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Radio news.

So my idea for you guys is you guys just have like regular normal boring ads on the podcast.

I think you need to do the post red ads where it's like I say a lot that everything is securities fraud.

Is having a bad night's sleep securities fraud?

You don't need to worry about about a casper mattress or like i could do like the men's shaving club ads or something that could be fun too when buying short dated out of the money call options i use surfshark right yeah i think it'd be good

hello and welcome to the money stuff podcast i'm matt levine i write the moneystuffcom at bloomberg opinion and i'm katie greifeld a reporter for bloomberg news and an anchor for bloomberg television Katie, today we're doing something new.

We are doing our first interview on the Money Stuff Podcast.

Are you nervous?

I'm pretty nervous.

I'm a little bit nervous too.

We're recording this after it happens, so we're not really nervous.

I'm still stressed out.

Speak for yourself.

I'm pretty nervous.

I haven't listened to it yet.

Today, our guest is John Collison of Stripe.

Stripe is a payments and financial technology company, and John and his brother and co-founder Patrick are kind of tech industry celebrities.

Yeah.

He's an Irish billionaire.

He's from Limerick.

That's cool.

Katie's wearing her Limerick jacket.

But we'll probably get into that during the podcast.

That's true.

It's a little embarrassing that I wore this jacket.

It's a medium amount of embarrassing.

I truly didn't mean to, but as I said to you, in our office, it was 47 degrees when I left my apartment this morning, pre-dawn, and I needed a top.

And this is my favorite medium-weight jacket.

This is the behind-the-scenes content that most of the podcast listeners really crave.

Yeah.

Let's jump right back into that interview.

Nailed it.

Should I do like a crashing transition to talking about Stripe?

Yeah, so how do you guys usually start these?

How do you want to?

I guess you haven't done these.

You haven't done this.

You You could invent the format.

Yes.

Start by reviewing the advertisements I've heard.

Yeah.

The podcast.

We start the podcast with much like this.

We walk into the room and bullshit for a bit and then record that.

Yeah.

And then we eventually say, hello and welcome to the Money Stuff Podcast.

And we talk about whatever the thing we're talking about today.

So now we're talking about Stripe, capital markets, destiny tech.

Okay.

So we've listened to this in podcasts with you.

You talk a lot about your interest in business history and like you've learned from the tech companies of the past and the conglomerates of the conglomerate wave.

I have not heard you talk about the lessons you've learned from financial services companies.

And I write about finance and think of Stripe in many ways as like a financial services-esque company or like some evolution of a financial services company.

So I'm curious, like, I don't know, what do you think about financial services?

Yeah, in general, we try to...

learn a lot from other

businesses.

And okay, one of the things I really like is we live in a golden age of learning about other businesses right now.

And one of the reasons I like this is because I think learning about other businesses at some level, learning about the world, or certainly the economy, because, you know, you're getting a sense for how all the various entities work together.

With financial services in particular,

you came up with the framing that, you know, Stripe is in a way kind of a new kind of scaled investment bank.

Was it your framing?

I think I said something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

I would love for you to tell me that's right, but I'm assuming you'll tell me that's wrong.

No, actually kind of like it because if you think about what are the potential sources of funding for a business, like if you want to scale up a business, how can you fund it?

There's three ways you can fund a business.

You can do it through debt, equity, or retained earnings.

And so if you just tick through each one of those, on the earnings side, maybe that's the place where Stripe is kind of the most directly doing this, where we're making it easier for businesses to self-fund their growth.

And we see tons of bootstrapped or kind of certainly airly monetizing businesses on Stripe.

Like we have this customer in Stripe Photo Room, and they do online kind of Gen AI-powered photo editing.

They're based in France and, you know, maybe 10 years ago, they would have, you know, raised a whole bunch of VC and scaled up that way.

They're actually profitable within a year and they've just kind of scaled up profitably.

Since then, 98% of their business comes from outside France.

And so they're kind of selling this product to a global audience.

And Stripe is making it easy to do that.

And we've seen that in general with, I guess, the AI companies in particular, where, you know, during the social media boom, maybe companies scaled up first with raising lots of VC dollars and then later on figured out monetization with a lot of the AI companies, you know, OpenAI, Perplexity, Claus, you know, the Photo Room who I was mentioning, they actually monetize from pretty early on using Stripe.

And so that's one source of funding.

Stripe allows early stage companies to monetize so efficiently that like there is less need for debt and equity in the world because companies can self-fund.

Like you're putting VCs out of business.

Yeah.

And obviously we think it's a more slightly more healthy dynamic for the businesses.

A classic trap that early stage companies fall into is, you know, and why Combinator say tries to get their companies to avoid falling into this failure mode is kind of they raise money and then they think kind of valuation milestones or any kind of financial or investor milestones are the milestones that matter for the business.

Whereas obviously that's not the case.

It's are you building something of value in the world, which will generally be measured by, does anyone want to buy it?

And so I think maybe it gets people on the right leaderboard earlier on, where a revenue leaderboard is just a much healthier leaderboard to be thinking about than a fundraising valuation leaderboard.

But we also play in the the other parts of the capital stack where on the debt side, I mean, you guys have probably watched this, but banks have kind of gotten out of the S ⁇ B lending space since the financial crisis, as just the compliance costs have gone up.

Like people do not go to a bank for a $5,000 loan anymore.

And so we now lend through our lending partners billions of dollars to startups.

We do that entirely programmatically through ML models, cash flow-based lending.

So we're not looking at the balance sheet.

