Serial entrepreneur Pieter Levels on building in public and living as a digital nomad

Pieter Levels joins John Collison to discuss building successful online businesses as a digital nomad, thoughts on European accelerationism, and Pieter’s unconventional methods and philosophy as a bootstrapped founder making over $3 million per year. Full episode transcript https://cheekypint.transistor.fm/4/transcript Timestamps (00:00) Intro (00:37) Pieter’s resume (01:33) Trying to make money online as a 12 year old (02:43) Being one of the first YouTube creators (03:18) Who should indie hack (04:31) What Pieter hates about VC-backed businesses (07:51) Who is digital nomading for? (09:15) Learning from @patio11 (10:17) 125k tweets and the brand of @levelsio (10:59) Getting referrals from ChatGPT (11:43) What Pieter automates with AI (13:02) Investing and home country bias (15:05) Hacking thermostats (15:57) EU acceleration movement (18:34) Entrepreneurship in the EU (19:26) Pieter's reflections on Stripe’s API (21:21) Looking 5 years into the future

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think it's actually good that it's going so bad in Europe, because it's almost like the patient is so sick.

• 0:04John Collison?

  Never raised a crisis?

• 0:06Speaker 00

  The problem is, if you're a founder and you raise money, like you kind of need to go big or bust, right? It's hard to stay in between. I also work really hard, because I tweeted like, I think, 125,000 times over 10 years, so it's like 40 tweets a day.

• 0:18John Collison?

  You've contributed so many brain cells.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:20John Collison?

  Spending time on X.

• 0:24John Collison?

  Pieter Levels, one of the most prolific indie hackers and digital nomads, whose businesses now do more than $3 million in revenue, and it's just Peter working on them.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Cheers.

• 0:37John Collison?

  I think you are maybe the most prominent indie hacker. Nomad List got to 700K in ARR. RemoteOK has gotten to $3.4 million in revenue. PhotoAI got to 600K in ARR. And these are all just you. Like, these are not startups that you have started. These are just Pieter Levels productions. You're also the vanguard of the digital nomad thing, and so you've lived in more than 40 countries and 150 cities?

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. I've mostly just been working on my laptop for the last decade, right? Like, traveling around, just making stuff, making little, like, creative projects that I needed to solve my problems. And then, most of the times, nobody else needed that problem solved. But like, a few times it worked. And then, I mean, I used Stripe a lot, right? Like, when Stripe came to Holland, back then, I lived in Holland. It was 2014, I think. Then I was like, oh, shit, now I can start making money. And that was the year I started making money. When I was a kid, I think I was like 12 years old, I was making websites too. And I wanted to charge money on the internet. And I remember signing up to Worldpay, I think it was Worldpay. And it was a giant contract, it was in America, and I live in Holland. And I asked my dad to sign for it. And my dad read the whole, like, contract.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  And I was like, "You're liable for damages up to $100 million." I mean, it's like, what am I signing for? I'm like, "No, dad, you don't understand." Like, "I need to make money on the internet, just sign it." And he signed it, and we faxed it, we faxed it to America. And I had a merchant account and I never sold anything.

• 2:03John Collison?

  Yeah.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  Luckily, maybe because otherwise we would be liable for damages.

• 2:07John Collison?

  I feel like this is a common thread amongst entrepreneurs of doing, getting their parents to help them with things they shouldn't do. Patrick, at one point, got a demo of like a Sun Microsystems workstation.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  Oh, my god.

• 2:17John Collison?

  Remember, these were like very high-end workstations. And he just filled out the form and like, you know, got them and, you know, they came with a truck and they unloaded it.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Oh, my god.

• 2:25John Collison?

  And he was playing with it. And I just remember the Sun Microstation's rep was calling the house. And they were like, is Mr. Collison interested in continuing with a purchase? And our mom was like, Mr. Collison is doing his homework and you need to stop calling me. And they hadn't realized that he was like 12 years old at the time or whatever.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  Man, amazing.

• 2:43John Collison?

  Yeah. Did you try to monetize projects before you started building them?

• 2:45Speaker 00

  No, because... So what happened, I was, I was making music and I was DJing. I was organizing like nightclub nights in Holland and UK and stuff. German-based music. But drum, you're Irish, you know, drum and bass. Like drum and bass, most people don't really know, but British people know, Irish people know. So when YouTube started monetizing videos, I was uploading my music already. So I was one of the first YouTube monetizing people. And I was like number one or number two in Holland for a while in top channels. But the thing is, I started making money, like $1,000, then $2,000, then $8,000 per month, a lot of money. And I was in universities.

