"Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Patrick  Collison, CEO of Stripe. Patrick, first question.   You have an excellent compilation of advice on  your blog for people 10 to 20. You say there, th..."

"But there's a strange emphasis placed  on entrepreneurship in San Francisco,   that should not be people's only fixation. What I like about this and what I admire about you   is that you have this sen..."

"Another thing the book talks about is learning  about high standards and what they actually are.   When I talk to people in other domains,  I hear very frequently, that when they   worked with X perso..."

""OK, well, it's overdetermined, and that's just  how countries work." But you can look at other   countries, where it's manifestly not the case.  What is it that's weird and special about the US?  The..."

"that's really exciting about the discovery,  that we mentioned, that came out yesterday,   this new bridge editing technology, is: that  work was led by one of senior scientists,   who had finished hi..."

"When we think forward 10 or 20 years, this  specific line of research, where you understand   the effects of the genetic architecture on  different traits, and you can edit, invert,   insert the DNA a..."

"That's really compelling, because a lot of  diseases are "complex" in the field's jargon. Yes,   they're complex in the colloquial sense, but  they're specifically complex in that they're   not infect..."

"what we're really excited about from a functional  genomics standpoint. There's an AI angle as well   that we could talk about if you want. How do you think about the dual use   possibilities of biote..."

"There are a lot of biological problems that we  don't know how to solve today. In that respect,   if one were to do what you're proposing and  try to advance the defensive side of this,   I don't know..."

"Yeah. With that in mind, I know you already have  a couple of day jobs, but I feel like something   similar to fast grants, when the time comes down  to it, should be there. You'd be one of the top   ..."

"I think you're being too humble. Staying on  Fast Grants, now we have the retrospective of   how effective the fast grants recipients were,  compared to the other grants that were given out   by, let'..."

"as the responsibility of the owner? Is there any  degree of independence granted? How does liability   work? Which rails are best suited? What kind  of transaction velocities are we talking about   he..."

"not only does Stripe exist, but there are lots of  others. There's a whole fintech ecosystem today,   right? It gets down to deep questions of: "What is  the binding constraint on the number of effect..."

"what is Stripe's mode in that context? Does that  make you think differently about Stripe's mode?  Yes, I do think that one can have organizational  and cultural moats. Maybe this contradicts what   I..."

"most organizations, when they start out, are  actually trying to achieve their stated goals.   Somebody started the organization for a reason and  probably it was for the stated reason. But then   ove..."

"I think it is, but I'm a biased observer.  I think it would be, that people at Stripe   really care about solving the problems that we say we are trying to solve.  Yeah, the point about the misalignme..."

"At the same time, if you look at Europe or places  like Denmark, because of the tax code there,   a lot of organizations are either controlled or  substantially held by non-profit foundations.   For e..."

"the fact that they made one of the most remarkable  pharmacological discoveries of the last 20 years:   GLP-1 agonists? – Plausibly. These questions of  “Why is it that the median age of organizations..."

"somewhat dependent on the way we've chosen to  organize large corporations in the US today.  The thing you're mentioning about this firm  seems very similar to the export-led growth  in Asia. Totally...."

"tariffs and trade barriers. The history associated  with them is checkered at best. Look, it's   possible that if you have a specific sector where  you have clear goals, a credible path to actually   ..."

"much as Stripe aggregates more and more global  demand, it seems too self-aggrandizing to call   it “The theory of Stripe", but some vague  hunch in Stripe is that this aggregation   of demand can hav..."

"inspired by the first AMC, which was a  pre-commitment to purchase vaccines for developing   world's countries for diseases that were market  failures, where either pharma companies hadn't   pursued t..."

"instrument of moving forward the tech? That's a good question. We've been having   that discussion internally. It's not that we  plan on doing it ourselves necessarily, but   I'm wondering: "Are there..."

"a few papers that suggest that maybe tumors will  selectively take up mannose rather than glucose,   but they won't actually metabolize it  properly and they'll just die. Maybe   this could be an effe..."