We're not trying to do kind of credit checks on the individual or something like that.

We're looking at the stream of cash flows.

Is it a healthy, reliable stream of cash flows that can support some debt?

doing the cash flows so you can

exactly we see the cash flows and people repay out of the striped cash flows and so that is a new kind of lending product that exists in the market that now again is you know in the billions of dollars in terms of the debt we're providing it's kind of ironic in a way if you want to raise a hundred million dollars of debt that is a very competitive market lots of people are playing in that if you want to raise five thousand dollars of debt for your company it's actually much harder to get that that than it was, say, 20 or 30 years ago.

We've gone backwards there.

And then on the equity side, I think Stripe Atlas has actually helped make more companies investable because

what a lot of people don't realize is Stripe Atlas is our incorporation product, but it lets companies where the founders might be in Israel or might be, you know, in Singapore or something like that, create a US.

Delaware company, and that makes it much more investable.

And so we've seen a lot of foreign founders kind of virtually creating a U.S.

company, which it just turns out foreign companies, investors find too scary.

So I guess I'm responsible for the framing that you're sort of, in some ways, a substitute for an investment bank.

So like your framing is like, increase the GDP of the internet.

But like, you know, you have these businesses like incorporating companies.

Like, what is the

principle?

And like, I was like a real investment banker.

I was doing like corporate derivatives.

And like, I assume you would never get into that business, but am I wrong?

We're certainly not planning on it.

We build products that are scalable in some way through tech.

And so, you know, Stripe itself, this past year, we did a trillion dollars in payments through the Stripe platform.

That's still bringing a pretty healthy clip.

The number of businesses served is millions of dollars.

And so, if there's something that is solved by just throwing an army of people at it, I mean, you know, all the investment banking firms are exceptional at recruiting armies of people, and that is a very competitive space.

Whereas the space of, you know, like I was saying with the lending side of things, that was just an underserved market where we came at it by talking to our customers.

And they said, we really need growth capital.

And it's actually very annoying for us to get it and so I guess we tried to find the underserved spaces and

investment banking for you know certainly on the larger side does not seem underserved right now I've listened to a lot of podcasts you've been on in the past several weeks and so sorry no no it's been really interesting you interviewed Charlie Munger which was I much prefer interviewing to being interviewed so we'll come back for the second round of this where you guys are put on the spot that'll be a lot of fun we'll put that on the calendar but at one point Charlie Munker started talking about like banks and they're selling these sleazy products.

And of course, I couldn't see if you were nodding along.

Matt and I were talking about, you know, whether you would chafe at sort of the comparison to, you know, an investment bank, for example.

But it sounds like you don't.

No, I don't.

Investment banking provides a useful set of services in the world.

And okay, one of the things I really like about the Money Stuff newsletter is a studied detachment from what's going on where there are people and people respond to incentives and that creates behaviors in the world.

And like Matt does have views and, you know, dislikes crypto and, you know, all sorts of things.

And you can kind of, the views occasionally come out, but it's mostly this very detached view of what's going on in the world.

But the way we think about it, like, for example, we think, you know, Stripe's scale and revenue are actually pretty decent proxies for the value Stripe is providing in the world.

That's not always the case with the business.

You could have an extractive business somewhere or monopolies or rent extraction or something like that.

But in our case, we have very informed buyers and a very competitive market.

There are lots of other places people could go for payment acceptance or billing software or something like that.

And so generally, if customers are choosing you and paying you money for a service, it's because you're providing something of value that you can't get elsewhere.

And similarly with investment banks.

I think if people are going to investment banks for a thing, that's probably because they're providing some value to them.

And so that's the framework I tend to take.

I think Charlie, rest in peace, generally took a lot of offense at where he saw.

people hyping things, principal agent problems.

You know, there's a set of things that bothered him, crypto, Robin Hood, mutual fund advisors.

And, you know, you could understand, I could construct the steel man for those cases.

I mean, I think there's a lot of opacity and pricing and value in financial services that there's probably a lot less of in your business, right?

Like you're kind of charging a transparent fee to people.

Yeah, and certainly the more scaled something is, the more price comparison there'll be, the more efficient the pricing will be.

Whereas, yeah, there's more room for extracting price

when you get into bespoke deals.

So one thing I think of when I think of investment banking is just serving as an advisor to CEOs and sort of giving them general advice on their business.

And we were talking before about, you know, you are now interacting with a lot of big companies and you had some views on like the ability of a big company CEO to sort of understand her company.

And

I would love for you to talk about them.

Yeah.

I think people think that CEOs are able to drive change in their organizations.

I'm just talking about organizations generally.

I'm not talking about Stripe.

People think that a CEO lands in a new job.

They take over a company, and they're able to just whip everything into shape and change everything.

And

I think the general experience of CEOs landing in new jobs is that is not the case and organizations are pretty hard to change.

And in fact, one of the things that we believe strongly at Stripe is it's very important for people to get close to the work or you will not be able to drive any meaningful, useful change.

And so like there's a bunch of different ways in which we do that.

It actually reminds me of the lean manufacturing principle, you know, and they have all these very nice aesthetic Japanese terms for things.

And so, you know, there's the English equivalents very much for the Japanese terms.

But one of them is Gemba, which is this idea that managers should, you know, walk the factory floor and solicit ideas from the people who are on the production line and things like that.

And all companies, like a tech company like Stripe, has its equivalents.

And so we very much encourage engineering managers to

actually write code at Stripe to get the experience of what is it like working in their corner of the code base, what problems are engineers running into.

I really enjoyed being CFO last year when we were between CFOs.

