have finished their postdocs finished grad school and just like that's what they want to do in their lives and there again isn't really a career path for them today um and one of the things that's actually really exciting about the discovery that we that we mentioned that came out yesterday this new bridge editing technology technology, is that work was led by one of these senior scientists who'd finished his postdoc.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's not clear to me that he wanted to go and become a PI,

Speaker 2 but he loves science and he's an amazing researcher, clearly.

Speaker 2 And so he's able to go on to

Speaker 2 have that career at Arc.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 in addition,

Speaker 2 the prospect of these mobile elements being usable in this way for this genomic insertion, whatever, that's a pretty speculative out there thing. And had he applied to the NIH to go and pursue that?

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 he didn't, so I don't know what the outcome would have been. But Jennifer Doudna's work was, if I recall correctly, funded by DARPA because

Speaker 2 her CRISPR

Speaker 2 NIH applications were rejected. And of course, Carolyn Carico's NIH applications

Speaker 2 for mRNA vaccine work were famously rejected.

Speaker 2 So it at least seems very plausible that

Speaker 2 it wouldn't have worked out.

Speaker 2 And so, look, all these things are random, and I can't make any definitive claims about

Speaker 2 what would have counterfactually happened, but it seems plausible to me that this thing announced yesterday wouldn't have happened or would have been less likely to happen

Speaker 2 in a different environment.

Speaker 1 When we think forward 10 years or 20 years,

Speaker 1 this specific line

Speaker 1 of research, where you understand the effects of

Speaker 1 genetic architecture on different traits, and also you can edit, invert,

Speaker 1 insert, whatever

Speaker 1 the DNA arbitrarily.

Speaker 1 You've solved a little cellular anemia. You've done the obvious things.
What does that lead to? What are you excited about?

Speaker 2 Well, the thing that I think is really interesting about it is

Speaker 2 using it as a new kind of telescope, by which I mean,

Speaker 2 when people hear about CRISPR,

Speaker 2 there's an obvious excitement and a legitimate excitement around using this to cure things directly in the body, using it as a kind of therapeutic.

Speaker 2 But you can also use CRISPR to

Speaker 2 try to figure out what's going on in cells and in cell cultures in a kind of structured way. And so

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 body is interesting in that it has this

Speaker 2 switchboard of

Speaker 2 the DJs, I guess, at the

Speaker 2 fancy mixing sets,

Speaker 2 of 20,000 genes.

Speaker 2 And with CRISPR, you can systematically go and sort of perturb each gene one by one, like mashing all the keys in sequence and try to figure out, well, what the effects of perturbing this versus that are.

Speaker 2 And if you do that in a cell culture where you can subject the cells to some stressor or some treatment or whatever, you can kind of see differentially how

Speaker 2 different perturbations affect different cell outcomes.

Speaker 2 Or you can just kind of use it for synthetic data generation more broadly, where you could perform all these perturbations and then sequence and kind of see what's happening in the cells and so forth.

Speaker 2 And single-cell sequencing has come a long way. Anyway, point is, there's a lot you can do with all this gene editing stuff for

Speaker 2 discovery and for data generation in the broadest sense. And

Speaker 2 that's really compelling because

Speaker 2 for a lot of diseases,

Speaker 2 they're complex

Speaker 2 in the sort of Fields jargon, meaning, I mean, yes, they're complex in the colloquial sense, but they're specifically complex in that they're

Speaker 2 not infectious,

Speaker 2 like not just like some pathogen getting into you, and they're not monogenic, like Huntington's, where it's like one specific mutation.

Speaker 2 Instead, it's like some combination of environmental factors, but like maybe some genetic factors as well. And

Speaker 2 it's somewhere in between.

Speaker 2 And by figuring out, and that includes most autoimmune diseases, most cancers,

Speaker 2 to some extent, cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative disease, like the big ones we haven't yet solved. And

Speaker 2 so then coming back to these functional genomics technologies, what's interesting, I think, is trying to figure out

Speaker 2 how it is that the genetic component of those diseases happens and works and so on.

Speaker 2 And even if that's only a small contributor, it can potentially shine light on just like what the general pathway is.

Speaker 2 And so the question would be, and look, this is speculative, none of this has actually happened, but by figuring out the genetic interactions between genes and say Alzheimer's, can you figure out

Speaker 2 how Alzheimer's arises, which we don't understand today? And then once you understand how Alzheimer's arises, maybe you can use kind of conventional technologies and targeting to figure out how to

Speaker 2 inhibit that or to sort of

Speaker 2 modulate those pathways.

Speaker 2 And so, yeah,

Speaker 2 that's what we're really excited about from a functional genomics standpoint. And there's kind of an AI angle as well that we could hook up if you want.

Speaker 1 How do you think about

Speaker 1 the dual use possibilities of biotech? I am sympathetic with the idea that if you think of prior technologies, just like Google search or even just the computer itself, right?

Speaker 1 You could forecast in advance, oh, this has all this dual use stuff.

Speaker 1 But for some reason, just like history has been kind to us, and maybe we should just,

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 metaphense here is like keep doing science. But

Speaker 1 with biotech, there's I mean, we don't have to go to specifics here, but there's like specific things you can think of with the specific technology where you could imagine some nefarious things.

Speaker 1 How do you think about just why not just like focus, let's say, on ameliorating the risks first or something like that?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I don't think that

Speaker 2 I don't think the binding constraint on harmful use of

Speaker 2 biotechnology or bioweapons today is pure biological capabilities. Like if some set of incredibly capable, intelligent people

Speaker 2 wanted to cause tremendous harm with,

Speaker 2 well, presumably with pathogens, but with something biological,

Speaker 2 they wouldn't necessarily need to invent anything new. They would just need to apply currently known techniques in kind of a malevolently directed fashion.

Speaker 2 I think there are some concerns and some risks there

Speaker 2 with respect to things that don't invent new technologies but do make them more accessible. And so

Speaker 2 I think the question is

Speaker 2 what would the effect on the world be if there was a sufficiently sophisticated LLM that

Speaker 2 it could help anybody synthesize and disperse smallpox.

Speaker 2 I don't know that the laws of physics prohibit such an LLM existing. I presume they don't.

Speaker 2 And would the world be fine if such an LLM was widely distributed?

Speaker 2 Maybe, but maybe not. So I think there is that kind of threat vector.
But my point is, I don't think

Speaker 2 knowledge at the frontier of biology is the relevant margin here. And if we take seriously

Speaker 2 what

Speaker 2 this is,

Speaker 2 I mean, we don't need crazy AI risks to motivate this, where the world is perfectly capable of originating really severe pandemics and pathogens itself, plus all the other diseases that are not pathogenic.

Speaker 2 So we got other problems. But

Speaker 2 whether we care about the possible

Speaker 2 dual-use harms you just mentioned, or we just care about the things that already exist, to ameliorate both of those, we do need enhancement of our capabilities.

Speaker 2 There are a lot of biological problems that we don't today know how to solve.

Speaker 2 And so I think in that respect, if one were to do what you're proposing and try to advance

Speaker 2 the defensive side of this, I don't know that what one would do would necessarily be that different,

Speaker 2 because there are just fundamental capabilities that we would presumably need to have that we don't today have.

Speaker 2 And by trying to solve current human diseases, I think you're probably also pursuing something pretty close to the best steps to solve the potential diseases that malicious actors could cause in the future.

Speaker 2 That makes sense.

Speaker 1 I mean, zooming out from bio-risk in particular, just like, how are you thinking about AI these days?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I think everyone has to be sort of

Speaker 2 high perplexity in the sense that, I mean,

Speaker 2 the verdict that one might have given at the beginning, you know, we're recording this here, pretty close to the beginning of 2024, the verdict one might have given at the beginning of 23, 22, 21, you know, back, say, the last eight years,

Speaker 2 those would all, I think, have looked pretty different.

Speaker 2 I mean, maybe Gwern

Speaker 2 might have scored the best

Speaker 2 from 2019 or something onwards,

Speaker 2 but broadly speaking, it's been pretty difficult, I think, to forecast.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 I think the basic position to a first order has to be one of some degree of humility.

Speaker 2 I think as your blog post identifies,

Speaker 2 the big question right now is

Speaker 2 to what degree scaling laws hold. And I guess, if they hold, then

Speaker 2 what exactly is it that we're,

Speaker 2 well, asymptoting is maybe a presumptuous word, maybe it's not an asymptote, but like,

Speaker 2 what is it that we're approaching? You know, it's not, we don't necessarily know the shape of that thing, whatever it is.

Speaker 2 And yeah,

Speaker 2 I think it's a lot of,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 2 I think how one should feel needs to be

Speaker 2 or ought to be very sensitive to like the exact parameters of those curves. And I just don't think

Speaker 2 anyone knows what

Speaker 2 the true value of those parameters actually are. So

Speaker 2 it's clearly going to be important.

Speaker 2 It is already important today, and it has a pretty central bearing on both Stripe and Arc.

Speaker 2 And we'll see.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 I wonder if the meta-lesson here, and I totally agree with that sort of general sentiment, but I wonder if the meta-lesson that we got from COVID, for example, and with things like fast grants was

Speaker 1 you obviously can't predict these things in advance, but the most important thing, even in addition to these specific sort of countermeasures trying to come up in advance, is when the thing is happening, having

Speaker 1 competent individuals who can synthesize and organize information, and also having these new initiatives and institutions to

Speaker 1 get the right thing done.

