Patrick Collison on AI + a16z
Patrick Collison on Stripe’s Early Choices, Smalltalk, and What Comes After Coding
Skip this if you have heard appearance 596: it is effectively the same episode under a different feed and adds no meaningful material to the corpus. The underlying discussion is substantive, especially on Stripe’s stack and development environments.
know initially we decided to use MongoDB at Stripe and we decided to use Ruby at Stripe uh and those are still quite foundational technologies uh uh at Stripe and uh you know we had to build a lot of you know infrastructure in order to make uh MongoDB as fault tolerant and as distributed and as um durable and as reliable and everything as we needed it to be and as it now is. uh like we had uh Stripe's critical API availability last year was 99.99986%. Uh which is 44 seconds of unavail unavailability through the whole year. Um uh which is we we think others don't
Patrick Collison discusses the unconventional technical choices behind his early companies and Stripe, emphasizing the long-term effects of APIs, data models, and development environments. He also explores AI’s potential to transform programming and biology while cautioning that economic and societal outcomes remain highly uncertain.