And one of the reasons I really enjoyed that, again, was getting closer to the actual numbers, the processes by which we drive the business.

Like we're going to hold Stripe to a budget regardless.

And aren't you interested in how that process is actually set and how those numbers are set and everything like that?

So, you know, I say that I think every founder should be CFO of their business for at some point during its lifespan.

It's a very educational experience.

Did you have any like product ideas?

Did you do that and come away with like we need to do accounting software?

No, no.

Or I mean, I mean, maybe in an abstract way, but again, Stripe's finance needs are maybe a little different from the broader ones.

But again, I just think for getting close to how the business actually runs, that's maybe the thing that's hard for CEOs to do.

And you know, we try to do it from a customer perspective.

A huge amount of even some of the products we're talking about, like Stripe Capital, they basically come from us trying to spend more time with our customers than our competitors do.

And so, you know, we'll start every leadership team meeting 8 a.m.

Monday morning with hearing from a customer.

We just ask them to come and give us candid feedback on the product.

If you were to sit in on one of those meetings, it's not an A-plus report card that we're getting.

You know, there are things they want us to fix, but I find that it's easy for like product managers to overcomplicate things and you can get in your own head and construct some really convoluted castle in the sky.

And there's nothing quite as grounding as hearing directly from a customer, talk about what is not working for them in the product.

And, you know, we do the same on Fridays with like an all-company thing, bringing customers to talk to that.

But anyway, I think the essence of this for CEOs is getting close to the actual production function.

And that is sometimes hard for them.

So I have two points.

It's interesting to hear you say that.

First of all, my brain immediately goes to Elon Musk, like on the factory floor at SpaceX and Tesla.

But it was interesting.

We had Home Depot this week announce that they were going to require corporate employees to work eight-hour factory shifts, which is interesting, like retail shifts.

Starbucks did something similar, right?

Yeah, which makes a lot of sense.

I mean, especially in brutal jobs such as that one.

And then the other thing, I mean, given that you do know so much about his business history and, you know, just love looking at companies, but those AM meetings where you're just talking to your different companies, like you see so many different types of companies, which is interesting.

Yeah, and it is definitely a pretty interesting time.

I think the behavior we observe is that tech has been very well covered.

And so I think everyone knows broadly kind of what's going on in the tech world.

What we find interesting is the businesses that are, you know, the Sherwin-Williams of the world, you know, the businesses that are 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 years old, and how they are adapting to the modern world.

And generally what we find is that COVID provided a useful long-term change to those businesses because those kinds of businesses all employed a chief digital innovation officer prior to COVID.

And that person had a team of 10 people and they produced all these slides and ideas.

And the ideas were pretty good.

And the company just ignored all of them and just didn't do any of them.

And so they had the kind of idea generation part and nothing happened.

And then COVID happened.

And it was this oh shit moment where people, they were forced to adapt because, you know, obviously the stores were locked down and were not open.

And so you maybe had gym companies moving to virtual training or something like that.

But that created a mandate for actually getting serious about the digital stuff.

And we see much higher quality digital execution coming out of that.

And there's kind of a few common patterns in what everyone's trying to do.

I think everyone is questioning their middlemen.

I don't think middlemen are going away, but they're questioning the middlemen and do middlemen add value.

And they are starting to do much more direct customer relationship stuff.

Part of that is the product experience where, you know, Hershey is using Stripe to sell candy directly online and the customization and things like that.

And then everyone's just trying to build some kind of recurring revenue.

And so, you know, we think there's two kinds of businesses in the world.

there's those who have recurring revenue and those who want recurring revenue.

And people talk about the engine, you know, the airplane engine makers with power by the hour.

You know, you actually don't buy an engine, you buy, you know,

exactly, you might trust, you know, by the minute.

But that is actually what all companies are moving towards because it's kind of better on both sides of the equation.

And obviously, that's pretty complex from an implementation point of view, and so they're coming in stripe.

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I did like a striped fire site a while back, and you were like, what should we do?

And I was like, I should fix paywalls.

Have you done it?

We're getting there because one of the things.

Why is it hard?

Okay, it's hard for a few reasons.

One,

I think people confuse paywalls with micropayments.

And I think more consumers want micropayments than publishers, where the publishers want macropayments.

I think nobody wants macropayments and everyone wants to talk about it, but maybe I'm wrong.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

So anyway, once we move past the micropayments thing, then it's hard because

you ultimately need to smooth the onboarding friction and you probably need some cross-publisher network and you know publishers are not they're competing they're maybe not inclined to work together and then it's just a bunch of tech upgrades which are actually kind of somewhat prosaic long-running projects but you know you need to be able to have the patience to work with a media company to spend a year or year and a half upgrading their stack the way we've ended up doing this is with our product link which is very simple but is really starting to work it just remember you guys maybe run into it on the internet it just remembers your credentials across websites And so if you've bought on website A with Stripe and you have the box checked to remember your payment details, then you'll be able to buy on site B without entering your payment details again.

And you might think it will lead to a big increase in conversion if a lot of consumers have their payment credentials remembered.

So they don't have to type any extra data in.

They can just click buy.

And turns out it does.

And there's obviously a virtuous cycle here where, you know, the more people sign up for it, the denser the network gets.

So that's really starting to work.

And so we have some media properties starting to use that.

And so what it means is they get lots of people people coming with credentials all pre-filled and they just need to hit buy.

And so then the commercial proposition just needs to work.

I just feel like the media paywall problem for me is not even the payment credentials.

It's once you've paid for a paywall.