Speaker 2 The adaptability premium is probably going to go way up over the next decade.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and with that in mind, and I know you have already a couple of day jobs,

Speaker 1 but yeah, I feel like something like Fast Grants, when the time comes down to it, I don't know, it should be like,

Speaker 1 you know, you'd be like one of the top people you could think of in terms of having expertise and respect in a wide range of domains and competency as a leader.

Speaker 1 I don't know, just like keep it in the back of your mind, or maybe in the middle of your mind, given how far we are into the transition.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 Fast Grants was

Speaker 2 three beloved squirrels in a trench coat, or I guess, well, I was one of the squirrels, so I don't know, self-pull of it, but it was also a Tyler Cohen, who's an amazing person and a great friend, and then my wife,

Speaker 2 who's also

Speaker 2 one of Arc's co-founders. And so, you know, Fast Grinds was not this like giant, you know, impressive edifice that would qualify me for anything at all.

Speaker 1 But it doesn't have to be giant, right, to have that kind of big impact.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I guess as an objective matter, that's true. I mean, look,

Speaker 2 John and I try to be very self-aware of the limits of our expertise, which

Speaker 2 are very approximate to us.

Speaker 2 And I'm sure if

Speaker 2 something like that was necessary, they'd be.

Speaker 2 I mean, look at Operation Warp Speed. They chose a super effective domain expert, Monsef Slowy, to run that.
And it was just monstrously successful,

Speaker 2 like truly remarkable. And

Speaker 2 I don't know who the Monsef Slowy of, I guess it would depend whatever the problem in question is, but I think my recommendation would be figure out who Monsef is and like go hire Monsef.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think it's extremely unlikely. I think anybody who deemed me the Monster of that thing

Speaker 2 is probably mistaken.

Speaker 1 I think you're being too humble. But just staying on FAST grants,

Speaker 1 now you have the retrospective of how effective the fast grants recipients were compared to the other grants that were given out by, let's say, the NIH or NSF.

Speaker 1 To your knowledge, what has been the reaction of these institutions to the discrepancy between the speed and effectiveness of FAST grants?

Speaker 1 Have they analyzed their protocols and what happened during COVID? Is there any sort of retrospective there on their part?

Speaker 2 Not to my knowledge, but I don't want that to sound like an indictment.

Speaker 2 Maybe they've done a lot of reflection and

Speaker 2 I just don't know about it. I don't think I would know about it, even if it had happened.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 I mean, look, most

Speaker 2 Well, I don't know anything about the response at CDC or FDA or NIH or NSF or any of the relevant organizations or their international equivalents.

Speaker 2 And so none of what I'm saying should be taken as like specifically

Speaker 2 not only not critical of them, but not even a comment to them. I just don't know what they did.

Speaker 2 But in general, organizations are not awesome at

Speaker 2 self-reflection. And I think

Speaker 2 I assume as a default prior that some of the dynamics we discussed at the beginning of this are rooted there, where none of the people who started those organizations organizations are there today.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, what exactly are the incentives of those leaders? And,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 you know, I haven't,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 2 it's not clear to me who would have the incentive to,

Speaker 2 you know, really take stock in a fully objective and self-critical way to figure out, you know, what was done well and what was done poorly.

Speaker 1 I promise not to be too myopic about AI, but one more question.

Speaker 1 Long term we can't forecast, maybe even medium term we can't, but near term it looks like we might have things that look like AI agents and they might need to trade.

Speaker 1 What does the financial infrastructure for AI agents look like?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think automated

Speaker 2 or

Speaker 2 autonomous transactions, I mean, they already exist to some extent extent today. I mean, you know,

Speaker 2 lots of services have usage-based billing, right? And a lot of the expenses being incurred are

Speaker 2 autonomously incurred. Like no human is pushing a button when Stripe does most of what it does with cloud computing and incurs

Speaker 2 some costs with some cloud service. So

Speaker 2 it's in some kind of extremely primitive way happening today. And I assume it will follow some gradient

Speaker 2 where

Speaker 2 some of those decisions are

Speaker 2 either directly or indirectly being made by an LLM or some LLM equivalent or whatever. And I think there'll be

Speaker 2 some almost unnoticeably smooth continuum up to

Speaker 2 very considerable degrees of autonomy. But it's not that we're going to wake up some month and be like, oh my God,

Speaker 2 suddenly

Speaker 2 the bots have been unleashed.

Speaker 2 I think there'll be interesting questions there around, I mean, this will now sound very kind of parochial and

Speaker 2 maybe getting excessively tactical or something, but I think there'll be very interesting questions around the legality of those in terms of like,

Speaker 2 are these treated as the responsibility of the owner, or is there any degree of kind of independence granted?

Speaker 2 How does liability work?

Speaker 2 Yeah, which rails are best suited? What kind of transaction velocities are we talking about here?

Speaker 2 Because if it's a billion transactions a second, then the properties of that system should look very different to

Speaker 2 one giant clearing transaction every day.

Speaker 2 And again, again, if we just use the analogy of the usage-based services, those tend to incur liabilities

Speaker 2 in kind of tiny increments, but then to kind of to settle on a monthly basis when you pay your bill.

Speaker 2 So maybe these agent transactions will

Speaker 2 have that character. So I think there are a lot, excuse me, a lot of practical applied questions, but I think what you're saying around these autonomous

Speaker 2 transactions conceivably being an important dimension is very true and real and is one of the ways in which

Speaker 2 the the one of the interesting ways in which the economy you know might change and expand uh over the next decade and and i think it's possible that the crypto plays some role here where um

Speaker 2 you know it's

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 if

Speaker 2 you know

Speaker 2 we take uh KYC and AML very seriously for humans and we want to know the human

Speaker 2 that is associated with some particular financial activity.

Speaker 2 Obviously, that's a murkier question in the context of some AI agent. And if we, in some blurry sense, look at crypto as the part of financial services that is de facto exempt from AML by design, then

Speaker 2 yeah, maybe that plays a role.

Speaker 1 How long before Stripe was founded do you think a product like Stripe could have been invented?

Speaker 2 Hmm, that's a good question.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 depending on what exactly you define Stripe as being, being, I think

Speaker 2 conceivably decades earlier in that, I mean, on some level, PayPal is a kind of Stripe.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there were many payments companies before PayPal. And

Speaker 2 you could go all the way back to cash registers or something, right? So it depends on

Speaker 2 these definitional questions.

Speaker 2 I mean, the particular secular tailwinds that we benefited from around the rise of app stores and the on-demand economy and maybe the startup boom post YC and after the financial crisis,

Speaker 2 those particular tailwinds were idiosyncratic and specific to Stripe. And I guess the GFC was 0809 and Stripe was founded in 2010.
And so

Speaker 2 as much as you define those as being core, then not that much earlier.

Speaker 2 But mostly my story of Stripe is one of market inefficiency. And I do wonder

Speaker 2 why much of it didn't happen sooner.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I always find it really interesting when there's these cases where it wasn't even the case that like, oh, it could have been started sooner, but there was nobody in the market.

Speaker 1 There were like many people in the market, and they weren't just random people. There were technology companies headquartered in San Francisco who were in the market.

Speaker 1 Do you have some explanation for why it didn't occur to them?

Speaker 2 I'm hesitant to generalize too much because,

Speaker 2 well, I only have maybe

Speaker 2 n equals one experience, and so I think it's dangerous to overextrapolate from that.

Speaker 2 Maybe n equals two now with ARC as a very different kind of organization, but an organization nonetheless.

Speaker 1 Or if you include all the features of Stripe, n equals like 10, 20 something. Okay, so

Speaker 2 yes, depending on your definition, maybe there's some kind of samples out there. I guess my general view is most products and most businesses

Speaker 2 things can just be done much better.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think moats are typically kind of overrated.

Speaker 2 And I mean, the payment's a great example of a domain where on a logical basis, you would say that there are so many sources of defensibility, where there's the network effect of the account holders, and there's the data network effect slash economy of scale for fraud and so forth, and there are regulatory modes and barriers, and end-end.

Speaker 2 And yet,

Speaker 2 not only does Stripe exist, but there are lots of other, I mean, there's a whole fintech ecosystem today, right?

Speaker 2 So, yeah, I think it gets down to

Speaker 2 kind of deep questions of

Speaker 2 what's the binding constraint on just the number of effective organizations that exist in the world.

Speaker 2 And for any any given sector, why is it that number of companies rather than twice that number of companies and so on?

Speaker 2 I think it's about motivation and ideas and people's willingness and determination to organize talent and so forth, but these kinds of more socio-cultural explanations rather than.

Speaker 2 I mean, Hamilton Helmer is probably the leading scholar of some of the

Speaker 2 sources of defensibility for businesses.

Speaker 2 He has this

Speaker 2 niche but very well-known in the the niche book

Speaker 2 called Seven Powers.

Speaker 2 And it kind of attempts to disaggregate all the various sources of market power in this respect. And I think that is true and important insofar as it goes.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 nonetheless, it's kind of strange to me that nobody had done Stripe before Stripe.

Speaker 1 When you think about the fact that most are overrated and just doing the thing is underrated,

Speaker 1 what is Stripes Mode in that context? Does that make you

Speaker 1 think differently about stripes mode?

