Patrick Collison & John Collison - A Business State of Mind - [Invest Like the Best, EP.348]

My guests this week are the co-founders of Stripe, Patrick and John Collison. My conversation with John in 2020 is still one of our most popular. A key theme that emerged from that first discussion was John’s boundless curiosity for all things business and this conversation continues that thread. We talk about setting a strategy and culture that attracts ambition, why the returns to sweating the details are high, and how they view Stripe’s progress against their mission to increase the GDP of the internet. Please enjoy this great and wide-ranging discussion with John and Patrick Collison. Buy a ticket to Patrick and David Senra's live show this Thursday in NYC. Listen to Founders Podcast Founders Episode 311: James Cameron Subscribe to Colossus's New Show: Art of Investing For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the modern research platform for leading investors, and provider of Canalyst. Tired of calculating fully-diluted shares outstanding? Access every publicly-reported datapoint and industry-specific KPI through their database of over 4,000 drivable global models hand-built by a team of sector-focused analysts, 35+ industry comp sheets, and Excel add-ins that let you use their industry-leading data in your own spreadsheets. Tegus’ models automatically update each quarter, including hard to calculate KPIs like stock-based compensation and organic growth rates, empowering investors to bypass the friction of sourcing, building and updating models. Make efficiency your competitive advantage and take back your time today. As a listener, you can trial Canalyst by Tegus for free by visiting tegus.co/patrick. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes (00:03:16) - (First question) - Stripe's curiosity-driven growth fuels enduring success and expansion (00:08:34) - Why companies should resonate with founders' ideas but also have strong enduring cultures (00:012:27) - Stripe aims to reduce friction and expand global commerce by solving practical barriers (00:25:59) - Simplifying processes for startups and large companies to drive growth efficiently (00:29:11) - Analyzing the enduring stories of ancient companies (00:35:44) - Success in Hollywood and academia depends on unmeasurable vision and knowledge (00:40:11) - Stripe's ubiquity, self-serve nature, and collective care drive its unique status (00:43:16) - Success in tech is grounded in user-centricity, care, and connecting with customers (00:48:17) - Parental influence on becoming entrepreneurs is complex (00:50:21) - Adult perspective on parents, admiration for their work, and ongoing philanthropy (00:52:30) - Stripe's challenges include complexity due to diverse payment methods and global programmable accessibility (00:57:27) - Aiming for long-term durability, Stripe prioritizes beauty and craftsmanship in its pursuit (01:02:50) - The most memorable conversation they had between them (01:05:30) - Why the launch of Atlas was a defining moment in Stripe’s history (01:06:35) - How their 25-year-old selves would react to what they are doing now (01:10:19) - The various ways in which they feel proud of each other (01:14:35) - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for them

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

• 0:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 0:35Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Neal and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Patrick O'Neal is the CEO and founding partner of Positive Sum and the CEO of O'Neal Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum or O'Neal Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum or O'Neal Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

• 1:32Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  My two guests today are John and Patrick Collison, co-founders of Stripe. My conversation with John in 2020 was, for a long time, our most downloaded episode. In this conversation, we went in a totally different direction, talking about Stripe, the global internet economy and beyond. This year, along with John Malone, John and Patrick were recipients of the Singleton Prize, given annually by the Singleton Foundation to active CEOs. The foundation was recognizing John and Patrick as up and coming CEOs in the mold of Henry Singleton, who I spent years studying and who heavily influenced my own thinking on business and investing, both in my quantitative investing days and today. This was one of those conversations that I went into with tons of topics to cover,

• 2:14Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  only to get through close to zero of them because I became so wrapped up in other interesting topics with two of the smarter people that I've ever encountered. I hope you enjoyed this great and wide-ranging conversation with John and Patrick Collison.

• 2:28Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I was talking to Will Thorndike about what was so interesting about Henry Singleton's life and career, and it was just wild adaptability. He just never held on to a strategy. He just adapted and updated his strategy for the prevailing conditions and it whiplashed around all the time. And then he did it for a very long period of time. The classic, don't interrupt compounding unnecessarily. And I'm really curious about how you think about that vis a vis Stripe, when such a big part of its compounding potential is born of your two curiosities about the world and about business and about technology, and how you make sure that it's set up in the right way, so that Stripe is the recipient of the reinvestment of your curiosity. So that, yes, payments is probably endlessly fascinating, and maybe

