John Collison: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think about startups as you have pre-distribution opportunities and post-distribution opportunities. And the pre-distribution opportunities are: what can you do to convince enough nodes to join your network and the post-distribution opportunities of what you do when you have enough nodes. Ambrook is just now crossing over in some regions. We have enough regional density with some of these nodes to get into a post-distribution world for some of our customers. But I think in that world of you have enough nodes in the network, it should be instant and free to transact within the Ambrook ecosystem. And I think a lot of what we are doing, or the vision is to be able to keep more capital in local communities. And I think that has been something that I’ve become increasingly passionate about, which is, for example, 90% of payments in US agriculture still go through paper check. And it’s not because they’re behind the times, it’s because digital payments can be expensive for a lot of these producers. And I think actually something that we’re building with… because of the Stripe Treasury network, is the ability to do these instant free payments within the deposit ecosystem. And ideally, those are within the ERP system they also have the context on both sides of the ERP. So my invoice is your bill. You don’t have to actually do the ARAP shuffle. Everything is reconciled on both sides. In the future we could say, OK, this category in your system actually maps to this chart of accounts category in this system. You can imagine a lot… what could you do when you actually have really rich metadata that’s going through the network? No, we think about this distinction a lot. I think it’s a very good one for startups of pre-distribution versus post-distribution. How do you get people using the product and then how do you make it better when you’re using the product? And when we started Stripe, we were very much building stripe in a single-player mode where you have your Stripe account and the fact that other people use Stripe is, well, they didn’t at the time. We were small. Whereas now a big part of how we can make the products better is the fact that there is so much internet commerce running on Stripe. I mean a very simple one, but it’s really started working, is Stripe Radar where it is now the case that most credit cards on the internet we’ve seen before. And so we know it’s suspicious if a credit card comes to us from a totally new device and totally new IP address and things like that. But that’s the kind of post-distribution thing where you can’t build that product initially, but when you have scale, it becomes very significant. I think one of the most rewarding things about building for small businesses is that you are able to build these real relationships with people who are entrusting you with their numbers and their future. And what can we do when we are translating just not just in the individual context of a single-player world, but the multiplayer world is communities. And I’ve just been thinking a lot about that, which is, what does rural resilience mean? What does economic resilience mean for a lot of people?…

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