Stripe Collison brothers reveal 34% growth, tender offer, and why 2026 Q1 may be 'the first quarter of the singularity'

guest. We do.

So, let's bring them on in.

We have John Patrickson,

the OG's

from Stripe. How are you guys doing?

What's going on?

Greetings.

Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. This is uh this is huge. Uh I went through YC. You guys were massively uh influential in my career and uh it's a joy to speak to you today on such a big day. But I'd love for you to kick it off with the actual news. What happened? Why are we talking today?

Uh we had two announcements today. One is we're launching a tender offer for uh employees and that and kind of the valuation everything tended to get a bunch of the headlines. Uh the thing that was honestly uh more work was we released our annual letter where every year we uh sum up all the trends uh that we're seeing uh on Stripe. And uh Stripe is growing a lot. We grow 34% last year because the businesses on Stripe uh are growing a lot. And there's just, as you guys know, there's a lot happening in tech right now. This is why we need TVBN. This is why we need a non-stop stream of everything going on because there is so much happening. So,

yeah, we'll move we'll move to 24 hours event.

Eventually. Eventually. Exactly.

Uh I mean, but uh I feel like there is a ton of AI noise and stories and drama and we are, you know, never running out of stuff to talk about. But what are you actually seeing in the data? because there's always this disconnect between the market and the real economy like people are still shopping in retail stores occasionally. Uh what do where is AI actually moving the needle?

Well the um generally speaking I would say from the stripe data it looks like the economy is in pretty good shape and there's been um to say the to say the least uh there's been uh some degree of volatility in markets uh over the last two years and you know all sorts of different events and deepseek moments and what have you. But if you look at the actual real economy time series, if you look at what's actually happening substantively over the last two years, things I mean it's it's always hard to prognosticate the future, but over the last two years, things really seem to be in good shape. The thing that's really catching our attention,

one second because I'm just curious, have you have you guys tried to think about uh maybe the businesses are doing well on Stripe because they're, you know, uh uh kind of like forwardlooking, extremely tapped in, you know, working on the right things. And if you look at a bunch of legacy providers, you would see that actually there are a bunch of businesses out there that are slowing down that maybe are feeling effective just overall uh consumer spending. Like have you tried to kind of like break that out or understand that dynamic?

It's it's it's obviously hard to measure because we don't have that data. We only have our data. But um but I think there is some of that composition effect. uh and we see it I guess both in stripes data compared to say public earnings from others like clearly the respective populations are performing somewhat differently but I guess we also see it qualitatively in the conversations we're having with customers where what tends to happen uh say for some incumbent is they built some business they installed some system long before Stripe even existed um maybe there's some sense that well it's not broken don't fix it but then decide hey we're going to do something new and when they're doing something new then they want to use the best infrastructure that'll enable them to move the fastest and launch the most countries and support stable coins and do things with AI and whatever and then they tend to launch that on Stripe and so there is this qualitative sense that once a company decides to do something innovative new retool what have you um they're they're more likely to um come to strip

are you seeing an overlap between stable coin activity and AI activity there's been sort of a new narrative around agents will use stable coin coins, but I feel like agents can use legacy payment rails just fine. And then also you can do really cool things with stable coins that are not really AI native necessarily. And so uh I'm wondering I'm wondering how much overlap there is there.

I would distinguish between how things work today and uh how things will work in the future. In terms of how things work today, agents absolutely can, you know, a lot of people build with Stripe. You know, you can have a one-time use credit card that your agent can go out and spend. But if you look at what's happening, there's lots of, you know, agents having to solve captures to, you know, be able to kind of do stuff on the wider web. Clearly, the web is not built for agents. Uh, and as a result, they have to get creative to actually do any real world tasks. And that's true in kind of economic activity as well. Where we think things will go is just there will be a huge amount of agentic commerce. And again, we're seeing a little bit of it today. We think there'll be a torrent of it. And that is what unites stable coins and AI because we think you're going to need blockchains and better blockchains. Honestly, I mean, this is what this was our thinking behind incubating Tempo because you're going to need really high throughput blockchains for the for the uh for the agents.

Can you take us through some of the the historical technologies that led to growth in just internet payments? I'm thinking about like mobile, social commerce, uh, one-click checkout, Apple Pay, like there's so many things when I think about the agentic commerce boom that's coming. Like, it could be hooking a better version of Siri up and, you know, chat GPT rolling this out very aggressively, but also, you know, smart speakers, smart lamps like your watch. Like, there's so many different pieces to unblock and unh unhobble the the actual agents as they go about their day. Well, can I answer a slightly different question, but then we can come back to that. Go ahead. A point I just um sorry, this is a brother.