• 3:10Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  if you just stayed in the payments lane forever, it would be interesting enough to you both that you stick around and the business and the team benefits from your curiosity. But how do you think about that, which seems to be a common theme in technology businesses, that technologists tend to be very omni-curious, interested in a lot of things, pursue a lot of things, and there's leakage, there's enterprise value leakage or something. How do you think about that 40 years hence, and what Stripe can become?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  I think for founders, there's two kinds of curiosity that have a lot of business value are probably important. There's also a lot of forms of curiosity that don't have particular business value, like Patrick coming to me with his latest scheme on carbon dioxide. There was a time when Stripe's conference room- If it's true, when we saw this, it produced so much value- You never know. How much would you pay for an increased pass rate at Stripe by 30%? There was a time when all the conference rooms had carbon dioxide monitors in them, so you could monitor that. It does get very high during a big meeting when it feels stuffy.

• 4:06Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's a real thing.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  That is noticeable on the CO- exactly, on the CO2 detector, or endocrine disruptors, or whatever the lay. So there's lots of random ones. But I would say on the business curiosity front, one is absolutely, like you say, businesses are different at every scale. And so Stripe has been different at 2 people, to 50 people, to currently 7,000 people. I think you have to be curious about what is required to run a good company at that stage, and what's required to run Stripe well, really matters. And one thing we try to do is just spend a lot of time looking at all the other companies- And what they've done, not that you want to blindly emulate them, but you should at least understand. It's funny, I remember Tyler Cowen commenting about Magnus Carlsen, that he entered some chess trivia contest.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  There was just like literally about chess trivia and won it. He knew the most chess trivia out of anyone who's in this contest. And that's not a coincidence. I think that the world's number one player has also studied the most about all the chess histories, extremely knowledgeable in that. I don't know if we'd win the business trivia, but I think we'd have a respectable showing because you'd have to understand what makes Apple versus Amazon. You cannot imagine two companies that work more differently than the two of those. One is totally functional, one is this GM model, and yet they're both really successful models. And so I think it's useful to have a framework for how that stuff works. So anyway, that's one. The second is, I was actually just reading the galley for Poor Charlie's Almanack. You probably know Stripe presses comes out in November. I was flipping through the galley of that. Now, he has the famous speech about the multiple mental models and just cribbing the best mental models from different industries.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  I don't know if you think that every founder kind of has to do it, but I do think it's probably effective to be able to just know the top mental models from finance and from engineering and from product and from sales and stuff like that. I don't see how you could be that effective without being pretty curious on how do I learn the most important mental models from this particular domain or function?

• 5:55Speaker 03

  I think it's a really perceptive question and I'd never thought consciously about it before. I think there's the line about whenever you see somebody make some observation about capitalism, you should replace that with people. Just like it's the nature of just voluntary arrangements of people. There's, I guess in science, I don't know if this is true, but maybe it's true that we've had a lot of success going down and unearthing the most fundamental laws and disaggregations and decompositions, whatever. And now it's not like we're fully done. There were still some unanswered questions, but the returns to going down more seem to have diminished. We've gone down pretty far, but then so much of science today is about what you find going up and combining things in different ways. And so computer science is an emergent science where we elucidated the Turing machine or whatever almost a century ago now.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  But we're still finding new ways of writing interesting software or similarly with, with, I would say biology. And we know how the atoms in biology work, but they're all these. Emergent effects that start to ensue as you have cells and systems and organs and everything. AI and deep learning, we know how the transformer works, we're still learning what the emergent effect of transformers can be. Anyway, that's all to say that I think to some extent, business is just the emergent effect of volitional voluntary arrangements of people. And that just feels like an endlessly interesting thing to me. I don't think Stripe is a payments company. I think payments and commerce, all these things are really important. But for me, my mental model of Stripe is Stripe is an infrastructure company for facilitating transactions and exchanges and so forth

• 7:23Speaker 03

  between these different businesses. And we deliberately articulate our mission as increasing the GDP of the internet. It's not something specifically about transactions. I think viewed that way, just how do you have there be more businesses in the world? And how do you have those businesses be more successful? I think that's a sufficiently rich vein to mine that we're not going to run out of curiosity aperture in the near term.

• 7:46Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You mentioned Apple. There's this line about Apple that I find so interesting, which is that Apple is Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives was the line discussed about it. And of all the major companies, maybe it was the one where the company was a vehicle for self-expression of the founder in the most extreme way. I'm curious to what degree you think that should be the case. The best companies end up being vehicles of self-expression for the founders, and that should be preserved. It's an outlier to begin, and don't let it go towards the peak of the distribution where everything's normal. It's like all other businesses. I'm curious if you agree with that idea about maybe vis a vis Stripe specifically, but even more generally, should companies really just be vehicles for founder self-expression?