Speaker 2 Yes, one.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I guess I do think that

Speaker 2 one can have

Speaker 2 organizational and cultural moats.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 maybe this contradicts what I was just saying, or maybe it's consistent with it in the sense that it's a kind of cultural explanation.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think that in as much as we have a moat, it's because we have a very good understanding of our domain and a set of people who actually care about solving the problems

Speaker 2 and who are, I don't know, continually paranoid at the prospect that we might be forgetting something important and sort of trying to figure out what the important thing that could supplant Stripe's approaches is and making sure that we build those first and so forth.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 organizations that are, I mean,

Speaker 2 there's

Speaker 2 you're familiar with Conquest's laws and there's Conquest's third law, I guess, which is that one should model organizations as if they were run by a cabal of their enemies.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 obviously, presumably it's tongue-in-cheek, but it's interesting to try to think about

Speaker 2 what is the kernel of truth in that and why would it be there? And I think what's going on is that I think most organizations, when they start out, are actually trying to achieve their stated goals.

Speaker 2 Somebody started the organization for a reason, and probably it was for the stated reason.

Speaker 2 But then over time,

Speaker 2 that person and that set of people who initially populate the organization depart, and some set of new people come to take their place.

Speaker 2 And there's multiple versions of that, there's generational turnover on a continuous basis.

Speaker 2 But say for the fifth generation,

Speaker 2 why are they there? And to what degree do their particular specific local incentives align with the nominal originally stated goals of the organization?

Speaker 2 And I think there can be a lot of misalignment there, right? Where they're following a local path and

Speaker 2 conceivably even the leader of the organization, not even through any

Speaker 2 fault of their own per se, necessarily, just that they're a human and they have their own incentives.

Speaker 2 And again, the original kind of constitutional incentives of the organization might be quite different.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 I think this phenomenon is kind of a fact of life. And

Speaker 2 I think these kinds of explanations for me

Speaker 2 are much more explanatory in trying to figure out sort of why some of these things either happen or don't.

Speaker 2 And to your question,

Speaker 2 in as much as Stripe has a moat, what is it?

Speaker 2 I think it's that,

Speaker 2 I mean, others can judge to what degree it's actually manifest and rooted in practice. I think it is, but I'm a biased observer.

Speaker 2 But I think it would be that people at Stripe really care about solving the problems that we say we are trying to solve.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 the point about the misalignment over generations or over time is interesting.

Speaker 1 And actually, do you have examples of institutions which have for decades or hundreds of years managed to keep their original

Speaker 1 not only mission statement, but the organizational competence? Because you think of tech companies, even the oldest tech companies have not been around that long, right?

Speaker 1 And they're some of the biggest tech companies in the world, and the median age of the corporation is famously low.

Speaker 1 What is good examples here?

Speaker 2 I think some of the explanations around the effects of shareholder capitalism and sort of the idea that shareholder capitalism as a mechanism does, in fact, have,

Speaker 2 has some consequence with respect to the incentives of organizations and their long-term fates.

Speaker 2 I think those theories have some credibility, and I think it is very plausible that shareholder capitalism even attenuates

Speaker 2 the duration of some of these organizations. I'm not saying that's definitively true, but I find it credible the idea that it is.

Speaker 2 It's not clear to me that that's necessarily bad, even if it is true, right?

Speaker 2 In that, are we on the side of the humans or of the kind of aggregate innovation in the world, or on the side of like the corporations, you know, qua legal entities? And

Speaker 2 yeah, it's not clear to me the answer should be the third.

Speaker 2 At the same time, or maybe in fact consistent with that, if you look at, say, Europe or some other places like

Speaker 2 in Denmark,

Speaker 2 for reasons related to the tax code there, a lot of organizations are either controlled by or very substantially held by

Speaker 2 non-profit foundations. And so Novo Nordisk, for example,

Speaker 2 the GLP company,

Speaker 2 but Maersk, the shipping company, I believe also Lego, a lot of these corporations

Speaker 2 are controlled by, and again, usually have a lot of their stock held by foundations. That has the secondary effect

Speaker 2 in many cases where they actually do embed in a legally binding constitution their mission.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, I'm not an expert on Novodordisk, but

Speaker 2 I happened to get a book about it over Thanksgiving.

Speaker 2 And actually, there's also a book on the Danish Industrial Foundations.

Speaker 2 But it's enshrined in their constitution that they have to make insulin broadly available really cheaply, or at least cheaply in Scandinavian countries.

Speaker 2 And I think they're allowed to charge market prices elsewhere.

Speaker 2 And I think that, and then

Speaker 2 the rest of their profits, they have to, they're again, legally obligated to reinvest in R ⁇ D.

Speaker 2 Is that somehow causal in the fact that they then invented one of the most remarkable pharmacological discoveries of the last 20 years

Speaker 2 in these GLP1 agonists? I mean, plausibly.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 I think these questions around

Speaker 2 why it is that the median age of organizations and corporations is what it is are definitely interesting.

Speaker 2 And I suspect it's a somewhat contingent aspect of how we've chosen to organize large corporations in the US today.

Speaker 1 The thing you're mentioning about this firm seems very similar to the export-led growth in Asian sort of

Speaker 1 tariffs. This one company you're tasked with making the cars, but you better make the cars good.

Speaker 1 You have no competition, but you had to invent the best car in the world.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes, yes. And I think, I mean, you know, we are all fans of Smith and Ricardo and all these characters.
And

Speaker 2 even they, I think, are sort of less dogmatically attached to free trade than perhaps people today interpret them as being.

Speaker 2 But I think people like Friedrich Liszt and those other, not quite contemporaries, but quasi-contemporaries,

Speaker 2 are maybe on a relative basis underrated. And I do think, I mean, in as much as you believe the kind of sociological, cultural skill, whatever, even vague alignment,

Speaker 2 not in the AI sense, but in the just in the more kind of interpersonal sense, in as much as you think these are important and explanatory, then,

Speaker 2 yeah, I think

Speaker 2 you end up thinking about some of the the things you just raised.

Speaker 1 That's really interesting to hear you say that, because if you think about Stripe's mission, right, it's to facilitate global trade, to make sure that some firm from India can compete with any firm in Nigeria or whatever.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 the room for you to have this sort of learning curve where you're less efficient, then the global competition should be less if Stripe exists, right?

Speaker 1 Isn't Stripe the anti-List company?

Speaker 2 Well, it depends which version of List. And, you know, I mean,

Speaker 2 and to be clear, I'm not sort of specifically endorsing these tariffs and trade barriers. I think the history associated with them is checkered at best.
Look, I think it's possible that if you have a

Speaker 2 specific sector where

Speaker 2 you have

Speaker 2 clear goals and a credible path to actually achieving some substantial degree of success there, you know, and and and probably some more kind of conjoined propositions, then maybe some degree of

Speaker 2 activist trade policy

Speaker 2 might be on net the

Speaker 2 beneficial thing to do. I don't think that that describes most sectors in most countries at most.

Speaker 2 And yeah.

Speaker 1 That's so interesting.

Speaker 1 I think there's an interesting thread here and how it relates to describe climate in that you're, I don't know, like subsidizing these learning curves that these East Asian countries did for their own internal companies.

Speaker 1 I mean, you haven't picked out like a specific company that's going to necessarily be the the Kia of

Speaker 1 carbon sequestration, but yeah, how do you think about this?

Speaker 2 Well, maybe a way to unify

Speaker 2 the two points, and I'll speak about Stripe time in a second, is that I think, I guess

Speaker 2 it's Say's law about demand creating supply. And in as much as Stripe aggregates more and more global demand, I guess part of the, I don't know,

Speaker 2 it seems too self-aggrandizing to call it the theory of Stripe, but some vague hunch in Stripe is that

Speaker 2 that aggregation of of demand can have important expansionary effects with respect to the ensuing supply.

Speaker 2 And yes, Stripe Climate is some version of this hypothesis applied on a much smaller scale than Stripe itself, but still real and, well, we'll see, maybe important.

Speaker 2 And the basic idea, just for folks who aren't familiar, which I assume is most of your audience.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 we observed in 2018, I guess, that everyone seems to agree that carbon removal will be very important.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 even if we decarbonize the economy on the kind of time scale that optimistic people,

Speaker 2 on the most optimistic timeframes, there'll still be an accumulated stock of carbon that is a problem.

Speaker 2 It sounded pretty weird.

Speaker 2 There were virtually no carbon removal companies in the world in 2018. Maybe there were two or three or something.
No companies had ever purchased from a carbon removal company.

Speaker 2 These were really sort of science projects. And so we thought, well,

Speaker 2 somebody's got to start.

Speaker 2 And it might be valuable to not only transfer some dollars, but to kind of confer some credibility on this sector not that stripe is the world's most credible company but you know it's better than nothing uh and so we started contracting with some of these carbon removal companies um that went pretty well and and and they seemed kind of appreciative of it and so we we thought somewhat more about this and we uh then in 2021 uh formed frontier which is an amc an advanced market commitment so inspired by um

Speaker 2 the first AMC, which was a

Speaker 2 pre-commitment to purchase vaccines for developing world countries for diseases that, I mean, well,

Speaker 2 either were kind of market failures where pharma companies hadn't pursued the vaccines or were just like the profits were insufficient to pay for the program. So we had to do this for carbon removal.

Speaker 2 We raised a billion dollars. Stripe was

Speaker 2 the first investor. We're not actually investing, we're just buying.
So the first company to commit.

Speaker 2 But then we're joined by Shopify and Alphabet and Meta and JP Morgan and a bunch of other companies.