• 3:19John Collison?

  So it seems like you've done well on this, kind of being a person on the internet. How much of a partisan are you on the topic of the indie hacker approach? Because obviously, most of tech doesn't run on the indie hacker way. Where again, you're building multimillion-dollar revenue businesses all by yourself. And do you think way more people should be doing the indie hacking thing?

• 3:40Speaker 00

  So, I mean, I think the internet makes you partisan, right? So I, I don't think I've been partisan much, but I think...

• 3:46John Collison?

  Until you got an X.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, X does help with it. But you have to understand, 2014, 14, when I entered kind of the startup world, there was barely any indie, there was no indie hacking. There was no bootstrapping almost, except Patrick McKenzie, you know, who you know well. You would, you would find investors, you would raise money, you would grow fast, you would hire a lot of people, you'd get a big office. Remote didn't exist, right, remote work. So...

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Compared to that, like what's possible now, there's different alternatives possible now.

• 4:12John Collison?

  Yes.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  And you can make a lot of money with this. I don't think you can become a billionaire. Maybe we will see that in the future, but.

• 4:16John Collison?

  So you think for talented engineers who have a commercial

• 4:23John Collison?

  brain and who are good at product, they should at least seriously evaluate the path of just building their own successful products on the internet like you.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you just, look, what I hate most about VC stuff is when you see people burn money. You probably hate this as well. A company with no users raise fifty million dollars, a hundred million dollars. And you're like, what is this product? Like it doesn't have any traction. And it's just hype. We've all seen these startups and they just disappear. And I think it's much more interesting to, and maybe you guys did the same with Stripe, but validate first and build a business first. See if you get traction, like get to fifty K or a hundred K a month.

• 4:58John Collison?

  No, look, I'm with you. You know, despite the fact Stripe has obviously raised VC. We just like started writing code. We got our first paying customer way before we raised any money for the business.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 5:07John Collison?

  And then just kind of grew and grew and grew. And it's a little bit different for a company in the financial services space. That you need to be well capitalized.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, but this is the thing. So it's natural. It's kind of organic, right? Even if you raise money, you did it in an organic way. And you only raise more when you see the growth coming.

• 5:21John Collison?

  Have you ever been tempted to raise for one of your projects?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  No, but a lot of VCs have been in my DMs and they want to invest and and I think now, because now like I'm financially independent, I made a lot of money. Now I could do it because now I'm at a point where like it sounds fun to play with other people's money, you know, like, but also in a serious way, it sounds fun to go like to a bigger thing.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  I mean, that's something you typically say after you've been in a week, a week in San Francisco, right? You start talking about this, but I'm not convinced yet, but I think now will be fun, for example. But the problem is if you're a founder and you raise money, you kind of need to go big or bust, right? It's kind of, it's hard to stay in between. You can't like make ten million dollars a year. You kind of need to make a hundred million dollars a year. You kind of need to become a unicorn. That's difficult because. The odds of that happening are not super high, like it's a few percentage maybe. So most people don't get there. And they do spend like five years or I don't know, seven years of their twenties on that. And that's something where if you would be in Indy, you would have a ten million dollar a year company. You have a hundred percent ownership. It's amazing. You have so much money.

• 6:26John Collison?

  You're saying as a VC funded startup, you're kind of locking in the expectations for your company in advance as to what's successful and what's not. And it's quite liberating to just start building things. Peter Level's Enterprises broadly is making three point one million dollars a year. And you've launched seventy projects?

• 6:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, probably more, you know, because I don't know what this is, but it's like.

• 6:45John Collison?

  You've launched so many that you lose track, but it's only seventy. And do you shut them down if they're like becoming too small to be?

• 6:51Speaker 00

  No, so I try to keep a lot of them running. I like to keep the internet history existing, like it's sad to see all these websites disappear, you know?

• 6:58John Collison?

  Yes, yes.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  So I keep them on my server running.

• 7:00John Collison?

  URLs shouldn't break.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  No, yeah. One project that still runs on Stripe is go effing do it. I don't know if I can curse, but gofuckingdoit.com. Where, for example, you want to quit smoking. So you're right, I want to quit smoking on the deadline is like, or I don't want to smoke. And the deadline is like one December two thousand twenty five. And you have to enter the email of your friend and he checks it. And then you enter your credit card with Stripe and it creates a customer. And it doesn't charge the customer yet and you set a price, so for example, a hundred dollars. And then on one December two thousand twenty five, your friend gets the email, did he smoke? You know, the last.

