a16z Podcast - John and Patrick Collison on Stripe's Growth, Agent Commerce, and the Future of Software

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

This interview with Stripe cofounders John and Patrick Collison originally aired on TBPN. They discuss Stripe's 34% growth and new employee tender offer, how agent commerce and stablecoins may require high-throughput blockchains built for millions of transactions per second, and why the economics of software are shifting from mass-produced products to bespoke, on-demand systems cooked fresh at the moment of use.   Resources: Follow TBPN on Twitter: https://x.com/tbpn Follow Patrick Collison on Twitter: https://x.com/patrickc Follow John Collison on Twitter: https://x.com/collision Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The world is going to need platforms that support billions of transactions per second, billions of transactions per second, which no payment rail or platform does today. 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 in AI, because we think you're going to need blockchains and better blockchains. Up until now, the economics of software have been consistent.

received about as fixed cost and then infinitely monetize or monetize as much as possible. That has the winner-take-all dynamics. But once there are inference costs and custom creation involved, it really shifts. Finally, 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 old-fashioned way. Stripe processed more than a trillion dollars in payments last year. It grew 34%.

And according to Patrick Collison, 2026Q1 may be looked back on as the first quarter of the singularity. That's not a marketing line. It's what the data is showing. The 2025 cohort of businesses on Stripe is larger and performing better on a per-business basis than any prior cohort. And the trend is accelerating. In this conversation recorded live on TBPN, John and Patrick Cullison walk through what they're actually seeing in the real economy, why agenic commerce will require blockchains capable of billions of transactions per second.

and a reframe on software itself, from mass-produced product to something bespoke, cooked fresh at the moment of use, like pizza. This conversation originally aired on TBPN, hosted by John Coogan and Georgie Hayes. We have John Patrick Collison. Yo, geez.

From Stripe. How are you guys doing? What's going on? Greetings. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. This is huge. I went through YC.

You guys were massively influential in my career and 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 you today? We had two announcements today. One is we're launching a tender offer for employees and that and kind of the valuation, everything, tended to

get a bunch of the headlines. The thing that was, honestly, more work was we released our annual letter where every year we sum up all the trends that we're seeing on Stripe. And Stripe is growing a lot. We grew at 34% last because the businesses on Stripe 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 TVPN. This is why we need a nonstop stream of everything going on because there is so much happening. Yeah, we'll move to 24 hours eventually. Eventually, eventually. I mean, but I feel like there is a ton of AI noise and stories and drama, and we are never running out of stuff to talk about.

But what are you actually seeing in the data? Because there's always disconnect between the market and the real economy? Like, people are still shopping in retail stores occasionally. Where is AI actually moving the needle? Well, generally speaking, I would say from the stripe data, it looks like the economy is in pretty good shape. And there's been, to say the least,

there's been some degree of volatility in markets over the last two years and all sorts of different events and deep seek moments and what have you. But if you look at the actual real economy, time series. If you look at lots actually happening substantively over the last two years, things, I mean, 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 guys tried to think about maybe the businesses

are doing well on Stripe because they're, you know, kind of like forward-looking, 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 consumer spending. Have you tried to kind of break that out or understand that dynamic? It's obviously hard to measure because we don't have that data. We only have our data. But I think there is some of that composition effect.

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, say, for some incumbent, is they built some business, they installed some system long before a stripe even existed. 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 them of those countries and support stable coins and do things with AI and whatever. And then they tend to launch that in Stripe. And so there is this qualitative sense that once a company decides to do something innovative, new, retool, what have you, they're more likely to come to try.

Are you seeing overlap between stable coin activity and AI activity? There's been sort of a new narrative around agents will use stable 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 I'm wondering how much overlap there is there.

I would distinguish between how things work today and 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, but, you know, agents having to solve CAPTCHAs to, you know, be able to kind of do stuff on the wider web.

Clearly, the web is not built for agents. And as a result, they have to get creative to actually do any real-bore tasks. And that's true in the 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 in AI, because we think you're going to be. to need blockchains and better blockchains. I'm going to say, I mean, this was our thinking behind incubating tempo because you're going to need really high throughput blockchains for the agents. Can you take us through some of the historical technologies that led to growth in just internet payments?

I'm thinking about like mobile, social commerce, one-click checkout, Apple pay. 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 speaker, smart lamps, like your watch. Like, there's so many different pieces to unblock and unhobble 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. Yeah, go ahead. A point I just, sorry, this is a...

We'll tell you the questions you tell us your answer. So you know how brothers are. So I just want to lose one point for the prior question about what we're seeing in the economy because I feel like, I mean, this is very arbitrary, obviously, but I feel like

there's at least a reasonable chance that 2026-1 will be looked back upon as the first quarter of the singularity. Maybe in three years, in hindsight, that'll look completely delusional. I don't know.

but we're seeing I mean there's kind of the macroscopic picture the Striped user base and things overall looking pretty good and so forth and the tumult's not quite

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, which is

really striking because you might think, okay, well, this cavalcade of new lightweight vibe-coded applications or something, but it'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. We're only a couple of weeks into 2026, but it looks tentatively, like 2026 may plausibly be an acceleration even over that significant leap of 2025. So, I don't know. I mean, there's, we've, we've had all sorts of dramatic AI inventions and innovations over the last couple of 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 trying to see it. That's super interesting data. One, because there was some survey that came out yesterday, or maybe it was late last week that said, 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 at you, when you look at... Oh, come on, that's hogwash. Finally, one executive who wants a refund on their tokens, finally, 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 old-fashioned way, or like we're spinning our code by hand, and, you know, we don't need any of this automated loom, you know, technology. Just, like, yeah, I'm not saying, I'm not, I can pick out a bunch of reasons.