Speaker 2 And now

Speaker 2 there's like a fairly active sector of carbon removal companies.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 Frontier has contracted with

Speaker 2 between 40 and 50 companies,

Speaker 2 the overwhelming majority of which didn't exist when we started out with this. Actually, we ran an anonymous survey back

Speaker 2 the end of last year, and we asked them to what degree

Speaker 2 was the existence of Frontier

Speaker 2 somewhat causal in their starting the company in the first place. And again, there's an anonymous survey, and I think it was

Speaker 2 74% of the companies said that Frontier played a causal role in their starting the company. So,

Speaker 2 yeah,

Speaker 2 I think these inducement effects can be pretty significant.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's huge. Well, what are other ideas you've come across where an AMC would be an effective instrument of moving forward the tech?

Speaker 2 That's a good question. We've actually been having some of that discussion internally.

Speaker 2 It's not that we plan on doing it ourselves necessarily, but just wondering,

Speaker 2 are there people we should share our technology with? Not that it's even technology per se, but share our experience with or something and try to help along.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 I think there's still a lot of stuff

Speaker 2 in the biomedical field.

Speaker 2 And I mean, patents are

Speaker 2 patents are pretty useful insofar as they go, but

Speaker 2 there's a lot of...

Speaker 2 There's a lot of innovation that seems like it would be

Speaker 2 socially beneficial that patents don't provide a way to cover the cost of.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 there was some excitement a few years ago about

Speaker 2 mannose, which it's a sugar.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there was one paper that, or maybe a few papers, I can't remember, that suggests that maybe tumors will selectively take up mannose rather than glucose, but they can't actually metabolize it properly, and so they just die.

Speaker 2 And so maybe this could be an effective

Speaker 2 encode treatment of some sort.

Speaker 2 But Manos is like

Speaker 2 it's a generic sugar. It's been understood for,

Speaker 2 I guess, more than a century. And you couldn't patent it, importantly.

Speaker 2 And so it's not clear who has the incentive to even fund the work to test whether or not this would actually work in practice.

Speaker 2 And this is not an endorsement of MANOS, but just there are things of this shape where there's something where you can clearly see, wow, that might be very beneficial, but it's not totally clear how the kind of economic structure of the market can make it possible.

Speaker 2 So I think there are still a lot of those across the biomedical landscape. I mean, look, there are still a lot of vaccines that could in principle exist that don't.
I mean, Lyme disease,

Speaker 2 there's one vaccine that was withdrawn from the market over some safety concerns that I think were misplaced, but it's still no vaccine.

Speaker 1 But it's not even that well understood, right? Like people have chronic Lyme disease. We don't know if it's legit or not.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 but it's it's a good question i mean i look maybe some of your listeners will know uh yeah will have ideas for for fields where you know we we we sorely need an amc

Speaker 1 yeah um uh i want to go back to stripe for a second so uh you're famously um uh you know appreciative of craft and beauty but also you appreciate the power of scale and growth is there a type of craft

Speaker 1 oh interesting okay yeah yep yep but is there a type of craft uh that is just not amenable to speed growth scale if you think like a a Japanese chef, he's like learning to cook rice for a decade and then he can move on into the sushi or something.

Speaker 1 Is that just not competitive in the modern world?

Speaker 2 Craft,

Speaker 2 scale, and

Speaker 2 speed, I don't know they're strictly necessarily intention in every case, but they're definitely frequently intention. So just yes, I think is kind of one short answer to that.
At the same time,

Speaker 2 a lot of the most successful companies

Speaker 2 are those that I think are distinguished by the extent to which they

Speaker 2 exhibit

Speaker 2 appreciation for and

Speaker 2 skill in realizing craft and beauty. And so LVMH is one of the largest companies in the world and that's literally their business.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think Tesla is pretty good at this. I mean, they're good at many things, but including this.

Speaker 2 Obviously, there's Apple.

Speaker 2 I mean, TSMC is a kind of, you know,

Speaker 2 it's not the Japanese sushi chef you mentioned, but it's the TSMC chip sushi chef

Speaker 2 in Taiwan.

Speaker 2 And so much, again, tacit knowledge and difficult

Speaker 2 to transfer skills.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I think it might be the case that

Speaker 2 that craft and the pursuit of it is as important as it's ever been.

Speaker 2 And certainly

Speaker 2 as Stripe has gotten larger, I think we ourselves have come to greater conviction in this, where

Speaker 2 I think part of what's interesting about these aesthetic qualities is they're generally speaking unquantifiable. I don't know if they're intrinsically unquantifiable.

Speaker 2 Like maybe you could train a model to do so or something, but today they're broadly speaking unquantifiable, and yet they are actually

Speaker 2 they influence people in significant ways.

Speaker 2 People very demonstrably care about aesthetics and they care about, if they're a company, they care about the aesthetic characteristics of the products that they produce, just like on an intuitive level, people know that that's true.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 yeah, it's difficult to manage that

Speaker 2 at an organizational level where there isn't a P ⁇ L associated with it. And if you're screwing it up, you don't see a neat time series decline.
But over the 14 years of Stripe,

Speaker 2 we have, I guess, through a kind of not exactly trial and error, but just by studying cases where things worked well at Stripe and cases where things worked less well and what customers responded well to and so on, it really seems clear to us that even in a domain like ours where we are selling primarily to businesses, that this is something that's truly important.

Speaker 2 And also that

Speaker 2 in as much as, getting back to what we were discussing previously, you want,

Speaker 2 in as much as

Speaker 2 the sociology and the kind of cultural explanations of defensibility are real, the best people consider themselves craftspeople in their domain, and they really, above almost all else, want to work with the best other people.

Speaker 2 And so I think

Speaker 2 it may almost be true that even if, from a customer-facing standpoint, craft was not valued by the market, you actually might still want to build an organization that indexes very heavily on this because you just want the best people for other reasons.

Speaker 2 Now, as it happens, I think customers do infect values, and I think the evidence is broadly consistent with that.

Speaker 2 But yeah,

Speaker 2 I think it's very hard to assemble groups of the best people if you don't take the practice of the work super seriously.

Speaker 1 What kind of beauty or craft or simplicity is more important? Interface or implementation?

Speaker 1 There's famously that essay that Unix is successful because the implementation is simple and not the interface.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I guess the interface is kind of simple,

Speaker 2 but but

Speaker 2 there's a lot of asterisks and caveats and edge cases that I guess Unix doesn't handle for you.

Speaker 1 But Stripe does, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, look, presumably it depends what you're building, right?

Speaker 2 For TikTok, it's probably more important that their interface is simple, and even if their implementation is a mess, that's probably okay. Nothing it is, I have no idea.

Speaker 2 Whereas for Stripe,

Speaker 2 people are on some level purchasing our architecture or purchasing their ability to do certain things and some set of things rather than some different set of things

Speaker 2 because of what our architecture makes easy and

Speaker 2 makes possible. Now, I don't think, I mean, if by interface you mean the visual GUI interface,

Speaker 2 then maybe we can draw some separation there. But I guess we don't really draw that distinction.
We think of the interface to Stripe as being the architecture.

Speaker 2 We're selling,

Speaker 2 no one else seems to agree with me, but I often think of Stripe

Speaker 2 as similar to Mathematica, where we're selling

Speaker 2 a self-contained universe to model whatever it is

Speaker 2 is of interest to you and that you care about. And we're providing some primitives and some,

Speaker 2 yes, kind of interfaces and tools and so forth to enable your modeling. But fundamentally, we're helping you do something in your own terms.

Speaker 2 And in that sense, I don't think the architecture and the interface are necessarily that separable.

Speaker 1 That's really an interesting analogy.

Speaker 1 Although, I mean, if you think of Mathematica,

Speaker 1 the entry that that's giving you to is just like the platonic objects of math.

Speaker 1 Whereas for you guys, it's like the entries to visa error codes, right?

Speaker 1 The end object is not the

Speaker 1 platonic.

Speaker 2 That's true, though. In both cases,

Speaker 2 yes.

Speaker 2 So the analogy falls down in a few respects.

Speaker 2 But look, I mean, the idea of a transaction is pretty fundamental and is roughly as old as the quadratic equation or something. I guess the transaction is older.

Speaker 2 And Mathematica, especially today, excuse me.

Speaker 2 Today, now supports all kinds of, I mean, to a very impressive extent, supports all kinds of crazy, arcane stuff.

Speaker 2 Like if you go through the more obscure packages in Mathematica, you can definitely find things that are, I think, much less broadly employed and understood, even than Visa error codes or something.

Speaker 2 But yes, look, these are are not the same. It's more to say I find it to be an interesting source of intuition.
And I think what Wolfram has done with Mathematica is pretty amazing.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Another way in which I'm curious how you think about this, one way in which Mathematica maybe differs is if they had to make a change to Mathematica, like big deal, somebody has to learn new syntax.

Speaker 1 If you make a change, you know, it's like billions of dollars of

Speaker 1 transactions don't happen.

Speaker 1 How does that change the way you think about the initial architecture and just the stakes?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a good question.

Speaker 2 Well, actually,

Speaker 2 first a point on just beauty with respect to architecture, then I'll answer that one. So

Speaker 2 just as a side note, I guess, I think it's interesting that API design in general doesn't get more study as a discipline and as a practice.