• 8:25Speaker 03

  I think yes and no. I think yes, in the sense that I think a company should be the resonant frequency of some tuning fork clearly rung. Presumably, the founders are chronologically the first people to respond to that wavelength. But I think it has to be, it's only going to work if it then becomes an agglomeration of people who share that idea. And turn the Apple example around, I think it's hard to argue that Apple hasn't pretty meaningfully sustained that which Steve stood for. And so I think a company has to stand for an idea, but I don't think it's going to work if it's overly individuated.

• 9:09Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Another way to think about it is.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Sometimes what people interpret as a very strong cult of a founder is just a company having a very strong culture that the founder is a metonym for. Apple has this extremely strong design focus and the designers are quite central in the org, you know, it's this very functional design and there's probably, I don't know, what, 50, 100 designers who are extremely important in all of the products that happen. And Steve was a big part of inculcating that culture, but that's a culture that can and indeed at Apple does exist separate from that. Another example I like is Patrick and I both visited Starbase Texas.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  For a launch?

• 9:46Speaker 02

  No, I haven't been to a launch. I'd love to go to a launch on a non-launch day. This is before they got their launch.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  You don't want to go to a launch until all the flying concrete is there.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Exactly. Figure out that part. What really struck me is at SpaceX, I presume, as you know, Tesla and other companies, there's obviously very much the focus on what is possible from an engineering point of view. And SpaceX and Tesla and various companies are customers. We kind of get this exposure at Stripe as well, but it's a really high agency culture. And so, for example, at Starbase, they're in the middle of nowhere, right on the border in Texas. And so they have all these issues with too many mosquitoes. So they're breeding dragonflies in paddling pools to eat the mosquitoes. And obviously there's no housing there, so they're just building their own housing and they need energy, so they're deploying a solar farm and everything like that. The guy giving us the tour at some point, who's nominally the site manager, is walking past some building. I say, wait, who wrote that?

• 10:34Speaker 02

  I was just very impressed by the high agency culture, which again, people associate with Elon, I think correctly, but at this point is cultural. We're asking, how do you solve problems? Who do you go to when you can't solve something? And the person we asked it of was confused. They're like, well, you just figure it out and you just solve it. And so again, this wasn't something that comes from talking to Elon. This was just something that now deeply exists in the culture. And so good cultures are often not regressed to the mean. They are differentiated. They have something that people strongly believe in a way, they strongly act, that is different from every other company. And that, again, Apple shows that it can certainly persist beyond a founder. Maybe you need a founder to get it going. I don't know.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  I think this metonym, the fact that John references, is a huge deal. And so I think there's maybe this availability bias where we focus too much on the companies with very identifiable founders, where there aren't such convenient memorable labels for shorthand embodiments for some of the other places. The New Yorker and The Economist, we often think about.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  That's a good example, yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  And they have super strong cultures that have endured really painfully.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  No, I can name the people.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. But we can. Yeah, maybe you can maybe economist founder, but I'm not an expert in economist history, but it's not clear to me that there's been particularly some monotonic degradation of the culture since, in fact, if anything, I think you can maybe make the contrary.

• 11:48Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I like the reframing of maybe not as self-expression, but almost like some sacred flame. That's the idea that the founders are the protector of that flame, so to speak. And hopefully Tim Cook, he can pass it off. It's really hard to do. Maybe re-articulate what you think that idea or flame is for Stripe beyond the grow the GDP of the internet. You had to put another click on it.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  Beyond grow the GDP.

• 12:08Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's a good start.

• 12:11Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Do you think that if I'm working at Stripe and I hear that, what is the next causal thing that happens because I'm thinking about that idea?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  We're now getting into things that I think we're just exploring live, but many of these cultures that we're describing are not unique cultures in a whole bunch of different ways. They're actually strong cultures in quite similar ways. One, what we're talking about is quality and producing higher quality sustainably and being unreasonable, basically. Clearly, Apple, The Economist, The New Yorker, places like that. And the other one we're talking about is high agency. And again, making it so that you're not just okay with that. Tesla, good example of this, where again, high agency in the way where they weren't just satisfied with subcontracting all of the parts of the car to subcontractors. It's the best wing mirror that you can buy from the wing mirror subcontractor. Instead,