• 7:33John Collison?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  And he says yes or no, and if yes, you get charged and I get the money. And the product still works and it still makes, I think, like fifty dollars a month. And it's been, I didn't change the code in ten years.

• 7:43John Collison?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:44Speaker 00

  PHP, you know, like.

• 7:45John Collison?

  Yes, yes.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  Still runs.

• 7:46John Collison?

  So part of what you're doing is you're creating all these businesses that have actually pretty long lifetimes as well.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:51John Collison?

  Who should try the digital nomad thing? Who does it appeal to?

• 7:54Speaker 00

  I think anyone, doesn't matter if you're twenty or seventy or whatever. It's so interesting because you changed as a person also, but I think digital nomad is so cool because.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Leaving your own country, which I did the first time, I did a study exchange program. I went to Korea in like two thousand ten, I think. And from university and I was like, this is a completely different world. I never left Europe before. I went to France, you know, like Italy, but like this is like there's neon signs and it's like Faraway places. It's crazy. This changed you on such a fundamental level, going to the other side of the world. It's amazing and it's way safer than you think, like usually nothing happens and I've never been robbed except in my hometown. Mm hmm. There was a burglary, so in ten years of this, nothing ever happens. So yeah, I think it completely expands your horizon. There's nothing I can recommend as much as people just go travel and don't be scared, man, just like there's always people who will help you. Mm hmm. If you don't speak the language, you can use your arms and like

• 8:47Speaker 00

  How did you make it not be lonely, not knowing anyone? It was extremely lonely. Oh, okay, just wild. No, it was like, it was like, I was like, this is amazing. Yeah. And then you're, you, you, you get, like you lose contact with the grounds of your own culture, your home country. And it's, everything's fine, people are nice, but you're like, um. It fundamentally removes your foundational culture at some point, it starts You become untethered, yeah. Yeah, untethered, that's it. And you have to rebuild that up and that's a psychologically taxing process, it takes some years. Yes. And what have you learned from Paddy Eleven? Dude's an amazing guy, like wild inspiration. So you have to go in the time machine back in two thousand thirteen or even earlier. I'm reading Hacker News in university and I read two types of articles. I read, uh, we're raising forty million dollars for a startup.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  Back then, Hacker News was full of raising, it was like special. Now you don't see it anymore, now it's more tech. And you'd read like Patrick McKenzie, I made sixty thousand dollars this year with Appointment Reminder, this site, which is like, he would go to hair salons, I think, and then sell his Appointment Reminder website. And I was, and he would write It just reminded people to show up for their appointments. Yes, like it was SMS, it was like amazing. And I would read this post, I was like, this is amazing, with this guy. Like sixty K a year, that's, that's big, like we need to do this. So seeing somebody making a cool, like honest business and another guy like Young Fu, John Young Fu, um. He, it was a few years after Patrick McKenzie, but he was also traveling as a nomad in Singapore and Asia and he was Well dressed and he was making a beautiful sass. And I was like, I was impressed that they were making like honest, cool, clean businesses.

• 10:16John Collison?

  Yes.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  And I want to do the same thing.

• 10:17John Collison?

  One thing I was reflecting on is the fact that you are now a big um brand in a way, the brand of Pieter Levels. Where, well, no, think about it, you sold fifty thousand dollars of pre-orders for your book. Before you had written any of the book, you just said, I might write a book and buy it here. And you got fifty thousand dollars of sales. And so to what extent does the recipe now work? Because you are launching these products and you know, if someone else was to build the flight simulator or if someone else was.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've seen these replies too.

• 10:46John Collison?

  And that it wouldn't sell as well.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's man, I think it's of course part of it. But I also work really hard because I tweeted like, I think a hundred twenty five thousand times over ten years. So it's like forty tweets a day.

• 10:56John Collison?

  You've contributed so many brain cells.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, so like.

• 10:58John Collison?

  Spending time on X.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 10:59John Collison?

  Are you getting a lot of chat G P T referrals as people talk about this?

• 11:02Speaker 00

  Amazing, yeah, so chat G P T, so I've seen the growth. Chat G P T a month ago was um, so if you have the Google traffic, that's like a hundred. Chat G P T was like four, so four percent. And now it's twenty percent.

