"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..."

"is also San Francisco's great virtue. San  Francisco valorizes striking out on your own,   iconoclastically dismissing the received wisdom.  It praises the founding archetypes and lore of   Steve Jobs..."

"career. I don't know what age he was when he  finally went and invented it, but he was not   in his 20s. I feel like San Francisco doesn't  culturally encourage one to become Herb Boyer.  Or yesterday..."

"of basically every strategy. I'm really glad  that you're doing what you're doing at what age?  23. 23. So that's...  A podcast, I’ve got a podcast. I think information dissemination   is a really val..."

"the world and a lot of the things that I'm most  happy are happening, require a very different   trajectory from mine. There are counterfactual  versions of my life, where I pursued that path   and wh..."

"is that you have this sense of contrarianism – the  way you often challenge what people are expecting   to hear from you in a given moment. You just  really want to tell them the opposite. When EA was..."

"So what practically does that look like to hone  your craft in any of these disciplines that take   a long time? You've spoken and tweeted about  some of the problems with modern universities.   Is th..."

"specific knowledge. Any kind of life wasn't  designed with neat fundamental principles the   way that maybe physics was. A lot of it is  obviously evolved and contingent and messy   and complicated an..."

"description of what they all did, but also this  reflection on: "What is it that was transferred?".  For example, one of the most important and subtle  questions in science is problem selection. How d..."

"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..."

"second. There's a view that says: "If we  improve the NIH 10% or whatever percent,   are we really making a dent in the fact that ideas  are getting harder to find over time? And how much   of a diffe..."

"I'm really skeptical of this approach being  brought to bear, where 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.  To..."

"One example of that, we ran a survey of the Fast  Grants grant recipients after Fast Grants asking   about their normal work, and not about anything to  do with Fast Grants itself. We asked them if th..."

"of these financially-oriented frameworks. Maybe financial is not the right word   for it, but just trying to map inputs to outputs  is the framing, which you're using to compare the   pre-World War II..."

""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..."

"structural, cultural, or organizational. Just to give a micro example there, and it's   a very basic and an obvious one, it's interesting  to compare the SpaceX R&D budget and the NASA R&D   budget an..."

"But I'm not sure that it is. I keep going back  to the cultural and sociological point. Gerty   and Carl Cori, they ran a lab at the University of  Washington, St. Louis. And six of their students,   ..."

"Arc institute. I think you just answered  this question but still: It's not exactly   like biology research is, it's something that  society has neglected. So what's the theory of   change here? Is it..."

"In very short terms, what's different  about Arc is: one, scientists are funded   themselves to pursue whatever they want.  So it's curiosity-driven research, whereas   NIH grants are given for projec..."

"In addition, the prospect of mobile elements  being usable in this way for genomic insertion,   whatever, — that's a pretty speculative, out  there thing. Had he applied to the NIH to go   and pursue ..."

"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..."

"but do make them more accessible. The question  is, what would the effect on the world be if   there was a sufficiently sophisticated  LLM that could help anybody synthesize   and disperse smallpox? I..."

"if one were to do what you're proposing and  try to advance the defensive side of this,   I don't know that, what one would do, would  necessarily be that different. Because there   are just fundament..."

"central bearing on both Stripe and Arc. We'll see. I totally agree with that general sentiment but I   wonder if the meta lesson that we got from COVID,  for example, and with things like Fast Grants ..."

"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'..."

"So what I'm saying should be taken as not only  not critical of them, but not even as a comment   to them. I just don't know what they did. In general, organizations are not awesome at   self-reflecti..."

"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..."

"dangerous to over extrapolate from that. Maybe n  equals 2 now with Arc, as a very different kind of   organization, but an organization nonetheless. Or if you include all the features of Stripe,   n ..."

"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..."

"When you think about the fact that moats are  overrated and just doing the thing is underrated,   what is Stripe's mode in that context? Does that  make you think differently about Stripe's mode?  Yes..."

"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..."

"if it is true, right? In that, are we on the side  of the humans, aggregate innovation in the world,   or corporations, or quad legal entities? The  answer isn’t clear to me. It should be the third.  ..."

"cheap or at least that is the case in Scandinavian  countries. So it is allowed to charge market   prices elsewhere but they're legally obligated to  reinvest profits in R&D. Is that somehow causal in..."

"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   ..."

"sequestration. How do you think about this? Well, a way to unify the two points,   and I'll speak about Stripe in a second, is  Say's law about demand creating supply. In as   much as Stripe aggregate..."

"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..."

"but they won't actually metabolize it  properly and they'll just die. Maybe   this could be an effective onco-treatment. Mannose is like a generic sugar. It's been   understood for more than a century..."

"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..."

"maybe you could train a model to do so, but today,  they are broadly speaking unquantifiable. And yet   they influence people in significant ways. People  very demonstrably care about aesthetics. And ..."

"even if from a customer-facing standpoint, craft  was not valued by the market, you might still want   to build an organization that indexes very heavily  on this, because you just want the best peopl..."

"the interface to Stripe as being the architecture. No one else seems to agree with me, but I often   think of Stripe as similar to Mathematica, where  we're selling a self-contained universe to model ..."

"one. Just as a side note, it's interesting that  API design in general doesn't get more study as   a discipline and as a practice. It plays or can  play a significant role in the fate of platforms.   ..."

"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..."

"look at it multiple ways, but many people would  consider Stripe to be on the wrong side of the   interchange cost equation, in the sense that  we're giving away the interchange revenue to   other com..."

"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..."

"orchestration remains really big and unsolved. 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..."

"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..."

"10% or 20% or something. But long story short,  I think it works out to about 1% of global GDP.   It's about a trillion dollars a year. As you say,  that then makes us really terrified of outages.  An..."

"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..."