Keeping you logged in.

Keeping you're on your phone.

You're on two computers.

You're on

your face and just remember me.

It's really frustrating.

We should and may get to that as well.

I agree.

That's part two of it.

To me, that's related to like online identity and the stuff that people are, crypto people are always talking about.

So I also have listened to you on podcasts.

One thing that you've said is that

when you started raising money for Stripe, people were like, why isn't this a solved problem?

PayPal exists.

Can you tell us why it's not, or why it wasn't or why it isn't a solved?

Like, why is payments hard?

And like, there were payments companies before you.

Like, what's the thing that you're solving?

They didn't.

It wasn't solved for a few reasons.

Payments requires you to be good at two very different things that are quite distinct skill sets.

There's technology and there's financial services.

And so prior to Stripe, you had some payment companies that just did the technology layer.

You know, they said, we're a nice API and we plug into whatever bank you use.

But that wasn't a good payment experience because you would then try to sign up with the bank and would spend weeks shuffling paperwork around or something like that.

And so a huge amount of what we do is at the intersection of those things where you have AML, KYC considerations, where Stripe is essentially aiming to look at the activity going on on its platform and ensure that it is licit and acceptable activity that's happening on the platform.

And so we do lots of cool ML work.

We don't talk about it really that much publicly because it is just what goes into operating a scaled platform like this, but it's a huge amount of the special sauce that makes Stripe tick.

At the same time, the tech has to be really good and nice and usable.

And customers really care about latency.

They really care about how easy the API integration experience is.

And so I would say companies prior to Stripe tended to pick a lane a bit where you had a few purely tech companies where they'd say we're a payments gateway and we just don't think about anything.

We just hand off the transaction of something out to someone else.

Or those banks and they actually just generally outsource the tech.

They didn't even really do it themselves.

Or if they did themselves, they did not do it particularly well.

And so it was a very crummy experience for the developers actually using it.

And of course, the tech changes.

Mobile was just coming along as we were getting started.

You know, the iPhone app store came out in 2008.

We started Stripe in 2009.

So we like, we were just in time for that.

And so mobile was a very relevant consideration.

You know, even just the web apps and SaaS and everything grew a huge amount.

And so I think the banks had not built for that and did not build for that.

And so there was maybe a gap between the existing providers.

And there was that set of things that you had to be really good at.

There were a huge number of things with Stripe that we did by intuitive feel.

They were not part of a...

particularly deliberate tops down strategy that was written down in a business plan, but ended up working out well.

And so one was our really early focus on developers where our go-to-market was through developers.

We started by selling to startups and there was this really, I would say, kind of bottoms up sort of adoption motion.

But again, ultimately, the product we are selling is a technical API product.

And so of course you should be thinking about what the developers want.

We just had the developer focus because we were software engineers ourselves.

We just wanted to build a product that we thought was a good product.

But I think it ended up being more strategic than we maybe realized in the beginning.

There's a lot of like

mess in the legal and like infrastructure of the payment system.

And like your job is to provide people a very clean abstraction to that mess.

And like that means handling all of the mess and actually going out and figuring stuff out and then being able to put that in the back end of your API.

So the API is like a very clean abstraction.

Like is that?

Bern Hobart had a line that I liked in one of his newsletters that Stripe makes the financial system work the way people think it already does.

And that I think is actually a pretty nice design principle for us.

And maybe a good example of this is: see, when I hear that, I want you to do like equity derivatives.

I want you to do more of this stuff in my world.

But I don't think we have a view on how equity derivatives could be improved.

No, that's sad.

Maybe we need to think about it more.

I do want to talk about crypto.

Yeah.

We debated this internally, but when it comes to the payments world, I mean, the conversation tends to devolve into a crypto conversation because I feel like crypto is trying to solve a lot of payments problems, especially when it comes to cross-border payments.

And I'm not asking you about like the price of Bitcoin or whether you're bullish on, you know, number go up, but when it comes to crypto and the problems that it's trying to solve, I mean, how do you think about it?

We're quite excited about crypto at the moment.

I interpret Money Stuff as the house position as moderately crypto skeptical.

And so I guess what I would say to a moderately crypto skeptical audience, it'd be two things.

One,

there are just a bunch of scams and dodgy characters and everything like that.

But it kind of reminds me of, I don't know, the the first, I grew up in Ireland, the first time I went to Vegas was for a work conference.

There I was, for a work conference, and, you know, at the Venetian or something like that, probably Monday 2020.

And

you're going into the hotel past like all the people smoking indoors and like the people just addicted to the slot machines, just pressing them again and again, again, and all the blinking lights and, you know, the, I guess, the clatter of the coins paying out.

And you have to walk past this degenerate gambling area.

Grim scene.

Yeah, it's a grim scene to get to your serious industry conference.

And that was very surprising to me.

And I don't know, there's something similar in crypto where you have the casino Dogecoin value speculating part of it.

And then there's people doing all the serious work over in, say, stablecoins or something like that.

And those two things just exist.

But I think one cannot use the existence of the slots in the Vegas casino to write off the work conference.

No, maybe I'm stretching the analogy.

No, this is good.

Pitch me on stablecoins.

So because, like, you know, excited about this, like, well, your friend Pettio11 would say

it's a KYC avoidance mechanism, basically, right?

It's like a.

Yeah, well, the good thing about crypto is there's been a lot of hype on what crypto is useful for.

And so, for example, if you go back and read the original Bitcoin paper, which is a great read, it's a very readable original paper.