Speaker 2 I think it plays a significant role in the fate of platforms,

Speaker 2 or can. I'm not saying it's always the determinative thing.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 if you get it right,

Speaker 2 there can be compounding positive benefits and the converse. And

Speaker 2 I think it's really striking that with

Speaker 2 mobile app development, which was one of the most dynamic and fast-moving ecosystems of the past 10 or 15 years, that so many of the objects and the classes,

Speaker 2 say in iOS development, are prefixed with NS,

Speaker 2 less so now with Swift, but for much of the iPhone's history.

Speaker 2 And the NS, of course, refers to NextStep back from Next in the 90s. But when you get API design and architecture right, it can be so enduring over literally multiple decades.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 even in the face of what are otherwise kind of frenzied evolutions in everything around it. And Unix, of course, is kind of another example of this where,

Speaker 2 yes, Unix has tons of shortcomings, but the architecture has basically worked for now more than I guess around half a century.

Speaker 2 And so we talk, we're also trying to impress upon people at Stripe the importance of multi-decadal abstractions. And

Speaker 2 I think people sometimes

Speaker 2 respond to that thinking that that's some insanely lofty, kind of implausibly ambitious

Speaker 2 hyperbola. But no, I think that's actually just what happens

Speaker 2 when you get this stuff right.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 if in fact you get it right, you can just reap these,

Speaker 2 or really the people building on your platform can reap these incredible benefits for a very long time.

Speaker 2 To the Mathematica point,

Speaker 2 they, I know, take backwards compatibility really seriously,

Speaker 2 where you can run

Speaker 2 programs written 20 years ago, unchanged, in today's Mathematica. That really raises the stakes in API design for sort of obvious reasons.

Speaker 2 And we have that same problem ourselves, where when we think about introducing something new, it's not just does this exigently address the particular need that's motivating it today, but do we think we can stand behind this

Speaker 2 in 2044?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 how do we think the world might evolve around us such that it all remains coherent? And we certainly don't always get that right, but that's on some of what we're trying to do.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, is VZenet an example of this?

Speaker 1 And one might even say that one of the downsides of being able to use an implementation for many decades in the future is even if it's self-sustainable and you have this ecosystem and equilibrium set around it,

Speaker 1 if you

Speaker 1 can't modify it just because of people's look at incentives, you get stuck in this equilibrium, that's worse than it could be otherwise.

Speaker 2 I think the card networks generally, Visa and MasterCard, are

Speaker 2 pretty good equilibrium.

Speaker 2 It's easy to judge today with the world as it exists in 2024, but I think you have to look at the world as it was when they started out and the particular problems that they're solving.

Speaker 2 And I think when you compare the

Speaker 2 financial landscape in the US or in the Western world to those in other places, it's certainly not clear to me that the US has

Speaker 2 gotten

Speaker 2 a bad hand, so to speak, or is somehow stuck in any meaningful way.

Speaker 2 The card networks do a couple of things.

Speaker 2 Originally,

Speaker 2 they're designed to replace store credit and to and I mean for the actual, I mean, it was a credit card originally, not a debit card, right?

Speaker 2 And that was important. And the availability of structured consumer credit, I think, is actually a pretty big deal and pretty beneficial, and especially beneficial typically for lower income people.

Speaker 2 And then with the advent, I guess, of jet travel and mass market

Speaker 2 tourism and so forth, then

Speaker 2 they helped supplant travelers' checks and

Speaker 2 various worst alternatives like carrying cash around in your little bag.

Speaker 2 And then with the internet, they were substantially involved in enabling online transactions.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think that the fact that they got the architecture so right that so much of this, so many of these

Speaker 2 different use cases were able to be addressed by their core design is just really impressive. And the guy who designed all this, D-Hawk, I think is,

Speaker 2 I mean, he was just, he was a remarkable person. And even people complain about interchange.
And I mean, lest I sound like a defender of

Speaker 2 the card ecosystem, I mean, like Stripe is on the, well, it depends, you could look at multiple ways, but like many people will consider Stripe to be on the wrong side of the interchange cost equation in the sense that

Speaker 2 we're giving away the interchange revenue to other companies. And so I don't think I'm structurally biased in favor of interchange.

Speaker 2 And yet, I will say, I think it's pretty interesting what interchange made possible, where

Speaker 2 it's a distribution incentive fee where you're paying other entities to go and do the work of recruiting these customers and convincing them to get a card and

Speaker 2 getting them to maintain the card and to pay it off at the end of the month and all this stuff. So, you're paying for that, just the pure distribution.

Speaker 2 There's a person at the end of the flight telling you, hey, sign up for the United credit card, whatever. But

Speaker 2 that's what internet is paying for. That guy annoys me.

Speaker 2 We'll get to the counterfactuals in a second.

Speaker 2 So, there's that. There's paying for the actual credit issuance itself.
itself, and then there's the customer support and all the ancillary things around the dispute handling and so forth.

Speaker 2 And then I think it is interesting to look at the cases where for whatever contingent reason

Speaker 2 the card networks didn't arise. So Germany is one of the classic ones.

Speaker 2 And dealing with the, I mean, from our vantage point at least, dealing with the online economy in Germany as compared to the US is so much worse.

Speaker 2 Like if Strike could push a button and have really broadly adopted cards in Germany ally the US, we would push the hell out of that button, right?

Speaker 2 You can look at China, which on the one hand

Speaker 2 does have

Speaker 2 Alipay and WePay or WeChat payments are really ubiquitous. And so in that sense, they're very digitally enabled from a transactional standpoint.

Speaker 2 But those products don't tend to be as sophisticated with consumer credit. And so yes,

Speaker 2 the transaction fees for transferring money that you in fact already have are, you know, that's super cheap.

Speaker 2 But I think you need to look at it on kind of a fully loaded basis where, okay, but what about the cost of actually getting the credit to make the purchase in the first place, you know, as a credit card would enable?

Speaker 2 And I think as you look at these other counterfactuals in other places,

Speaker 2 one feels a kind of gratitude for what it is that DHOC and

Speaker 2 Visa and MasterCard and the card networks made possible. And look, I'm not saying they're perfect or anything, but I think that

Speaker 2 I'm most interested in critiques.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying, again, that one can't make them, but just I'm most interested in critiques from people who've really studied the ecosystems of other countries because I think it's easy to

Speaker 2 underestimate

Speaker 2 what we got in their invention.

Speaker 1 Yeah, maybe there's a sort of testers and disfense kind of thing here going on here. If you had to design payments from first principles now,

Speaker 1 does it make sense that

Speaker 1 all these things you mentioned, taking on credit risk, the chance of fraud, dispute adjudication, should that cost like 2%, 3% of each transaction that happens in the economy?

Speaker 1 What would payments look like if you had to design that from first principles?

Speaker 2 Well, we're seeing a live version of this experiment play out

Speaker 2 for the first time in many years in a number of countries today where central banks are becoming more active in designing national payment schemes.

Speaker 2 And so PICS in Brazil launched in late 2020, I think.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 it's, I mean, I'm sure you've heard of UPI, the central bank.

Speaker 2 UPI was kind of the instigator here, where it's the central bank payment system in India. And it was tied up with Adha and their national identity system and so on.

Speaker 2 But that inspired a lot of central bankers in other countries to go and build their own UPIs. And so, yeah, PICS in Brazil launched in 2020.

Speaker 2 And now a significant majority of all Brazilian adults are like weakly active users of PICS. Again, even though it launched in 2020, so it just had this incredibly rapid adoption curve.

Speaker 2 You have Swiss in Sweden, you've, you know, there's, I mean, across East Asia, Japan, Thailand, Switzerland, you know, central bank after central bank are deciding, hey, you know, we should have our version of this.

Speaker 2 And so this is a kind of reinvention of the payment system from scratch.

Speaker 2 For kind of hard to understand reasons, yeah, things typically seem like once you layer in the customer support and the consumer protection and the fraud prevention and the anti-money laundering controls and the credit, you know, things just for some weird reason seemed asymptote at around 2% or 3%.

Speaker 2 It's important to also note that a lot of the 2% or 3%,

Speaker 2 beyond just covering the costs, much of the surplus ends up

Speaker 2 getting remitted to consumers in the form of rewards, not in every country, but in many countries.

Speaker 2 And if you look at

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 public reports from various banks in the US,

Speaker 2 their interchange revenue where they're getting these delicious fees on every transaction, as you put it, like a lot of that is going straight back out the door to the consumers themselves and so on so anyway it's not clear how exactly one should think about the economics like if it's going back to the consumer should you include that as a transaction tax or is it just like a weird sort of uh a weird circular relationship um i have not seen any evidence to suggest that the uh that the two percent or thereabouts is massively inefficient uh in the in the scheme of things.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying it's the optimal level. Maybe 1% would be better, but within some range of 1% to 3%,

Speaker 2 it's probably reasonable.

Speaker 2 As we think about some of these,

Speaker 2 I don't know,

Speaker 2 these advalorum fees and figures,

Speaker 2 I think the place where there's

Speaker 2 even more change at the moment that we find ourselves thinking more about is actually the changing structure of global tax,

Speaker 2 where

Speaker 2 the idea of

Speaker 2 there's been a reasonable amount of innovation, I guess, in the tax domain over the last century where

Speaker 2 income taxes got pretty high, and then we value-added taxes and so on. The new thing,

Speaker 2 at least

Speaker 2 in the online context,

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 2 jurisdictions remitting

Speaker 2 or excuse me, or imposing sales taxes on businesses that don't have any kind of locus in the jurisdiction in question. So

Speaker 2 you're a podcaster in the Bay Area, and

Speaker 2 the Dwarkash merch store

Speaker 2 will have to pay

Speaker 2 the town of Uppsala in Sweden will have

Speaker 2 a special tax on baseball caps.