• 13:02Speaker 02

  they brought a lot of stuff in-house. And I think in Stripe's case, I mean, Patrick can speak to some of the examples, but definitely, I think a lot of where we've gotten to date and how Stripe has one market share to this point, there's a bunch of stuff we can talk about on the quality point and similarly on the high agency point. A big part of how the Stripe product suite has gotten to where it is today is not just self-defining as, okay, we're in this industry or this is what we do, but always be willing to come back to the customer problem of, okay, we want to make trading online easier. We want to make it easy to start and grow an internet business. And then what holds up businesses? Okay, everyone's complaining about a sales tax and VAT and everything being hard. I guess we're getting into the software business now and we're solving sales tax for people. There's a bunch of stuff you have to learn about, but we'll just go figure it out. I

• 13:47Speaker 02

  think we definitely try to inculcate that at Stripe, the high agency piece.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  But to your question about sort of, well, what's the, if we want to make that idea somewhat more concrete, what's the next incremental version? The one that I usually go to next is this one that we just referenced of.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  How do you cause there to be more companies started? And that's itself a pretty rich vein and why we do Stripe Press. That's some of why we do Stripe Atlas. It's why we try to give away anything useful that we discover that we think can help lower barriers to entry. To some extent, it's why we expand to more countries. The other countries we expand to, there aren't necessarily big pockets of revenue or payment volume or something there today. But we're pretty optimistic about the possibility of new ventures being undertaken there that in future years will be of some significance. There's that kind of version of it. And the second one is, okay, conditioned on some pool of companies existing. What are the binding constraints on their success and growth? And we really try to gear people towards what doesn't exist as opposed to what does.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  That is, rather than thinking, well, where are their profit pools today that we can sidle up to and plant some flag and try to displace others? I think it's both easier and honestly, just more fulfilling to think about, well, what are the profits that nobody's making? How can we build something that would enable that to happen? Global GDP is about order of $100 trillion. Where is the next $50 trillion of GDP going to come from? And how can we causally responsible for helping that happen? And in framing the question that way, I don't want to sound grandiose that the world's a big place and many actors are responsible for enabling that. But on the margin, how can we help push in that direction?

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Now, I was having dinner with Jensen Huang back a couple of months ago, and he used the term of, we were discussing this idea. Because I think Jensen's, well, now probably he's not underrated, but I think for a very long time. Especially not today.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  For a very long time, he was very underrated. We talk about the founder run technology companies in Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff and all these characters. But Jensen was usually not on that list, even though he's been sort of quietly running Nvidia for several decades now.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  Producing $7 billion a year in cash flow. Exactly, incredible business. But anyway, we were discussing this idea of trying to really encourage people to look for the new opportunities. And he was saying that Nvidia much prefers $0 billion markets to $10 billion markets. When they first introduced CUDA, for example, it was a $0 billion market. You're actually getting at something that I think is a belief that Stripe has that is actually not that widely shared. And is a big part of how we've managed to get to where we are, is just that much more internet commerce is possible than currently happens today. And it's global commerce.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  And you're like, okay, yeah, sure. But people get mad into TAM analyses and business school types are just always talking about, as you say, where are the profit pools? Which is like, when you think about it, a really unambitious way to look at the world. Because it's like, how can I say your margin is my opportunity?

• 16:42Speaker 03

  A lot of businesses inadvertently implicitly bet on stasis.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. Whereas in Stripe's case, we measure a lot of the incrementality. We go talk to people who started their businesses on Stripe or you know, use Stripe Atlas or something like that. And we ask them, what kind of impact did Stripe have on this? A majority report a very significant impact and a pretty significant number say, I think it's unlikely I would have started my business without this set of tools. And then of course, you might say, okay, Stripe is useful at the low end, getting off the ground, it makes it easy. But a large company that is up and running, they have everything figured out when it comes to payments and Stripe won't be able to help them. But actually, that's also not the case. And when we've run A B tests on people using Stripe's payments infrastructure, rather than whatever unoptimized payments infrastructure they had themselves, the latest numbers we