"but you also appreciate the  power of scale and growth.  And speed. Oh, interesting. Is there a   type of craft that is just not amenable to speed,  growth, scale? If you think of a Japanese chef,   h..."

"including this. Obviously, there's Apple. TSMC  is not the Japanese sushi chef you mentioned,   but it's the TSMC chip sushi chef in Taiwan. They  have so much tacit knowledge and difficult to   trans..."

"On an intuitive level, people know that that's  true. But it's difficult to manage that at an   organizational level, where there isn't a P&L  associated with it, and if you're screwing it up,   you d..."

"take the practice of the work super seriously. What kind of beauty or craft or simplicity   is more important— interface or  implementation?There's famously   that essay that Unix is successful becaus..."

"That's a really interesting analogy. Although, if  you think of Mathematica, the entry that that's   giving you to, is just the platonic objects  of math, whereas for you guys, the entry is to   Visa ..."

"decades, even in the face of what are otherwise  frenzied evolutions in everything around it.  Unix is another example of this. Yes, Unix  has tons of shortcomings, but the architecture   has worked n..."

"Is Visa an example of this? One might even say,  that one of the downsides of being able to use   implementation for many decades in the future  is, even if it's self-sustainable and you have   this e..."

"interchange cost equation, in the sense that  we're giving away the interchange revenue to   other companies. So I don't think I'm structurally  biased in favor of interchange, and yet, I will   say i..."

"possible. I'm not saying they're perfect, that one  can't make critiques, but I'm most interested in   critiques from people who've really studied the  ecosystems of other countries, because it's easy..."

"As we think about these ad valorem fees and  figures, the place where there's even more change   at the moment that we find ourselves thinking more  about is the changing structure of global tax.   Th..."

"This is the thing we're always interested in. When  we talk about growing the GDP of the internet,   it's not like: "Get the existing GDP onto our  rails", — it's sort of: "Where on the margin   can w..."

"of us and we thought that we could make this  superior payments API. For the vast majority   of its history, Stripe has attracted people  who are drawn to unglamorous infrastructure   challenges and p..."

"from the beginning, where 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 classic Metcal..."

"writing culture for the benefit  of the writer or the reader?  It can be both. But which one is the more so?  There are really considerable benefits on both  sides, because for the reader, it's not ju..."

"There's some version of that organizationally,  and I'm not drawing a precise parallel,   but there are analogous dynamics, where the  nature of oral cultures and textual cultures are   just quite dif..."

"Tell me about the internal LLM you built. Oh, we didn't build an internal LLM, we built   an internal LLM tool for making it very easy for  people to integrate LLMs into production services,   but als..."

"because humans, intentions, identities are analog  — all these things have some degree of uncertainty   around them and some noise. But then transactions  are digital, right? And we often find in thes..."

"cycles: it'll ship in the next release in a month  and that kind of thinking. Developers also hate   being paged at 2 AM for incidents. So, given  the criticality of the businesses that we serve,   wh..."

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

"A few more Stripe questions. One percent of  global GDP is such a staggering number. When   you think about where further growth for Stripe  comes from, does it come from the internet economy   expand..."

"Why is it that when you start the merch store,  why does it have X level of buyers rather than   2X? I think those remain fruitful questions. We haven't optimized the meta system of business   to any ..."

"this, big business is underrated. 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. Even though they   ..."

"As I take stock of the businesses, the enterprises  that are in the process of migrating to Stripe or   that did so over the last year, whether it's the  large retailers, global manufacturing firms or..."

"Can I ask about John for a second? Sure.  You guys recently published Poor  Charlie's Almanac and subsequently,   Charlie Munger has passed away. Did Munger  ever comment on your relationship and if o..."

"Patrick, I think that's a great place to leave  it. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.  Thank you. Hey, everybody! I hope you enjoyed that   episode. As always, the most helpful thing you ca..."