Speaker 2 And you will need to know about that particular tax on baseball caps. And any baseball caps that you are selling to the Uppsalans, you'll have to collect that amount from the buyer,

Speaker 2 report to Uppsala,

Speaker 2 and then eventually figure out how you're going to get that money to Uppsala. And obviously, it's this combinatoric problem of buyer jurisdictions and

Speaker 2 product types and then all the different jurisdictions that you have to remit the money to.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 those amounts,

Speaker 2 we're not talking

Speaker 2 three basis points.

Speaker 2 The taxes in question are often 5% or 10% or something. So it's not trivial.

Speaker 2 And so just as I think about

Speaker 2 the funds flows on the internet and like how all that's evolving and unfolding, I think changes in tax law are actually a much bigger deal than anything about the transactional economics. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 By the way, it's not the Warcash podcast, it's Lunar Society Podcast LLC, registered on Stripe Atlas.

Speaker 2 Is there any

Speaker 1 merchandise I sell in the future?

Speaker 2 And Stripe will take care of that. Yes.

Speaker 2 Does every Stripe complaints?

Speaker 1 No, it's great. It's been super useful, honestly.
It would have been a much bit more difficult to get business operations going.

Speaker 2 Do you think, sorry, I know you're supposed to be interrupting me.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 did Stripe play any, like even on the margins, counterfactual role in you charging for anything? Because this is the thing we're always interested in.

Speaker 2 Like, when we talk about sort of growing the GDP of the internet, it's not like get the existing GDP onto our rails.

Speaker 2 It's sort of, you know, where on the margin can we cause there to be economic activity that isn't already occurring?

Speaker 2 So, yeah, like you, I, I, you did, in fact, uh, start the start the podcast, you know, before

Speaker 2 incorporating, but, you know, were we

Speaker 2 causal in any fashion in like the merch

Speaker 2 or anything of that nature?

Speaker 1 Um, I, I, I, like, to the extent that, like, Substack would not be like a convenient place to get payments from, um, to begin with.

Speaker 1 That's like definitely everything.

Speaker 2 And also, you know, if I do you wouldn't charge for the newsletter if Substack hadn't made it super easy, yeah.

Speaker 1 And also, if I do like an ad or something, it's just like I wouldn't even know how to begin with getting the money if I didn't already have an LLC through Stripe that

Speaker 1 with an associated banking account that I can get the money through. So, yeah, probably counterfactually responsible for

Speaker 1 a lot of the monetization.

Speaker 2 That's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 So, what are some unexpected complements to payment processing you see in the future? So, you know, all this stuff, Atlas, identity, fraud, detection,

Speaker 1 you know, in retrospect, it might not have been obvious back then that was a good complement. Now it does seem that way.
What will be like this in five, ten years?

Speaker 2 Honestly, our problem ends up being that

Speaker 2 too many things,

Speaker 2 more things that we can possibly pursue look like compliments, right? In that

Speaker 2 every business, almost by definition, has revenue. And so we obviously want to help them

Speaker 2 generate and accept and manage and orchestrate everything pertaining to that revenue. But

Speaker 2 once you're in that flow and you kind of just go through the steps of running a business,

Speaker 2 a lot else looks relevant and somehow connects quite directly. You know,

Speaker 2 we're not

Speaker 2 for the vat, I mean, when Stripe started out, Stripe seemed, like it definitely wasn't cool.

Speaker 2 It was sort of the opposite for just sort of a couple of us and we thought that we could make this

Speaker 2 superior payments API.

Speaker 2 And for the vast majority of its history, Stripe has, I think, attracted people who are drawn to

Speaker 2 unglamorous infrastructure challenges and problems. And

Speaker 2 we're not a company that specializes in making beautiful cars.

Speaker 2 We make roads.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I bring all of that up

Speaker 2 because I think it's relevant to this kind of complement question where

Speaker 2 in our discussions internally, a lot of it and by the significant majority of it is still about, okay, where are there actual practical shortcomings and limitations in even our core bread and butter?

Speaker 2 And that's not, I mean, payment processing might be a slightly too limited term to use for it.

Speaker 2 Maybe it's more about just global programmable money orchestration, which, yes, is consumer to business payments of the sort that we were just discussing in, say, the context of your sub stack, but it's also business to business payments.

Speaker 2 It's also payments where there's credit or lending involved. It's also how you hold money.
It's how you convert money between different currencies.

Speaker 2 It's how you represent money that's held by different legal entities.

Speaker 2 And how we make it possible for even individuals or small businesses to act as kind of micro-multinationals and all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 But those problems that we just skimmed over are all, even though they all directly pertain to the movement of money, they're not small.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 if we could just solve those really, really effectively,

Speaker 2 then

Speaker 2 Stripe will be a very

Speaker 2 consequential organization and I think force in the world.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think the counterfactual importance of building some of this stuff as we go to newer markets that are on a relative basis more poorly served is actually increasing rather than shrinking.

Speaker 2 Like in the US, there were payments companies before Stripe, and maybe if Stripe had never done its thing, eventually you'd have found some way to monetize a newsletter or something like that. But

Speaker 2 know,

Speaker 2 if you're in Albania, you know, it's,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 the set of options available to you is far more restricted. And so I think that the marginal impact

Speaker 2 as we expand

Speaker 2 globally increases quite a bit.

Speaker 2 So anyway, that's all to say that even though we are interested in and do today pursue some of these direct adjacencies, I think that the core problem of global sort of money orchestration

Speaker 2 remains a really just big and unsolved problem.

Speaker 1 Does that look like being a better interface for all these complexities and glossing them over under the seven lines of code? Or does that look like actually replacing the Rails and the infrastructure

Speaker 1 to make all this more efficient and effective?

Speaker 2 The former, the former. It's just not that useful to build financial ecosystems that are self-contained, right? A financial island

Speaker 2 is not that helpful. It's much more valuable to build, I don't know, a financial,

Speaker 2 this is mixing metaphors, but

Speaker 2 a financial

Speaker 2 air network or something. But I think

Speaker 2 we would much prefer that Stripe plugged into every existing system and rail and

Speaker 2 domestic organization rather than that we tried to come along and supplant them. And this has been Stripe's strategy very deliberately from the beginning, where

Speaker 2 there were lots of companies when Stripe started out that were trying to do their own thing and go their own way, whereas our belief was you get these, I mean, it's classic, I guess, Metcalf Law stuff of, you know, by enhancing the capabilities of an existing ecosystem,

Speaker 2 you create quite a bit more value.

Speaker 1 Okay, let's go back to Stripe.

Speaker 1 Is Stripe a writing culture for the benefit of the writer or the reader?

Speaker 2 It can be both.

Speaker 2 But which one's the more so?

Speaker 2 I think there are actually really considerable benefits on both sides.

Speaker 2 Because for the reader,

Speaker 2 it's not just that it's maybe more efficient to communicate stuff through text, though in many cases it is, but also there's like this intertemporal benefit where future readers can try to understand the

Speaker 2 through line and the thought process that led us to this point.

Speaker 2 And I think that's very considerable. But it's also true that I think the I mean,

Speaker 2 I write things and lots of people write things in order to organize one's own thoughts. And if that kind of ability was taken away from me, I think I'd be meaningfully less effective.
So,

Speaker 2 how exactly those balance out is hard to say.

Speaker 2 Maybe the

Speaker 2 answer.

Speaker 2 Like, literate cultures are just a different thing. And I don't mean literate in some kind of faux intellectual way.
I just mean

Speaker 2 textual cultures

Speaker 2 is a better term here.

Speaker 2 Where

Speaker 2 Bruno Latour spoke about how

Speaker 2 he thinks part of how the

Speaker 2 printing revolution,

Speaker 2 like Gutenberg's,

Speaker 2 caused the scientific revolution was by making knowledge more rigid, where before, if some observation didn't match some claim, you can always kind of shrug and be like, well, I guess the person who transcribed that thing just made a mistake or whatever.

Speaker 2 And so by making things more rigid, it's easier to break them.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 then you can notice discrepancies between, I guess, the theory or the claim or whatever and the actual reality.

Speaker 2 And I think there's some version of that organizationally where, I mean, I'm not drawing like that precise parallel, but there are analogous dynamics where the nature of oral cultures and textual cultures are just quite different.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the kinds of collaboration that are possible and the kinds of consistency that can be achieved, like it is just fundamentally different. And

Speaker 2 is the

Speaker 2 front or rear wheel of the bicycle more valuable? I guess theoretically, you can have unicycle, but as a practical matter, you do just need both.

Speaker 1 I know I said no more AI questions, but on this particular point, it actually seems very legitimate to me that you might expect firms that have a lot of writing to be

Speaker 1 the first to experience the productivity gains of AI because there's all this context that the model doesn't have available readily. I don't know if that's something you anticipate.

Speaker 2 I think that's probably true. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't know. And if the model is really good, maybe it should be able to pick stuff up quickly.
But

Speaker 2 I think most organizations are not recording all of their meetings

Speaker 2 for a variety of reasons. And if they're not, then yeah, there is this question of what is the corpus? How do you get up to speed? So, yeah, my guess is that'll be true.

Speaker 1 Tell me about the internal LLM you built.

Speaker 2 Oh, it's we didn't build an internal LLM.

Speaker 2 We built an internal LLM tool for making it very easy for people to integrate LLMs into

Speaker 2 production services,

Speaker 2 but also into just into their regular workflows as humans.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 the ability to work directly, I guess, with the LLM as a standard chat agent, as lots of people have built.

Speaker 2 But then also to integrate that with some of our tools for querying and accessing data,

Speaker 2 or maybe most interestingly, with sharing prompts across

Speaker 2 different people.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 somebody might discover, I mean, one of my favorite examples actually is somebody put together a prompt for optimizing SQL queries.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it doesn't always work,

Speaker 2 but sometimes it does. And it's very cheap to ask us.
Got any ideas for optimizing the SQL query?

Speaker 2 And sometimes it'll come up with some good stuff.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so, yeah, the collaborative abilities there

Speaker 2 have proven surprisingly kind of high return. And then having just, I mean, lots of organizations have this.
We're not claiming that it's very novel or anything, but

Speaker 2 having kind of a central bus

Speaker 2 through which to route all access to these LLMs such that we can experiment with different models and have some degree of

Speaker 2 observability into the respective performance trends

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 usage of different cases and so forth.

Speaker 2 We have found building a fairly significant amount of production infrastructure around LLMs to be valuable.

Speaker 2 And now, given the proliferation of LLMs themselves with all of the obvious contenders, this is proving quite valuable because we're able to try to figure out for different use cases which models, self-hosted models, who knows,

Speaker 2 are most effective. And

Speaker 2 I don't know what the total number of invocations is, but

Speaker 2 I think we're making millions of invocations

Speaker 2 per day now. Like there are there are just dozens of dozens of actual production use cases across Stripe and in all sorts of really

Speaker 2 I mean the financial services ecosystem is in some way

Speaker 2 a giant analog to digital exercise because like humans are analog

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 intentions

Speaker 2 and identities and all these things have

Speaker 2 you know, there's always some degree of kind of uncertainty around them and some noise.

Speaker 2 But then transactions are digital, right?

Speaker 2 And we often find in these analog to digital conversions that LLMs can be a surprisingly interesting augmenting tool.

Speaker 1 And actually on that point about the,

Speaker 1 I don't know, the

Speaker 1 flexibility and the

Speaker 1 edge cases in the way humans interact with these systems.

Speaker 1 I mean, in some sense, Stripe is like a really high-stakes bug bounty program, right?

Speaker 1 If somebody hacks it,

Speaker 1 not only

Speaker 1 your financial services, obviously, like money's in play, but

Speaker 1 if there's reliability issues, not just because of a hack, but because you deployed the wrong way, a significant percentage of world GDP would grind to a halt, at least while it's down.

Speaker 1 How do you deal with that kind of responsibility? How do you keep the uptime and keep the reliability while deploying fast?

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is one of the things

Speaker 2 we've spent the most time on. And I mean, back to this point about wanting to be the place with the best people.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the value of focusing on craft so that you can have the best people.

Speaker 2 In the context of software development, one of the things that developers really hate is

Speaker 2 well, actually two things that developers hate.

Speaker 2 Slow development cycles and it'll ship in the next release in a month and

Speaker 2 that kind of thinking. Developers also hate being paged at 2 a.m.
for incidents.

Speaker 2 And so, yeah, given the criticality of

Speaker 2 the businesses that we serve,

Speaker 2 which

Speaker 2 is, in rough terms, 1%

Speaker 2 of the global economy,

Speaker 2 it's not totally clear how to measure this because

Speaker 2 we're not measuring like GP is defined as final goods, and Stripe is not only selling final goods. And so in theory, there could be a bit of double counting.
But Stripe is mostly selling final goods.

Speaker 2 Like we're not used for,

Speaker 2 by and large,

Speaker 2 for

Speaker 2 giant supply chain shipments.

Speaker 2 So I think maybe there's a mismeasurement of 10 or 20% or something. But

Speaker 2 long story short, I think it works out to about 1% of global GDP. It's about a trillion dollars a year.

Speaker 2 As you say, that then makes us really terrified of outages. And so we work so hard to enable fast iteration and development cycles without having edges.
And just to kind of put some numbers on it,

Speaker 2 we deploy production services that are in kind of the core charge flow around a thousand times a day.

Speaker 2 Like most of these services are automatically deployed. So when anybody makes any production ready change, it just like...

Speaker 2 goes into production and it's kind of meticulously and and carefully orchestrated so that it you know first is just run on some small sliver of traffic and then you know incrementally more traffic until it's everything.

Speaker 2 So about 1,000 deploys per day

Speaker 2 at roughly or somewhat in excess of 5.5 nines, like 99.9995% reliability, which works out to about

Speaker 2 100 and

Speaker 2 yeah, two and a half minutes of unavailability per year. It's not that we have obviously two and a half contiguous minutes of unavailability, but that's what it kind of

Speaker 2 approximates,

Speaker 2 even though it tends to happen as kind of background radiation throughout the year.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 getting to that point, yeah, just takes a huge amount of investment in,

Speaker 2 and then there's security properties that are less readily measured, but analogous to

Speaker 2 those figures.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I guess Silicon Valley doesn't tend to,

Speaker 2 I'm perhaps being now unfair and kind of attributing things to Silicon Valley, but maybe a lot of the tech industry doesn't place a lot of value on process and operational excellence.

Speaker 2 You know, we kind of culturally value the spontaneous and the creative and the iconoplastic and the

Speaker 2 path-breaking, but building mechanisms that can enable really reliable

Speaker 2 enable the very reliable provision of important services at scale and

Speaker 2 removing the

Speaker 2 sources of variability that can really cause a bad day for a very large number of people. I don't think they get quite as much cultural credit.

Speaker 2 But yeah, we have found that we've

Speaker 2 adopted all sorts of,

Speaker 2 for example, we found that

Speaker 2 there's kind of a core feedback loop around,

Speaker 2 none of this sounds like rocket science, but defining what it is that we care about and then like building automated measuring systems to obviously measure to what degree it's actually happening in practice.

Speaker 2 And then to to sort of try to figure out, well, in the cases where we're not living up to that, like what is the reason?

Speaker 2 And then to

Speaker 2 actually intervene and to improve the system so that that's not happening.

Speaker 2 And then importantly, to build kind of secondary controls that detect instances of deviation long before they actually cause like a production problem or anything, but just

Speaker 2 where we understand the behavior of the system in sufficient detail that we can instrument it in some upstream way.

Speaker 2 Most of what I said there, I think, was well understood by production engineers in 1930.

Speaker 2 So again, I'm not claiming that it's any kind of radical breakthrough, but we have found that the adoption of these practices in really

Speaker 2 kind of tenacious multi-year form is

Speaker 2 just yields really high returns.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there may be other organizations that

Speaker 2 both ship at that rate and kind of maintain that sort of developer velocity

Speaker 2 at this kind of combination of scale and reliability and security. But I don't think there are that many.
And I think it's a real testament to

Speaker 2 the remarkable folks at Stripe who made it happen.

Speaker 1 Last point, but actually the fact that you have this huge internal tooling and testing is like once you get the AI engineers, they can just push the commits and you have the infrastructure set up that it can be readily evaluated.

Speaker 2 Across the the board, I think so much comes back to

Speaker 2 what has to be true

Speaker 2 for us actually to be able to build and to kind of take seriously this goal of building

Speaker 2 the best software.

Speaker 2 And it's easy to say that as some lofty, vague, hand-wavy

Speaker 2 aspirational statement, but if you sort of take that seriously as a goal,

Speaker 2 and if you think about, well, what would you have to measure if you were actually going to

Speaker 2 pursue it in earnest?

Speaker 2 And what are the characteristics of organizations that do produce it? I mean, you get down to, well, customers have to really like your stuff. And so, okay, well,

Speaker 2 how can we measure that? And how can we systematize the process of making sure that there aren't regressions there?

Speaker 2 And so we have this concept of experience journeys, which are sort of pathways through Stripe that we really care are always implemented at a really...

Speaker 2 high quality level. And it has to be true that developers can iterate very quickly.
And we just kind of spoke about how to make that happen, and and.

Speaker 2 And so I feel like, I mean, maybe a kind of a theme through everything we've talked about is

Speaker 2 actually taking the goal seriously. And I feel like a lot of what we do at Stripe is, again, I disclaim any

Speaker 2 sort of genius in it. I think it's just the very earnest, repeated, serious, and long-term application of taking the goal seriously.

Speaker 1 A few more Stripe questions.

Speaker 1 1% of global GP is it's such a staggering number.

Speaker 1 When you think about where further growth for Stripe comes from, does it come from the internet economy expanding, or does it come from Stripe becoming a larger share of the internet economy?

Speaker 1 And to the extent that Stripe is growing faster than the Internet, if we consider that the beta in your case, where is that alpha coming from?

Speaker 2 That's a good question.

Speaker 2 Well, the customers that Stripe serves

Speaker 2 are outgrowing outgrowing

Speaker 2 the internet economy as a whole, like

Speaker 2 in aggregate.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 at some point, those have to converge for kind of obvious mathematical reasons. But we're 14 years in and they haven't converged yet.
So I think there's a lot of headroom there.

Speaker 2 And say Stripe is hunting around a trillion dollars a year. When Stripe started out, the global economy was 60 to 70 trillion-ish.
The global economy is now around 100 trillion.

Speaker 2 And so we still have quite a bit of headroom before

Speaker 2 the amount of activity that is coming out to Stripe is really butting up against the ceiling of global economic growth. And of course, it's not like there's no ceiling on global economic growth.