• 17:28Speaker 02

  have are a 10 and a half percent conversion uplift. So again, 10 and a half percent more commerce taking place on this particular site than would otherwise have had. You can see it in all the anecdotal stats as we go talk to customers. I remember talking to a customer a little while back that had just turned off their store in Mexico because fraud was too high and rather than deal with it, they just decided to not make the store available in Mexico. That's crazy when you think about that. In 2023, we have not figured this global commerce out. And so that is the underlying belief that Stripe has that I think has actually helped get to a lot of where we are today.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  There's a huge legibility and more broadly, just interestingness bias in the world for the like.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  I joined a Madam and the Podcast.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  The cause and attributions that we give to things are necessarily those that are of sufficient memetic interest that they can survive in the meme ecosystem.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have to translate that two more times.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  I mean, it's like, given the choice between an interesting explanation for something or a comprehensible one or something, necessarily the ones that are comprehensible will survive and become the prevailing explanations rather than things that are super boring and arcane. But I don't think reality has the same interestingness bias. Where I'm going with this is, I think a huge driver of where businesses choose to sell is the mechanics of fulfillment, logistics, tax, remittance, all this stuff. I don't know that's that interesting to talk about. I don't know how much there is to even say in a totally generalizable way because the specifics in each case are different, but the fact that it's not interesting doesn't mean it's not true and doesn't mean that it's not a huge deal. There's a guy in the UK who was, I think I'm pronouncing it correctly, I don't know,

• 19:03Speaker 03

  the Jost Report, as in the 60s, I think, where he basically concluded that friction, actual mechanical friction, was costing the UK several points of GDP. Because if you just look at like-

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Things not oiled or lubricated correctly, ball bearings not being pressurized, there should be literal friction.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Literal friction. Not too many buttons on a website. Yes, and so your question about how do you make this idea of increasing the GDP of the internet more concrete, there are so many pockets-

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Kill friction.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  There are just like prosaic reasons as to why gainful activities are not taking place. I haven't checked the latest here, but at some point, when I went in to check this, Google Cloud was not available in India. You just, you couldn't pay them using any Indian payment method. And I don't think that's because Google Cloud made a strategic decision as while we definitely don't want to be available and to sell in India, it's like, well, there's some combination of data policy stuff, financial stuff and tax stuff, whatever, that I'm sure everyone agreed it would be nice to solve these, but we haven't gotten around to it yet. And I think implicit structural belief in Stripe is actually the sum total of those things, in fact, adds up to a lot.

• 20:05Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I don't want to get overly wonky about it, but I'm curious what is more interesting to you, the reduction of friction around known things to start a traditional business or whatever, versus exploration around what the next technology is of business, the next LLC, or the next law, or something that would unlock a lot more, be a step change, not just lots of one and 2% increases?

• 20:26Speaker 03

  What's the next corporation?

• 20:27Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yeah, what's the next, seems like a ridiculous question, but- The corporation was so incredibly important. It was an invention.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  I think it's a really good question and maybe it seems too grandiose or something to spend too much time thinking about that. But I think it's a very good question.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  I think we start with removing as much friction as humanly possible. And again, there's just way more of it than you could possibly know. Do you know about the Chicago lease tax?

• 20:50Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  No, tell me, please.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Anyone who leases more than a hundred thousand dollars to Chicago residents has to pay a lease tax, revenue tax. And that's all, and it's lovely about the city of Chicago. That's all fine, one good, but they define lease quite broadly, including SaaS, basically. So any SaaS company that sells more than a hundred thousand dollars of SaaS, which is probably a few million dollars a year total, has to pay the city, has to go implement this city of Chicago lease tax. And again, this is yet another thing that a business has to go do and kind of like the cost of the friction, the ball bearings in the British economy. It's yet another thing that is miniscule by itself, but when you add together, like the bacteria in your gut actually weigh a lot. All told, the weight of all this kind of adds up. So I think we start with, let's remove all the friction.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  However, when you actually meaningfully change a lot of that, I think new things become possible. And so we have a lot of multinationals on Stripe that are year old, five person companies. And again, when you think of multinational, you think of giant skyscraper campuses. That's the image that comes to your head when you hear the word multinational. Whereas we have all these businesses that are now selling globally from day one on Stripe. As a result of it being easier to do so. The other one that we think is exciting is marketplace based business models, thanks to the internet. I think there's a few components, but one thing you need is the liquidity of the internet that you get these Airbnbs and Uber. You probably need smartphones, not just the internet. So you need the tech foundations, but then you also need to make it easy for people to actually transact with each other and do two way stuff.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  And you know, Stripe Connect is the marketplace payment product that didn't really exist before that. And so I think you get these new kinds of businesses that are much, much easier than before.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  I think you're saying at some point a change in degree, a change in kind, which I think is true. But I really like this question as well. And actually, if any of your watchers or listeners have suggestions, we'd be very interested. I think Atlas was this in that I think we know because they tell. That there are thousands of businesses that have been started in countries where high tech entrepreneurship has not previously been as common or as popular that wouldn't have been started if not for Atlas. