John Collison: belief

Transcript context

…You really can. Then just think about running a subscription business where you care as much about customer acquisition, you care a lot about churn because that's how your lifetime value equation works. You think about, "Okay, if I had a budget of how much I spend on service, and now I can do 100 conversations more than I could before, can I actually reduce my churn rate? Can I improve lifetime value?" Then the interesting thing is then you realize that, "Wow, all of my competitors have access to the same technology." And then you're saying, "Okay, what are my competitors going to do to actually take my customers away from me?" Then that's where you start to get things like, the ATM machine didn't actually reduce bank branches because some bank had the great idea of, I'm going to put different people in this branch. It'll generate revenue. All of a sudden, it wasn't job displacement, but something completely different. I think the exciting part in our world is you're taking something that was just so expensive that people literally hid their phone numbers so people couldn't call them, and you're making it inexpensive and delightful. The thing I'm excited about is the second and third-order effects are going to be really interesting and very hard to predict, and that's pretty exciting. I want to come back to this idea of the agent as the UI because I find it really interesting. We talked about this a bit in our annual letter in the context of agentic commerce, where, again, I think people are trying to pitch too much of the end state of fully autonomous, the robots just choosing a few. The point we always make is, let's just start with not having to fill out the web form. No one likes filling out forms on the internet. Speak for yourself.…

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