Speaker 2 And for all sorts of reasons,

Speaker 2 it could be vastly higher than it is. And I don't even mean new technologies or AIs or whatever, but just obviously all the kind of basic per capita math you can do around

Speaker 2 what if everybody had an income on par with the US? And I think it is.

Speaker 2 One of the reasons am so interested in working on Stripe is I think it's

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 old line, the Lucas line about how when you start thinking about differential rates of development in countries, it's hard to think about anything else.

Speaker 2 Why does Brazil have the particular income and GDP level that it does? Why does Poland have the level that it does?

Speaker 2 Why did Ireland have the trajectory that it did where we went from being the kind of sick man of Europe to now one of the wealthiest countries there?

Speaker 2 And I feel like Stripe is some applied version of this question in practice where you're kind of building software products, but in some sense, connected to or

Speaker 2 touching upon these questions of, well, why aren't there more countries? Excuse me, why aren't there more countries?

Speaker 2 Why aren't there more companies?

Speaker 2 And what determines the growth rate of a company?

Speaker 2 Like, why,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 when you start the merch store, like, why does it have X level of buyers rather than 2x?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I actually think those questions,

Speaker 2 I think those remain fruitful questions. We actually haven't optimized the meta system of business to any particularly great extent.

Speaker 2 For the vast majority of business, businesses have been offline, inefficient,

Speaker 2 analog,

Speaker 2 everything.

Speaker 2 And it's really only over the last

Speaker 2 one to two decades that a significant share of this has been meaningfully digitized.

Speaker 2 digitized, and the prospects for efficiency gains and optimizations there are still pretty significantly underexplored. And we find incredibly basic things like just

Speaker 2 extending capital to businesses.

Speaker 2 The reason we do that is not to generate profit from the loans, but because we find that the businesses, when we extend the capital, then just grow faster on a sort of persistent subsequent basis.

Speaker 2 Or

Speaker 2 trying to figure out how does a business decide which countries it sells in?

Speaker 2 And you'll find even for the smallest business through to some of the largest businesses in the world that these are very kind of ad hoc and not particularly deeply thought through questions like, you know, why don't you sell in Mexico and Brazil or whatever?

Speaker 2 It's like, well, it seemed kind of complicated and so we didn't quite get around to it and so forth. And so I think there's

Speaker 2 to your question about like, you know, where does the growth come from, I think that there's still an awful lot of low-hanging fruit in just asking some of these incredibly basic questions.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 when we think about the way in which Stripe will continue to grow in the future, in some sense, it'll obviously involve a lot of big businesses. And

Speaker 1 you're now processing a significant amount of Amazon volume. There's these other businesses you're doing deals with.

Speaker 1 First, tell me how you think it kind of makes sense how an exponentially growing startup would contribute to exponentially growing growth for Stripe.

Speaker 1 How does like does Stripe keep growing at the same trajectory when it's this existing big businesses that you're partnering with? And just second,

Speaker 1 also the case for why these startups matter is so compelling, right? Like a new thing is coming into this world and we should really support it and make sure it happens.

Speaker 1 Why is it compelling that Amazon can fulfill orders

Speaker 1 more efficiently or something?

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 those are very good questions. So

Speaker 2 on the first one, you're right.

Speaker 2 Stripe is doomed to eventually grow at

Speaker 2 the rate of the economy.

Speaker 2 And there's just a question of how long it takes to get there. Now, the good news is I think it can be a very long time because

Speaker 2 there's,

Speaker 2 as we just discussed, there's so much low-hanging fruit around

Speaker 2 different optimizations and improvements that are possible. And so I think it would be many decades before that happens, but it's true.

Speaker 2 That will eventually occur.

Speaker 2 On the second question about, yeah, what's the like,

Speaker 2 it's obviously virtuous or compelling or exciting to foster all these nascent startups and to kind of be an anti-incumbency force, but what's the case for

Speaker 2 supporting established businesses? I think people misunderstand where

Speaker 2 a small business typically, not in every case, but at least in the cases where we denote them startups, there's usually an embedded innovation and the innovation is kind of all that the company is.

Speaker 2 Like they have a new idea and they're going to do something better or different or whatever.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, generally speaking, we like innovation and so we've positive sentiments towards that startup.

Speaker 2 But there's a lot of innovation that comes from large established businesses. That's not all they do.
You know, there's also just running the existing thing.

Speaker 2 And so maybe it's a smaller share, but the aggregate fraction of innovation that comes from established businesses is really large. And we have to be cognizant of

Speaker 2 the cognitive bias of

Speaker 2 the startups perhaps being somewhat more conspicuous. And maybe on a relative basis, the improvements in turbine technology or in fab technology or in insulation technology

Speaker 2 that come from established businesses.

Speaker 2 Or, well, you choose any sector of the economy. And a significant fraction of the important

Speaker 2 inventions that occurred over the last 10 or 20 years will have come from the incumbents. And so

Speaker 2 I think as a general class, and Tyler, of course, wrote a book on this, I think big business is underrated.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 if you look at the survey data, people tend to have very positive sentiments, not only towards startups, but towards small business as a class.

Speaker 2 Whereas

Speaker 2 even though they've negative sentiments or relatively negative sentiments towards big business, not that bad on an absolute basis, but not as favorable. I think it's true that

Speaker 2 established businesses tend to pay better, they tend to be more efficient, more of the innovation in our economy comes from them,

Speaker 2 and they produce a lot of consumer surplus.

Speaker 2 I think the specific case for Stripe working with them is typically they're coming to us not because they want to

Speaker 2 take the thing that they're already doing and just

Speaker 2 go to all the

Speaker 2 work of transposing it to Stripe, but because either they want to do a new thing that they're just not doing today, and so it's associated with some new business line or some new innovation or invention or whatever,

Speaker 2 or they've spotted the opportunity to,

Speaker 2 I guess, to maybe not produce a new product, but to meaningfully change how they provide an existing one in a fashion that, again, yields consumer surplus.

Speaker 2 And that sounds very abstract and theoretical, but in practice, what it tends to mean is they want to take this thing they're selling in this market and sell it in many more markets.

Speaker 2 Or they've realized that they're selling it in this kind of modality and they should

Speaker 2 sell it in other more convenient ways, like they should sell it on mobile or something. And each of those,

Speaker 2 if it's successful, and people actually buy it in any significant numbers, I guess we're getting this decentralized signal from the economy that there's now something of value being provided that

Speaker 2 wasn't heretofore.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 as I take stock of the businesses, like the enterprises that

Speaker 2 are in the process of migrating to Stripe or

Speaker 2 that did so over the last year, whether it's the large retailers or the large global manufacturing firms

Speaker 2 or shipping companies, things like this, it typically has

Speaker 2 one of those two patterns, new product or current product sold to people who weren't buying it before.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, if you think about just like the big trends in the society that are needed to solve our big problems, right?

Speaker 1 Like Moore's Law or the cost of solar or something, these are just, you have marginal improvements over many decades that, you know, the

Speaker 1 big tech or big companies are just able to invest a lot of money into doing the RD.

Speaker 2 Relentless iterative improvement, yes, is underrated.

Speaker 1 Can I ask about John for a second? Sure.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 you guys recently published Poor Charlie Solvanak and subsequently Charlie Munger has passed away.

Speaker 1 Did Munger ever comment on your relationship and if or whether it reminded him of his and Buffett's?

Speaker 2 Not to me, but

Speaker 2 he knew John better.

Speaker 2 And so it's possible that he did to John.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 What have you learned about marriage from John? I mean, this sort of like co-equal, intense, lengthy partnership is like the closest thing that you have is marriage, right?

Speaker 2 Well, I'm relatively new to the practice of marriage, so I, you know,

Speaker 2 maybe in a decade I'll be able to kind of extract the generalizable commonalities.

Speaker 2 I suppose the general thing I would say is

Speaker 2 I think working with people you're close to is underrated.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, I'm doing ARC with

Speaker 2 Patrick Sue and Silvana. Fast Grands was with Tyler and

Speaker 2 Silvana.

Speaker 2 Stripe is obviously with

Speaker 2 John. And actually, John was also, I should mention, instrumentally involved in Ark's formation.
Like, it would not have happened without John.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 could give more examples,

Speaker 2 but I feel like for all the

Speaker 2 ventures of any significance in my life, they've not only been with others, but been with other people that I'm very close to and where I had and would like to have an enduring relationship

Speaker 2 that outlives them. And sometimes one hears the advice that you shouldn't work with friends or maybe you shouldn't work with your partner or something like that.
And look,

Speaker 2 all these things are idiosyncratic and

Speaker 2 there are instances of every possible

Speaker 2 permutation,

Speaker 2 but for me, it's been a really rewarding experience. And I think John and I

Speaker 2 can work together for

Speaker 2 you never know life, but

Speaker 2 I think we'll probably work together for decades. And

Speaker 2 for us, it's been a really

Speaker 2 both an important source of just meaning and again fulfillment, but also I think there's a real complementarity.

Speaker 2 And I think that Stripe would be a less effective company, you know, without either of us.

Speaker 2 And I just mean from like a bandwidth standpoint or something, but I think we both bring different things to bear.

Speaker 1 Patrick, I think that's a great place to leave it. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 Hey, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that episode.
As always, the most helpful thing you can do is to share the podcast. Send it to people you think might enjoy it.

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Cheers.