Patrick Collison on The a16z Show
John and Patrick Collison on Stripe's Growth, Agent Commerce, and the Future of Software
Most of the substantive material—especially the agentic-commerce thesis and Stripe’s read on new businesses—substantially repeats the earlier TBPN appearance. Worth skipping unless you want the brief Stripe Press sales update or a compact restatement of Patrick’s current outlook.
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. 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 stablecoins and AI, because we think you're going to need blockchains and better blockchains. Up until now, the economics of software have been conceived of as fixed costs 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.
Patrick Collison participates substantively in the interview, discussing Stripe's growth data, the emergence of agentic commerce, and the possibility that software will be generated bespoke at the moment of use. He also shares the milestone of Stripe Press selling more than 1.1 million books.