It actually used the word interchange in there and talks about kind of the use of Bitcoin as a payment method.

But Bitcoin turned out to be certainly stock Bitcoin, you know, before Lightning and everything like that, turned out to be a horrible payment method, like slow, expensive.

Let's not do that.

And now the technology has matured through what has been kind of 14 years of development.

I think the crypto haters use this argument that like, well, you know, it was the web in 93 for many, many years.

Where is the actual web coming along?

But there's been 14 years of lots of technical development happening such that we've ended up with much more advanced technologies.

And so what you specifically have now with stablecoins is you have, firstly, something that's value doesn't change.

And so there's none of the kind of speculation stuff that we're talking about.

You have something that's actually very technically scalable.

So with the current L2s, there's no real scalability issues with them.

And you have a pretty sensible construct where, in a way, it's narrow banking, right?

We've been talking about narrow banking in this country for decades, and we've ended up with narrow banking through stable coins, where, let's say, a good stablecoin, you know, that's like a Paxos or a USDC, in the case of USDC, it is fully backed by short-term treasuries.

And that actually just seems like a pretty good construct to me.

And so, you know, we now make it where you can, you know, accept money in Stripe via crypto.

You can do some payouts, things like that.

And the obvious thing that people say is true, where

in the US, you will be slightly too biased against crypto because the US is the world's best currency.

You know, the US has the world's reserve currency where you get to spend.

Exactly.

And so, of course, people in the US think the USD is awesome because it is an awesome currency.

Whereas many people in many other countries have a much more adversarial relationship with their own currency.

And I'm not even talking about Zimbabwe, though it is true there.

I'm talking about Turkey, which is a very large country in economy and population.

But people there do not have full faith in the lira.

And they think about what's a better place to keep money than lira.

I guess the other like U.S.

bias is that the U.S.

government really wants dollar payments to flow through the KYC'd banking system.

And there's some suspicion that...

I think all the serious grown-up crypto players today, I mean, they're subject to the FinCEM travel rule.

They are KYCing the actors.

And so if you go through a crypto flow today, you will see the normal frictions of dealing with a regulated financial product where you are asked to provide your, you know, last four-year social or uploaded driver's license or things like that.

And so I think just in most of the crypto use cases that are being taught, obviously there's the sketchy dark web stuff exists as well.

But in most of the use cases we are talking about where serious businesses like Stripe or serious merchants are using crypto, it is the custodial litus part of the crystal ball.

So it's not like just sort of like an on-chain, like non-custodial transfer.

Correct.

Yeah.

I am curious.

I mean, if you look into your crystal ball and, you know, it's been 14 years since Bitcoin was created.

As you said, we've seen a ton of technology advancements since then.

I mean, you said you're quite excited about crypto, but I mean, how far can we run that out?

Do you think it's the future, for example?

Would you go that far if you look 50, 100 years into the future?

I don't think it's a singular future.

And again, there's a bit of over-promising that's happened in the crypto world.

And again, I think that's what gets people's backs up.

Actually, speaking of Bern Hobart, we just at Stripe Press published his new book.

The title is Boom.

And the thesis of the book is that we generally view financial bubbles as societally net negative because they cause misallocation of resources and they cause ultimately people lose out.

And he makes the argument that bubbles provide a societally useful function by essentially coordinating effort.

And maybe the dot-com boom is incorrectly understood as a pets.com and web van.

It was really like by dollars put into it.

As you guys probably know, it was a telecoms boom and and it was a fiber rollout boom, but it led to the US having just amazing fiber overcapacity that then led to the steady growth of the internet for the decades that followed.

And so that's maybe an example of it was a bubble, but it was a societally useful bubble because then it led to this overcapacity that had lots of positive externalities.

Anyway, I think you can make that argument about crypto.

I think that argument made as crypto led to a build out of GPUs that led to the AI boom.

Yeah.

Oh, interesting.

I wasn't even making that case.

You could make that argument too.

Though obviously there was a lot of GPU spent happening even before crypto.

No, I was just making the argument that I think the speculative side of crypto, you could make the argument pulled in attention and resources that was then used to build the very boring, useful parts of crypto, like you know, Ethereum 2 or against stablecoins or things like that.

We could talk more about this.

I do want to make sure that we talk about the things you don't want to talk about.

Yeah, which

we do want to talk about.

So, another money stuff theme that we'll probably do on our ad reads is that private markets are the new public markets.

You guys are among the poster children for that.

You're the CFO.

Tell me about what it's like being private.

I don't know.

Like, I mean, how should I think about the idea that you're an enormous company and you've stayed private and have no enthusiasm, as far as we know, for going public or even talking about this?

20 years ago, would you have been able to do that?

Yeah, we spend a lot of time internally at Stripe thinking about the value of the Stripe business.

I think the external world spends a lot of time thinking about the value of the Stripe stock price, which are related but different things.

We have definitely stayed private longer than some people expected.

I think we'll continue to stay private longer than maybe some people expect.

But there's no complex answer.

It's just a simple answer, which is we don't think companies should sleepwalk into going public.

We think they should be deliberate about it.

And

why would Stripe run out and go public?

It could be if we wanted to sell stock broadly to a retail audience.

That's not something that we've had.

The business is profitable.

We haven't needed to raise very large amounts of capital.

A traditional reason might be return of capital, not just kind of a capital raise for running the business, but return of capital to existing shareholders.

But again, that's where you're maybe referencing the private markets have gotten deeper.

And, you know, in our case, we've run two unlimited employee tenders, you know, last year and this year.

