Patrick Collison has spent nearly fifteen years building Stripe into the payment infrastructure layer for the internet — now processing roughly one trillion dollars a year. In this wide-ranging conversation with Dwarkesh Patel, recorded in February 2024, Collison speaks about Stripe's origins, its writing culture, the craft of building reliable software at scale, and why he thinks the most consequential challenges in the world require a fundamentally different career trajectory than Silicon Valley celebrates.
You have an excellent compilation of advice on your blog for people aged ten to twenty. What advice do you have for people in their twenties?
The one piece of advice I've been wondering about recently is this: I said that people in their teens should go to San Francisco. I wonder if people in their twenties shouldn't go to San Francisco. There's a significant set of people who should. But there is a set of career paths that people ought to pursue, and would derive most fulfillment from pursuing, that are also really valuable for the world, that require accumulating a lot of expertise and studying a domain in tremendous depth.
San Francisco valorizes striking out on your own, iconoclastically dismissing the received wisdom. It praises the founding archetypes and lore of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and all the rest. That's great, I'm happy that this phenomenon exists in the world. But the world needs lots of other things. A lot of really important inventions in the world require a very different trajectory. There are counterfactual versions of my life where I pursued that path — and who knows how well it would have worked.
On Stripe's writing culture — is it for the benefit of the writer or the reader?
They're not actually separable. That's my answer. For the reader, it's not just that it may be more efficient to communicate through text — though in many cases it is — but there's intertemporal benefit. Future readers can try to understand the through-line and the thought process that led us to this point. That's very considerable.
But it's also true that I and lots of people write things in order to organize their own thoughts. If that ability was taken away from me, I'd be meaningfully less effective. Literate cultures — textual cultures is a better term — are just a different thing. The kinds of collaboration that are possible, the kinds of consistency that can be achieved, are just fundamentally different. Bruno Latour spoke about how the printing revolution partially caused the scientific revolution by making knowledge more rigid. There are analogous dynamics organizationally.
“Textual cultures are just a different thing. The kinds of collaboration that are possible, the kinds of consistency that can be achieved, are fundamentally different.”
Could Stripe have been started decades earlier? Why didn't the existing payment companies get there first?
I'm hesitant to generalize too much because I only have maybe n equals one experience. The particular secular tailwinds we benefited from were tied to the rise of app stores, the on-demand economy, and the startup boom post-YC and the financial crisis. Those were idiosyncratic. The GFC was 2008–2009 and Stripe was founded in 2010.
Mostly my story of Stripe is one of market inefficiency. I do wonder why much of this didn't happen sooner. PayPal is at some level a kind of Stripe. There were many payment companies before PayPal. I think we just found some dimension of the problem that others weren't focused on — the developer experience, the API — and pursued it very earnestly.
Stripe deploys production services roughly a thousand times a day while maintaining five-and-a-half nines of reliability. How?
This is one of the things we've spent the most time on. Two things developers hate: slow development cycles and being paged at 2 AM for incidents. Given that Stripe handles about one percent of global GDP — roughly a trillion dollars a year — we're really terrified of outages.
So we work very hard to enable fast iteration and development cycles without having outages. We deploy production services in the core charge flow around one thousand times a day. Most of these services are automatically deployed — when anyone makes any production-ready change, it goes into production, meticulously orchestrated, running first on a small sliver of traffic and then incrementally more. About one thousand deploys per day at somewhat in excess of five-and-a-half nines. That works out to about two, two-and-a-half minutes of unavailability per year.
“We deploy production services roughly one thousand times a day at five-and-a-half nines of reliability. That's about two and a half minutes of unavailability per year.”
Where does future growth for Stripe come from — the internet economy expanding, or Stripe taking a larger share?
The customers that Stripe serves in aggregate are outgrowing the internet economy as a whole. At some point, those have to converge for obvious mathematical reasons. But we're fourteen years in and they haven't converged yet. There's a lot of headroom there. Stripe is handling around a trillion dollars a year. When Stripe started out, the global economy was sixty to seventy trillion. It's now around a hundred trillion. We still have quite a bit of headroom.
One of the reasons I'm so interested in working on Stripe is the old Lucas line about differential rates of development in countries — when you start thinking about it, it's hard to think about anything else. Stripe is some applied version of this question in practice. We haven't optimized the meta-system of business to any particularly great extent. For the vast majority of time, businesses have been offline, inefficient, analog. It's really only over the last one to two decades that a significant share has been meaningfully digitized, and the prospects for optimizations there remain significantly underexplored.
What is Stripe's vision for the payment infrastructure problem — interfaces on top of existing rails, or replacing the rails themselves?
The former. It's not that useful to build financial ecosystems that are self-contained. A financial island is not that helpful. It's much more valuable to build a financial air network. We would much prefer that Stripe plugged into every existing system, rail, and domestic organization, rather than that we tried to supplant them. This has been Stripe's strategy deliberately from the beginning.
The broader problem I think about is global programmable money orchestration — not just consumer-to-business payments, but business-to-business payments, payments involving credit, how you hold money, how you convert between currencies, how you represent money held by different legal entities. If we could just solve those really effectively, Stripe will be a very consequential organization. The counterfactual importance of building some of this stuff, as we go to newer markets that are more poorly served, is increasing rather than shrinking.
“We would much prefer that Stripe plugged into every existing rail and domestic organization, rather than trying to supplant them. A financial island is not that helpful.”
You mentioned Fast Grants and Arc Institute — what do those teach you about what science funding gets wrong?
We ran a survey of Fast Grants recipients asking about their normal work. We asked them if they had flexible funding — if they could direct their current research dollars however they wanted — how much their associated research program would change. Four out of five said their research agenda would change a lot if this constraint was removed.
Asking whether the NIH funding level should be X or 1.1X seems to me like a bad way to analyze this question, compared to: how constrained should an NIH grantee be in choosing their research agenda? Maybe their judgment is way better than that of the committees. Maybe there's a five-fold improvement to be generated just by making that one switch. I'm very skeptical of financially oriented frameworks that presume the only relevant constraint is dollars, when in practice it may be permits, labor shortages, or just how much freedom researchers have to follow the most promising leads.
What advice would you give about working with close collaborators — your brother John, the Arc co-founders?
Working with people you're close to is underrated. All the ventures of any significance in my life have not only been with others, but with other people I'm very close to. Sometimes one hears the advice that you shouldn't work with friends, maybe you shouldn't work with your partner. But for me it's been a really rewarding experience. I think John and I will probably work together for decades.
For us it's been both an important source of meaning and fulfillment, but also there's a real complementarity. Stripe would be a less effective company without either of us — not just from a bandwidth standpoint, but I think we bring genuinely different things to bear. I don't presume to know what makes those partnerships work for others, but I can say it has worked remarkably well for us.