Patrick Collison: belief

Transcript context

…That's a good question. 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 14 years in and they haven't converged yet. There's a lot of headroom there. Say Stripe is handling around a trillion dollars a year. When Stripe started out, the global economy was sixty to seventy trillion-ish. The global economy is now around a hundred trillion. We still have quite a bit of headroom before the amount of activity that is coming out to Stripe is really butting up against the ceiling of global economic growth. And of course, there's no ceiling on global economic growth for all sorts of reasons. It could be vastly higher than it is. And I don't even mean new technologies or AIs, but just all the basic per-capita math you can do around. What if everybody had an income on par with the US? One of the reasons I am so interested in working on Stripe is: it's the old line, the Lucas line, about how when you start thinking about differential rates of development in countries, it's hard to think about anything else. Why does Brazil have the particular income and GDP level that it does? Why does Poland have the level that it does? Why did Ireland have the trajectory that it did, where it went from being the sick man of Europe to now one of the wealthiest countries there? I feel like Stripe is some applied version of this question in practice, where you're building software products, but in some sense connected to or touching upon these questions of: Why aren't there more companies? What determines the growth rate of a company? 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 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 of this has been meaningfully digitized. And the prospects for optimizations there are still significantly underexplored. We find incredibly basic things, like 'just extending capital to businesses'. The reason we do that is not to generate profit from the loans, but because we find that the businesses, whom we extend the capital for, then just grow faster on a persistent subsequent basis. Or, trying to figure out, how does a business decide which countries it sells in? And you'll find for even the smallest business through to some of the largest businesses in the world, that these are very ad hoc and not deeply thought through questions. Like: "Why don't you sell in Mexico or in Brazil or whatever? — Well, it seemed complicated, and so we didn't quite get around to it." To your question about: where does the growth come from? There's still an awful lot of low-hanging fruit in just asking some of these incredibly basic questions. so we didn't quite get around to it." To your question about: where does the growth come from? There's still an awful lot of low-hanging fruit in just asking some of these incredibly basic questions. So, when we think about the way in which Stripe will continue to grow in the future, in some sense, it will obviously involve a lot of big businesses. You're now processing a significant amount of Amazon volume, there are these other businesses you're doing deals with. First, tell me how you think. It makes sense how an exponentially growing startup would contribute to exponential growth for Stripe. How does Stripe keep growing at the same trajectory, when it's these existing big businesses that you're partnering with? And second, the case for why these startups matter is so compelling, right? A new thing is coming into this world, and we should really support it and make sure it happens. Why is it compelling that Amazon can fulfill orders more efficiently? Those are very good questions. On the first one — you're right. Stripe is doomed to eventually grow at the rate of the economy, there is only a question of how long it takes to get there.…

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