We'll tell you the questions, you tell us your answers. So you you you know how brothers are but um so I just want to lose one point uh for the prior question about you know what we're seeing in the economy because

I feel like I mean this this is very arbitrary obviously but I feel like there's at least a reasonable chance that 2026 Q1 will be looked back upon as the first quarter of the singularity. Um maybe in three years in hindsight that'll look completely delusional. I don't know. But what we're seeing, I mean, there's kind of the macroscopic picture of the stripe user base and things overall looking pretty good and so forth and the the two months not quite uh showing up. But when we look at the cohorts and then when we look at the businesses that signed up in 2023 and their progression and trajectory over the subsequent months, the businesses that signed up in 2024 and then the business signed up in 2025, there's been a phase transition in 2025 where there are both more of them and on a per business basis they are on average doing better. um which is really striking because you might think okay well there's this uh cavalcade of new lightweight vibecoded applications or something but you know there's not really a lot of substance there. We're actually seeing both numbers move together. There are many more business getting started and the average the median business is in fact performing better. Um, we're only a couple weeks into 2026, but it see it it looks tentatively like 2026 may plausibly be an acceleration even over that significant uh uh leap of 2025. So, I don't know. I mean, there's um we've um we've had all sorts of dramatic AI um uh inventions and uh innovations uh over the last couple years. There's a bit of a question of well how and when and how should we think about how it'll translate to the economy. I would say looking at real purchasing behavior on Stripe 2025, end of 25, beginning of 26 is when I feel like we're really starting to see it.

That's super interesting data. One, because we were there was some survey that came out uh yesterday or maybe it was late last week that said they asked like

they asked a bunch of executives, are you getting any value out of AI? And 80% of them said no. But clearly if you look you when you look at

come on that's hogwash. Like find me one executive who wants a refund on their tokens. Find me one executive who said oh yeah we started you know augmenting our customer service with AI so people are more productive but we're just going to go back to doing it the oldfashioned way or like we're spinning our code by hand and you know we don't need any of this automated Loom uh you know technology. Just like reveal versus I'm not saying I'm not I I could I could pick out a bunch of reasons. No, no, I'm not saying I agree with a pessimist.

No, I could pick out a bunch of reasons why it would be wrong. One one reason it might be wrong is they is they're not in the weeds actually using the tools and so they just think

they might not even be aware that they're using the tools because it's buried under

they're not feeling they're not feeling the acceleration because they're not they're not um

uh I wanted to ask how you guys think about incubations like tempo when you look at uh when I look at Atlas and what Jeff and the team have done there you think even in your I I don't know kind of like the most wild projection that you had early with Atlas like, hey, maybe someday a quarter of the of the sea corpse in the United States could be, you know, built on this platform. Anybody would have said that was insane and yet here we are. Gosh, I um I'm not sure what to say really except we just um we just try to pay a lot of attention to the I mean, as you guys know, there's a lot of pain points that go into starting a company. Um and we just try to take them seriously. Uh and then you know it's the line you know so much of so much of these things is just a long obedience in the same direction. Uh like Atlas is now this great overnight success but we launched Atlas I think in

overnight 14 maybe 2015. Um and so uh you know 10 years of uh of of compounding and yeah now now it's at some pretty meaningful meaningful scale. And you know, look, I I I think tempo will probably have the same shape where we we think it um I mean again to this AI discussion and us sounding a bit unwarded and untethered like I think there are the world is going to need platforms that support millions of transactions per second, billions of transactions per second, which no payment rail or or platform does today. But it's even in the success case, it's not going to be an overnight thing. it's going to be, you know, five, six, seven years and then maybe we'll we'll have conversations about how, you know, Tempo suddenly became a an overnight success or something. But I

I think I think Patrick's a bit the fish in water who can't uh, you know, who doesn't know things are wet. Uh, my framework would be you can't get too MBA brain about new products. You can't have your spreadsheet that's like, oh, the TAM is this, and just like reason about things international.

You should never say we want 1% of global GDP. running.

No, we didn't set up. Exactly.

You guys never Wait, you guys never pitched that?