• 11:14John Collison?

  Wait, in the last month, chat G P T has gone from four percent to twenty percent.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it went five X. And I checked other websites, it's the same story. And I think it's beneficial for me because it's very hard for me as a solo person to like do S E O stuff and I hate S E O stuff. I just want to make a cool product and a cool website with a nice title and whatever.

• 11:32John Collison?

  You talk in your book about uh automation being really important for making the indie hacker recipe work, because I guess if you get grounded in operational work, you're not going to be able to do multiple projects. You won't do many shots on goal, everything like that. And so how much has the automation of your business tasks improved over the past ten years, if at all?

• 11:51Speaker 00

  Man, it's been amazing for me.

• 11:53John Collison?

  Okay, what have you automated?

• 11:54Speaker 00

  So for example, Nomad List, it's like this big, it's a big website. You can visit, you can find places to live and work remotely, but you can also join a community, you can pay for like a hundred dollars. You join a community of like meetups, chat group, um all this stuff. This chat group was like held to maintain, it was, I mean, you know from communities, so much drama. I've had crazy stories.

• 12:12John Collison?

  Wait, if they are content moderating the community now?

• 12:15Speaker 00

  So exactly, so so it was very hard for me to moderate this stuff and it was very hard for me to be impartial.

• 12:21John Collison?

  Yeah.

• 12:22Speaker 00

  So you have like politically different sides and I I'm I feel I'm kind of in the middle, kind of neutral. But they don't like the moment you ban one side, they're like, oh, you're this, you're that side. And so with G P T. It's actually neutral, like it really, it's really good. You you write, I write down the rules of my chat group.

• 12:38John Collison?

  Yeah.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  And it's forty thousand people. Um, and it's it doesn't ban anymore. It just mutes people for like a day or ten minutes or.

• 12:44John Collison?

  Like the debate moderators in the presidential debates.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, same. They they mute, they just muted, right?

• 12:49John Collison?

  Exactly.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  So that's it. So like, um, I can either hire people or I can just use G P T A P I and, um. I don't like hiring because I need to manage people and I don't really like manage people because I it's not my thing. I like to create things.

• 13:02John Collison?

  Well, in your book, you recommend that people build for their own understanding of the problems they have. Shouldn't you make an investment product? You and Warren Buffett basically have the same views, which is a lot of money managers and kind of wealth management products.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  Come on.

• 13:15John Collison?

  Are very bad because they're very charging you very high fees to invest in bad things. And actually, what the vast majority of people should do is buy a simple index, maybe the S and P five hundred or the M S C I World or something. And then just leave the money there and don't touch it and especially don't sell it, don't draw that.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Vanguard.

• 13:30John Collison?

  Exactly.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  But Vanguard already does that.

• 13:31John Collison?

  Yeah, but there aren't good products for Europeans, I feel like. Uh, that's like less common.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Buy them via Ireland.

• 13:36John Collison?

  Okay.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  U C I T S.

• 13:37John Collison?

  Sure, you do. But again, I feel like, you know, if you want an idea for the next business, I think good investment.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Lot of money in there.

• 13:42John Collison?

  Good investment products for Europeans.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  But then you you increase the price. It's a problem. Like if you resell a Vanguard D T F that has zero point zero seven fee per year.

• 13:49John Collison?

  No, you need large scale to, yeah, make it work. And maybe that doesn't fit with the indie hacker.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  No, I think it's a cool idea because it helps people get richer and wealthier.

• 13:56John Collison?

  Yeah. And you know, there's this home country bias in stock purchasing where people in Germany buy German stocks.

• 14:01Speaker 00

  This is crazy. I talk to my parents. They're like.

• 14:04John Collison?

  They're yeah, they're buying the Dutch stock market probably.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  No, and I'm like, you need to buy S and P five hundred. They're like, no, we're not going to buy in America. We're going to buy Royal Dutch Shell. I'm like, come on. And they have all their money in Shell, like in oil. And then I have you seen Tesla, like electric cars now? And they're like, no, it's not going to happen. You know, so, yeah, I think it is very important. I think, look, if you make money, like as Indian or even as a V C founder, like it's very important to. Not spend all this money because you're you have a limited time in startups to make money, I think.

• 14:33John Collison?