You know, Sequoia just did an LP tender where they gave liquidity to some of their LPs, but liquidity is available to people in the private markets.

And so it's more, I think, the default spring where companies, you know, a SaaS company would be started and

go from zero to 100 million in ARR and then just run out and go public.

Default is being questioned a little bit in Silicon Valley.

Obviously, lots of companies are still going public, but the default is being questioned.

And the default is

more of a

Silicon Valley tech default than maybe a broader global default.

So, like in financial services.

We know that.

Exactly.

So, as Bloomberg employees, you may be familiar with it.

But Bloomberg is the example that everyone cites.

But if you just quickly run through financial services, you know, take the world's leading market maker, Citadel Securities, private company.

Take the world's leading prop trading.

I'm probably offending one of the world's leading in all these cases.

So I don't offend anyone.

But if you look at Jane Street, you know, which it's been reported on a lot these days, just how good a business it is, where they're at a 10 billion profit run rate or something like that, private company.

Fidelity, one of the world's leading brokerages, private company.

Goldman Sachs, your former employer?

I assume that a big difference is that Jane Street writes very large checks.

And the Silicon Valley difference is not just that you have VCUs who might be hungry to get out, whereas Citadel doesn't, but it's also you have employees who are getting paid in equity and they're getting tenders every year.

Is a tender every year just as good as publicly traded stock?

We think the tender every year is a nice solution.

And there are some things that would be different if we were a public company for the better.

There's some things that would be different different as a public company for the worse.

And you get into trading windows and who's an insider and things like that.

But it's thus far worked quite nicely for us a solution.

So is that the model then?

Like tender every year?

You've only done two, but.

We don't have forward-looking plans to announce.

And so I come back to you at some stage with, you know, we could go do something that you don't expect.

And we're not announcing the plans because genuinely it's not like there is a written-down plan at Stripe that we're going to do this, this, and then this.

We are always re-evaluating it.

But again, up to this point, it has made more sense for us to grow as a capital-efficient private company than it's made sense for us to be a public company.

Like Jane Street just makes money every year and they don't need to raise capital.

And so they just seems like great business.

Paying money to people, right?

I don't know what the economics of that business are like, but they seem extremely good.

But like, it does seem possible that you could just make cash every year and fund the business out of that and.

pay people out of that and never need to.

For 24, we're trying to make a decision for 24.

And for 25, we'll try to make a decision for 25.

So luckily, it's not the case that you're faced with a, you know, a fork in the road and you have to make some kind of permanent decision.

We do constantly reevaluate it.

When I write about this topic, one concern that people have is that there are a lot of cool companies, like an increasing number of them, like fast-growing profitable companies that, or sorry, I should say fast-growing not profitable companies, like early stage companies, middle-stage companies,

high-growth companies that don't go public.

And that deprives like ordinary investors of access to those companies.

And therefore, it should be made easier to go public or whatever.

So, for you, do you worry at all about that from a systemic perspective that you're depriving like American retirement savers of access to Stripe?

And then, two, you're not entirely because there are people who are going around selling Stripe shares in a way that I believe you do not like.

And I don't know, there's like a way around the barrier that you've set up, I guess.

Yeah.

Look, I do think the debate over who should be allowed by private assets is a good debate.

And

the accredited investor rule is kind of an odd rule.

Like, we don't take it for granted that it's been around for a long time.

But basically, we define sophisticated investors as rich people, which is, you know, maybe somewhat ahistoric.

And like a declining standard of rich, where it's now like sort of upper middle class people.

Correct.

Yeah.

So I think debate on that is a good thing.

In Stripe's case, you know, most of the non-employee ownership is through essentially kind of VC funds and the underlying VC fund ownership, the LPs there, tend to be pension funds, college endowments, people I think we feel quite good about making money for.

And so, I don't think it's the case that it's going to broader society.

It doesn't get to benefit from the appreciation.

I think we feel quite good about the LP base of the investors that are behind Stripe.

And again, I think that's another thing that has allowed us to stay private for as long as we have, which is we actually have very long-term VCs.

And I think if we had a different set of VCs, we would have been less fortunate in being able to grow Stripe as a private company because maybe they would have felt the need for a win or something like that.

But I think luckily, you know, Sequoia Capital is one of the best VC firms that there is.

They don't quite need to prove themselves.

They probably count you as a win anyway.

Say again?

They probably count you as a win.

No, exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And then on the, I don't know what you call them, but the firms out there, this market.

We've talked on the podcast about Destiny Tech 100, which has a private market.

close them fund situation with like some stripe forward contracts.

And like there's like a general, there's like a market for forward contracts, which all all seem to be not really approved.

Yeah, this is not going to end well because

generally

hyping financial assets has a

bad history.

It worked out badly with SPACs.

It worked out badly with ICOs.

And

it just tends to work out badly, which is why it tends to be regulated.

That financial regulators tried to rein in the hyping of private assets.

And so, again, Stripe is not a public company.

We do not enable broad retail ownership of Stripe stock.

And so if people try to back into that by having private company stock in a vehicle that is then available to public market investors, we just think it's not a good construct.

Like it's underdisclosed where people are buying an interest in things based on name brand recognition, but not based on going over the financials or understanding what it actually is.

They tend to all be very high fees.

I mean, it depends on the vehicle, but they tend to be fairly extractive in that way.

And so we don't like it.

We don't approve of it.

We don't permit it.

And I'm personally not a fan.

Is there much that you can do about it?

Like in the case of a Destiny tech, for example, that says that, you know, they have stripe forwards.

Is that correct?

