Patrick Collison: evaluation

Transcript context

…But Stripe does, right? Presumably, it depends what you're building. For TikTok, it's more important that their interface is simple. Even if their implementation is a mess, that's probably OK. Not saying it is, I have no idea. Whereas for Stripe, people are, on some level, purchasing our architecture or purchasing their ability to do certain things rather than some different set of things, because of what our architecture makes easy and possible. If by interface you mean the GUI, then maybe we can draw some separation there. But we don't really draw that distinction. We think of the interface to Stripe as being the architecture. No one else seems to agree with me, but I often think of Stripe as similar to Mathematica, where we're selling a self-contained universe to model whatever it is of interest to you. We're providing some primitives, interfaces and tools and so forth, to enable your modeling. But fundamentally, we're helping you do something on your own terms. In that sense, I don't think the architecture and the interface are necessarily that separable. That's a really interesting analogy. Although, if you think of Mathematica, the entry that that's giving you to, is just the platonic objects of math, whereas for you guys, the entry is to Visa error codes. The end object is not platonic.…

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