  Yes.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  And put this money in the market and and it doesn't have to be only America like I always talk about Asia. And it's very hard to benefit in Asia from the market from the economies rising because the public market is not as efficient as in the US. So you should definitely have as a P500, but definitely you can look at other ETFs in the rest of the world. I've got some China.

• 14:49John Collison?

  Yeah.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Always never doing well.

• 14:51John Collison?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  But at some point, I'll be right, you know, so.

• 14:54John Collison?

  Yes.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's very important to invest your money well. And most people don't know, most people don't know personal finance like they don't, you don't get it in school. You know, um, you save money, but your money, your cash disappears.

• 15:04John Collison?

  Yes.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  The moment you have it.

• 15:05John Collison?

  Yes. Are you one of those people who hacks the thermostat when you get to a hotel room?

• 15:09Speaker 00

  I've tried, but I've never succeeded.

• 15:11John Collison?

  I also have failed. I've watched the YouTube videos.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's always some different model Siemens, you know, like.

• 15:17John Collison?

  I think they're wise to such people like they make it hard to get to override them now.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Air conditioning problem.

• 15:22John Collison?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Such a big problem.

• 15:23John Collison?

  We need people in the comments to teach us how to override the hotel thermostats because the ones that are set to like, you know, seventy two degrees Fahrenheit or twenty two degrees Celsius in Europe, I mean, that should be a.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  I mean, how many times do you get back to Europe like often, right?

• 15:34John Collison?

  Often, yeah, yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  It's it's a massive problem.

• 15:37John Collison?

  The European hotels and air conditioning, it's not a good situation.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  No, but it's it's like it's Airbnb too. Like my friend went to an Airbnb in Italy and it said, don't put it below twenty five degrees because of regulation. It's like this is unacceptable and all the studies show like, look at like.

• 15:51John Collison?

  For sleep, you actually need pretty cold.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  You need really cold.

• 15:54John Collison?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  Like the sleep quality gets so good.

• 15:56John Collison?

  Yeah, we're talking about European air conditioning. You've talked about the EU accelerationism movement. Um, Quas, what is required for EU accelerationism?

• 16:04Speaker 00

  So I think it was two years ago, one year ago, um, I saw Bev Jaisels, who's a Gilliam Verdon. He made EOC, which is like effective accelerationism, which is like, let's accelerate America again, like it's been a very depressing time, especially with COVID. Let's look at the benefits of technology and AI for the future. And I thought, that's amazing. We need to do the same for Europe. So I did EU slash O C, like let's do this for Europe because Europe is, it's the same kind of like depressing kind of down vibe about the future. And I understand because there's a lot of problems. It's not an easy life for a lot of people. So that got a lot of traction.

• 16:37John Collison?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  And um, I crowdsourced this like bug board where everybody could submit their idea how to save Europe, how to fix Europe. And like. Tens of thousands of people submit ideas and then they upload each other's ideas and stuff. I think number one is just like remove the regulatory burden for new businesses.

• 16:53John Collison?

  Yep.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  And there's other stuff like remove the cookie banner and all this stuff. And I hope it will be easier in Europe to run, to start a business, run a business.

• 17:00John Collison?

  Yes.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  As easy as it is in America.

• 17:03John Collison?

  Yes.

• 17:03Speaker 00

  I think there's so much, nobody, nobody doubts the European talent or the intelligence. Like it's cool, smart, ambitious people. But they're like, they're getting, there's a ceiling for them. They can't go higher because it's, they're getting pushed down by governments, by regulation. And it's like, what are you doing like European countries? Like you have amazing people, you could compete easily.

• 17:25John Collison?

  I, I think there's kind of two things. One is where the regs are just bad. And the second is where the regulations are not standardized. Where places where, you know, employment law is really annoyingly different across European countries. And so if you're a 10 person startup and you employ people across Europe, it's actually really cumbersome. Whereas in the United States, that's quite easy.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the problem with Europe is, um, it's very funny. You have all these different countries and the, they have kind of the left side of the political spectrum are like not very pro-business. They're more for regulation and for protecting people and their, and the climate change and stuff. And then you have the, the right side, which is pro-business, but they're also nationalists. But the problem is what we need is like pro-business and federal Europe. Like you need to be pro-Europe.

• 18:08John Collison?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  And, um, that's not nationalist, and you'd be pro-business. So it doesn't exist.

• 18:13John Collison?

  Yes.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  So it's like, where do you start? I think it's actually good that it's going so bad in Europe now. Because it's almost like the patient is so sick.