Yeah.

I mean, what can you do?

We prohibit forwards.

So we had a bit of a tete-tete about that.

People do them anyway.

Can you then void them?

And these people are not.

I don't know where this goes.

Yeah.

Because, right.

I mean, it seems like they're prohibited and people do them.

Yeah, we put it up on the website just to make it abundantly clear so everyone has the same information as

instruments are not allowed.

So I don't know, there's some areas where people have to read the tea leaves or the body language.

We tried to make it abundantly clear, get out there with the semaphore flags so that people are not in any doubt.

On the topic of going public, it doesn't sound like you're in any rush, obviously.

You said in June, and I thought this was interesting, that many companies make the decision to go public too early, that you personally see tons of opportunities to change and grow the business quite a lot.

And

I think it's interesting that you want to stay private to do that.

And I think a lot of founders would agree with you.

But just the fact that, you know, sort of like going public, you see this as the sign of maturity, and maybe that you're not innovating as much as you would in the privates.

I don't know.

It kind of made me think of tech companies like offering dividends.

Like I remember when Meta started giving out dividends earlier this year, everyone was like, oh, well, they're old news now and they're too mature.

Well, I think Meta is the wrong example to use for that argument because they currently seem to be doing extraordinarily well in the AI race.

And I'm not making the claim that, you know, one cannot innovate as a public company, because that is clearly an absurd claim.

And you would just be kind of constantly slapped in the face by counterexamples.

And Meta would be the perfect one where they just demoed the origin glasses and those look amazing.

And again, they're just nailing it in the AI race.

And so that'd be a silly argument.

I do think that on the margin, if you are

developing a large number of new products, if you have a fast-growing business, if you're constantly reinventing how the business works, and again, in our case, we are transforming Stripe from not just being a payments business to there are all these new software lines of business that are much earlier, that are harder to predict how they grow, everything like this.

You know, we're changing out the underlying payment methods.

You know, we talked about crypto.

We didn't talk about around the world.

There are all these interesting trends happening in new payment methods where basically bank transfers and things like UPI and PICs in Brazil and things like that are becoming much more relevant.

Anyway, there's a huge amount of change.

I think on the margin, the public company valuation apparatus is

set.

You see it how people, you know, the quarterly earnings and the miss and the beat and everything like that.

It is optimized for

mature, predictable businesses.

And indeed, people talk about kind of business predictability.

Whereas, you know, for a business that is still in the, you know, in the early stages like Stripe and we think about a lot of new products on a, on a five or 10 year time horizon, again, I think on the margin, there are some benefits to doing that as a private company because you get to kind of completely retool the business as you go without necessarily wondering about, you know, what will the reception be for this in the next quarter's earnings release.

I know you're not in any phase of planning an IPO, but I was a capital markets banker and I know you've had thoughts about like

the IPO process.

And like, I don't know, if you were doing an IPO, like what would you change about the process?

I find all the debates about IPO mechanics really uninteresting because because it just doesn't matter.

Like if you have a great business that's valuable for customers that millions of people use and makes money as a result, you can do whatever you want.

Like, you know, I think Facebook would say they botched the IPO, but they have like an incredible business.

So it doesn't matter and no one remembers it.

And then you can have like the world's best IPO plan.

And if the business isn't good, it doesn't matter.

And so people get into all these debates about direct listing versus regular IPO.

And then Bill Gurley complains that the bankers are taking too many fees and

it just doesn't matter.

Like build a great business and you could write your prospectus on a cocktail napkin and it'd be fine.

I feel like this is like why Charlie Munger doesn't like financial services business, right?

Because you're like, oh, this is irrelevant.

You just build a great business.

It's like, it's true.

But it's true, right?

Yeah.

And the other thing is investors are smart.

I think people

try to do too much of a song and dance with investor relations and try to, you know, gin things up.

And ultimately, when you meet professional investors, you know, they're really smart and they can look through and understand the fundamental dynamics of a business.

And so the secret to good investor relations is to have a good business that's growing and is profitable.

More people should do that.

Exactly.

That's my sorry.

Sounds easy.

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Oh, you have an airport.

Do you want to talk about that?

Is that something that you don't know?

Okay.

Why?

Where did that come from?

Well,

I should not be listened to for any rational financial or investment advice on this topic.

I don't know.

I don't have the pockets of buying an airport right now.

Well, no, just I'm a pilot and an aviation bus and grew up interested in it and have been flying since I was a teenager and still really love to do it and fly in my spare time.

And so I would say it's not necessarily the most rational business interest of mine.

But the case is the airport.

So Dublin basically is three airports.

Dublin International, which you've been to Dublin, that's the one you've been to.

I guess three, if you count, the military airport, Bell Donald, and then Weston, which is the general aviation airport.

And so general aviation is all the stuff that is not airlines.

So it could be public service flights like search and rescue or air ambulance.

It could be flight training, you know, people getting their pilots' licenses.

It could be corporate jets.

It could be all this kind of stuff.

And generally speaking, the appropriate home for the general aviation stuff is not where all the airlines are because they just don't mix that well.

And so most places will have, you know, if someone's doing flight training in New York, they'll not do it at JFK.

They'll do it at, you know, Westchester or something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They really don't mix well.

And in the case of Dublin's Western airport, I ended up buying it back in 2021 and it needed a bunch of investment.

And so I bought it and we've been investing investing in giving it the facilities it needs around, you know, instrument landing capabilities and, you know, redoing the terminal and the capital stock and things like that.

And so it's partly, I think it's a good, I mean, they are in the U.S., they're not for-profit businesses.