No, no, I'm not saying I agree with it. pessimist. I could pick out a bunch of reasons why it would be wrong. One reason it might be wrong is they're not in the weeds actually using the tools and so they just think like you might not even be aware that they're using the tools because it's buried under two layers of the stuff. They're not feeling the acceleration because

they're not. Yeah. I wanted to ask how you guys think about incubations like tempo when you look at Atlas and what Jeff and the team have done there you think even in your 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 Corps in the United States could be, you know, built on this platform. Anybody would have said that was insane. And yet here we are. Josh, I am, I'm not sure what to say really, except we just, 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 are going to starting a company and we just try to take them seriously. And then, you know, it's the line, you know, so much of these things is just a long obedience in the same direction. Like Atlas is now this great overnight success. But we launched Atlas, I think, in 2014, May 2015. And so, you know, 10 years of

compounding. And yeah, now it's at some pretty meaningful, meaningful scale. And, you know, look, I I think tempo will probably have the same shape where we think it, I mean, again, to this AI discussion and us sounding a bit unworth and untethered, like, I think the world is going to need platforms that support millions of transactions per second, billions of transactions per second, which no payment rail or platform does today. But 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 have conversations about how, you know,

I suddenly became an organized success or something. But John. I think Patrick's a bit the fish in water who can't, you know, who doesn't know things are wet. My framework would be you can't guess to 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. Yeah, you should never say we want one percent of global GDP.

No, exactly. You guys never, wait, you guys never. pitched that? We actually never thought about Stripe in GDP terms until one day we realized, oh, hang on. That's such an important lesson because so many founders, how many pitch decks

have you seen every long? We're like, yeah, we just need 1%. It's a meme. You can go back in the way back machine and find the early Stripe websites, but we're very focused on payments for developers and making that 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 the adjacency of, you know, incorporation makes no sense. It's not related to, you know, what's our right to win. It was all these things people say, whereas 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. operational issues, not because of bridge, but because of blockchain congestion, where, you know, you have coins that are, or blockchains both used for kind of meme coin 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. What specific products are you excited about in the unhobbling of Agenda Commerce? We lay that in the letter basically these levels of agenetic commerce.

Because I think like everything in AI, people want to sell a hypey story. And so they talk about how the machines will buy everything, you know, without even consulting you. And 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 GPT. have it buy it. Or why can't I search outside of, 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 or working with all the big retailers that you would expect, the, you know, Etsy's and Shopify's and Best Buys and Walmarts and folks like this to make product catalogs 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 do shopping, do discovery, do purchases within the AI apps. And maybe it's more kind of abstractly, you know, we've been in this kind of the specific agent of commerce thing. And then there was just the general question of how software will change because of agents. And I've been thinking about it, you know, a bit, maybe software becomes a bit like pizza.

that is to say software historically has been created not like pizza some would say months years beforehand and then you know freeze dried and whatever you prepare it at the sort of moment of consumption

but we're actually going to software should be like pizza and said it should be cooked right then and there at the moment of use and so it's this actually this quite fundamental shift where you don't want mass-produced industrial-scale software. You want bespoke custom software made for you that moment.

That's very fundamentally different. It's kind of the up until now the economics of software have been conceived of it as fixed cost and then infinitely 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 non-Wal-Russian

software regime and just, I don't know, I don't quite know where it goes, but I think it's going to look very different. Last question. Pineapple on pizza, yes or no? Ireland was big into pineapple on pizza. Ireland, not a big pineapple growing country. I will concede, but a lot of pineapple in the pizza.

Good memories. A very large fraction of the banana markets, don't forget. So we punch above our weight in Fruits that don't grow there. There we go. The round is exciting. The overall growth of volume is exciting, but we wanted to hit the gong

for how many books you guys are selling. Can you give us the numbers there? Can you give us the numbers there? To scale that operation. Stripe Press just, well actually we announced in the letter we sold our millionth book but in fact since

incredible. We've actually now sold our 1.1 million book so we'll look through the next gonga too but we love books and they're very they're very egy eye proof oh yeah no

we've been a huge fan of so much of the Stripe Press catalog 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 you're doing on yeah great to have you guys on and congratulations to the whole team on

incredible to you guys TBPN is an amazing startup and it's super cool to see you guys to grow and built on Stripe in streaming world on our sector needs. Incorporated on Stripe,

built on Stripe. Our first ad deal ever was a live read at a live conference. I think we charged $50 and I sent someone a Stripe Link. We're talking about the 2025

pool of being the fastest ever. Yeah. Well, we'll have to have you to our internal Stripe show. So we'll be great. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your next. Congratulations.

Thanks, guys. Cheers. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcast, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.com.

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