• 18:21John Collison?

  Never raised a crisis?

• 18:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, like finally people, finally Europeans are kind of like, hmm, maybe we should do something. Like two years ago, when I would tweet about this, they said, yeah, stop talking bad about Europe. Like it's going great here.

• 18:32John Collison?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  Now they're like, okay, maybe we need to do something.

• 18:35John Collison?

  What would you highlight as the ideas that need fixing?

• 18:40Speaker 00

  I think the problem is if there's not a lot of opportunities in Europe for people to to get jobs or start businesses, then they're gonna look down on Americans getting rich with these big businesses and because they're jealous. Europeans are jealous and you need to change this idea that business is bad, that getting rich is bad. Getting rich is simply a representation of your added value to the world economy in most cases, of course as edge cases. Generally, the money on your bank account is how much value added to society.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  And in Europe, that that completely does not like they don't even they really think different. In America, you get much more respect for for being an entrepreneur. But I would I would say, don't be afraid of money. Like, money is a tool in this world to, you know, to change the world.

• 19:27John Collison?

  If you're running Stripe, how would you fix?

• 19:32Speaker 00

  I think it's going really well recently. I think it wasn't going well after COVID. There was a few years where things were getting the API was getting more and more complicated. We all complained about it. There was every it felt like it was being run by engineers, not by people who actually use Stripe, like illogical defaults on the API, you know, like one time I had this bug and it was from the Stripe API because it changed and it didn't create a customer anymore. Everybody was a guest. I was like, why would I want people to be a guest? Like, I can't even carry them as a customer anymore. Those kind of things. But now it's now it seems much better and it seems to be like sanity has returned. But it's scary and it must be scary for you because you're running a big company. It's very hard

• 20:12Speaker 00

  to to manage a company from small to big and not become like corporate, you know. Of course, you're always corporate because you need to do B two B sales, it becomes more corporate. But you need to keep this the original Stripe mentality of like was simple, right? Stripe JS was one line of code you would add to your page and you had a payment button, you know. Keeping that is so important, keeping the original soul of the company. And I think you're doing a great job because essentially, I don't want to go into Stripe, do anything. I want to go there to see how much money I make and I want to go back to my coffee and code a little bit. Like, I see all these new features for Stripe, like workflows and I think it's very cool, but I don't have time to do this stuff.

• 20:47John Collison?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Because it's not that important for me.

• 20:49John Collison?

  I think our perspective is you should be able to get started with anything.

• 20:55John Collison?

  Instantly, you shouldn't even need to integrate an API. You should just be able to send a payment link or something like that.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Exactly, it's amazing, yeah.

• 21:00John Collison?

  You know, I'm always saying to people that, you know, generally, people will not even want to start by integrating the API. They'll want to start by sending people to a hosted page.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what I do now, like a payment link, yeah.

• 21:08John Collison?

  But you will, over time, get to, we think the workflow engine is really cool. Because if you want to build something complex, you don't have to build it yourself. But if someone is starting with the workflow engine, then something's gone horribly wrong, you know what I mean?

• 21:18Speaker 00

  I think so, the challenge is like exposing them slowly to all the stuff that's possible.

• 21:22John Collison?

  Exactly. Last question, if we're back here in five years, will things be kind of similar where you've worked on a bunch of projects that are working really nicely? Will things be different where maybe you have sold a few of the projects? Maybe you've started a VC-funded startup and raised a billion dollars from SoftBank? You know, exactly. But I'm just curious, what does the next five years hold?

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Man, I have no clue. I, it would be so funny if you become VC. I've been starting to invest.

• 21:46John Collison?

  Yeah, maybe you become a VC.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  No, I've been starting to invest. And every time I invest, I feel like, I feel like bad. Because I feel like a faker, you know? But like I invested in Curse, for example, like very nice and.

• 21:58John Collison?

  That seems like that will, that'll do okay for you.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  Well, who knows? But, but yeah, it's, it's fun to, I think you need to be neuroflex. You need to be a little bit flexible with your neurons. And like, you can change your ways a little bit. And, and it's interesting to try different stuff. But yeah, I'm really enjoying life with my girlfriend now. And it's, we're still traveling a lot, it's fun. And we meet all these cool people here. And like, I want that to continue. And I'm just very happy. I'm every day grateful to be able to live this life and it's so good. So, thank you.

• 22:31John Collison?

  Thanks for coming by.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.