They tend to be government-owned and federally funded.

Internationally, they are like Heathrow is a for-profit business and they just make money off landing fees.

And so I actually think it will, in the fullness of time, be a good business once it's kind of come out on the right side of the growth curve.

But it's also a passion project of mine.

That's awesome.

I mean, this not not as an insult, but I feel like to enjoy being a pilot, like casually, you have to be like a little bit crazy.

Like, that seems like an insane proposition, but maybe I'm just really risking it.

So, no, it just requires a lot of discipline, you know, checklist discipline and

recurrent training.

I just went through some recurrent training, and it just I actually find it more interesting because, obviously, aviation safety is generally talked about correctly as one of the best examples of process optimization over the last, you know, five decades where we have taken a system and just improved the crap out of it until it's like so good.

They talk, I saw a thing go by on Twitter recently where the FAA doesn't mandate car seats on airplanes because flying is so safe.

compared to driving that they're worried that if they mandated car seats on airplanes, even though like it would have a tiny benefit, it would lead to people choosing not to fly and choose to drive instead and get into car accidents and therefore be net less safe.

But I find it funny that, you know, again, flying an airplane feels like in principle, it should be like kind of hard to do and driving a car on the ground should be easy to do, but per mile, obviously flying wins out.

And so again, you have this.

decades and decades and decades of history where we've taken the lessons of, you know, they say the rules and regulations are written in blood.

You know, we take the lessons of the previous accidents that have happened and then we wrap them into future training.

And, you know, generally when you do pilot training, you're studying a lot of specific accidents that happened and you know what the learnings were for them.

And so I think if you're interested in systems design engineering process optimization things like that lessons from piloting like inform your software engineering or i mean they're pretty separate but i think the software engineering brain tends to be attracted to flying and you know you go to palo alto airport which is the little general aviation airport in the bay area and it's one of the busiest general aviation airports in the entire country because I think engineering minds, of which there are lots in Palo Alto, tend to enjoy it.

And again, you're mixing, you know, a kinesthetic skill and meteorology and, you know, mechanical understanding of, you know, a combustion engine and all the attendant systems and, you know, airspace and everything like that.

So it wasn't like fueled by you being in an adrenaline junkie, like I want to go fast and I want to fly in the sky.

Adrenaline, like if you're feeling adrenaline while flying, you're doing something wrong.

I feel it all the time when flying.

Like, God, I hope we stay in the air.

There was that, you know, you read Antoine DeSante Zuperi and, you know, flying in Africa during the 1920s in his case and, you know, getting shot down and all these kind of things.

There clearly was a that would make you feel something.

Yeah, exactly.

I think that kind of stuff would make you feel something.

But again, these days it has become much more safety-oriented and the cowboy stuff has been pulled out.

And again, they actually describe one of the cultural challenges that happened and the aviation industry underwent was that we produced all these military pilots in the World War II and the Vietnam War.

And those people then went into Pan Am cockpits.

And they actually kind of made bad captains in a certain way because it was like very much shut up.

This is my cockpit.

And so the CRM crew resource management, I guess, thing basically was a multi-decade effort to get rid of the

captain mindset and get towards a collaborative problem solving.

I had always thought of like, if I'm going on a like 737 and the pilot landed F-14s on carriers, like that's got to be the safest possible way to fly, but apparently not.

No, he's going rogue.

He's not listening to his second officer or whatever.

The European airlines have a different model than than the U.S.

airlines, where they take pilots who have 250 hours only, which the U.S.

would consider very low, and they put them in the right seat of airliners.

And they have like a really strong safety record.

And so, as you fly around an airliner in Europe, you could have someone who only learned to fly a few years ago.

And the way they do that is a huge amount of standardization, a huge amount of process orientation.

You know, people make fun of Ryanair for the hard landings, you know, the Ryanair landing in Europe, where they really plunk it on the runway.

That is one of their safety SOPs, where they say a positive landing, as it's known in the industry, is safer because it reduces the risk of hydroplaning if it's wet.

And so it reduces the like very small risk that you run off the end of the runway if the runway is wet.

But we're just going to, every landing, we're going to plunk it on, and that's safer.

But again, it's generally process orientation, standards, and a lot of that kind of stuff that's driven the safety and not excessive piloting skill.

And again, if you're relying on incredible piloting skill, something has gone wrong in your system because we should be able to have a 777 full of passengers be safe, even if the pilots are fatigued or something like that.

That's wild.

I did not know that about Ryan Air.

I feel like they should put that fact out there, you know, that it's intentional that we're plunking down.

That's true.

Yeah, yeah, because it's quite

jarring.

Exactly.

Yeah, you really know that it's right.

I draw attention to it being uncomfortable.

Well, everyone knows.

Ryan Air might.

That's true.

That's true.

That's true.

John Collison, thanks for coming on the Money Stuff podcast.

Thank you, guys.

It was fun.

Our first guest.

Yeah, I'm honored.

And that was the Money Stuff Podcast.

I'm Matt Leville.

And I'm Katie Greifeld.

You can find my work by subscribing to the Money Stuff newsletter on Bloomberg.com.

And you can find me on Bloomberg TV every day on Open Interest between 9 to 11 a.m.

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We'd love to hear from you.

You can send an email to moneypod at bloomberg.net.

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You can also subscribe to our show wherever you're listening right now and leave us a review.

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The Money Stuff Podcast is produced by Anna Mazarakis and Moses Ainbaum.

Special thanks this week to Stacey Wong.

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And Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.

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