Well, companies, we actually never thought about Stripe in GDB terms until one day we realized, oh, hang on,

that's such an important lesson because so many so many like how many founders, how many pitch decks have you seen over the last few decades? They're like, yeah, we just need 1%. And it's kind of it's a meme. you you you you you can go back in the wayback machine and find the early stripe websites, but we're very focused on payments for developers and making that um experience good. But where I'm going is I think you have to reason in product specifics. And so again, I think any MBA would have told you that um the adjacency of uh you know, incorporation makes no sense. It's not related to you know, what's our right to win? you know there's all these things people say whereas when you actually go talk to founders they're like guys it's like this is the single biggest issue I run into starting my company and similarly with tempo and just as we think about incubations we're trying to solve a real problem here where we talked in the letter about bridge having operational issues not because of bridge but because of blockchain congestion h where you know you have coins that are or blockchains both used for kind of memecoin trading and also serious real world payments and so we just want low latency, high throughput payments and we're going to need much higher throughput for the agents. But anyway, I think you have to reason in very specific product terms.

Mhm. What specific products are you excited about in the unhobling of agent commerce? We um we we laid out in the letter basically these um these these levels of agent commerce because I think like everything in AI people want to sell a hypy story and so they you know talk about how you know the machines will buy everything you know without even consulting you and um people aren't actually you know that seems far off they're not that excited about that

you can start from just the basics of why are we filling out forms like that you know you were talking about the progression of commerce why can't I just send something to, you know, a link to chat GBT and have it buy it. Uh, or why can't I search, you know, uh, outside of, uh, you know, just doing a basic keyword search or something like that. And so, a lot of the work Stripe is doing is building the infrastructure. We're working with all the big retailers that you would expect, the, you know, Etsies and Shopifies and Best Buys and Walmarts and folks like this to make product cataloges viable within the AI apps. And there's basically a ton of boring API and protocol and infrastructure work which you know we love that's our business but people just want to be able to uh do shopping do discovery do purchases within the AI apps and maybe just more kind of abstractly you know we've been there kind of the specific agent commerce thing and then there's just the the general question of how software will change because of agents um and I've been thinking about it um you know a bit maybe software becomes a bit like pizza. Um that is to say uh you know you software historically has been uh created

not like pizza some would say

months years beforehand and then you know freeze- dried and the whatever you you you um you uh prepare it at the sort of moment of consumption. we're actually going to, you know, software should be like pizza and it should be cooked right then and there at the moment of use. And so it's this act this quite fundamental shift where you don't want mass- prodduced industrial scale software. You want bespoke custom software made for you that moment. That's and that's very fundamentally different. It's kind of the the you know the um up until now the uh the economics of software have been you know conceived of as fixed cost and then infinitely uh uh monetize or monetize as much as possible that has these kind of winner take all dynamics but once there are inference costs and custom creation involved it really shifts it's kind of the nonwal rasian software regime and just I don't know I don't quite know where it goes but um I think I think it's going to look very Last question. Pineapple on pizza, yes or no?

Ireland was was big into pineapple on pizza. Um Ireland not a big pineapple growing country. Uh I will concede. Um but a lot of pineapple in the pizza. Good memories.

We know a very large fraction of the banana markets, don't forget. So we punch above our weight in uh fruits that don't grow there.

There we go.

There we go.

Uh the round is exciting. the the uh the overall growth of volume is exciting, but we wanted to hit the gong for how many books you guys are selling.

Oh yeah.

Can you give us can you give us the the numbers there? The

scale of that operation.

Stripe Press uh just uh well actually we we announced in the letter we sold our millionth book but in fact since

incredible. Um, no book books. We've actually now sold our 1.1 millionth book. Uh, so, uh, but we'll come back for the the next Gonga, too. But, um, yeah, it's great. We we love books and they're very they're very AGI proof.

Oh, yeah. No, we've been a huge fan of uh so much of the Stripe Press catalog. Uh, I haven't read them all, but I'm collecting them one at a time, and I'm working through them, and every time one drops, it's always a moment, and we love them. So, thank you for everything. Great to have you guys on and congratulations to the whole team on on congratulations to you guys. TBBN is an amazing startup and it's uh super cool to see you guys uh grow and um

built on stripe built on the streaming world and our sector needs

incorporated on stripe built on stripe.

Our first our first ad deal ever was a live read at a live conference. I think we charged $50 and I put and I sent someone a stripe link. We're talking about the 25 being the fastest ever feedback, but uh well, we'll have to have you to our to our to our internal Stripe show. So, we'll follow that be great. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations, guys. Cheers.

Goodbye.

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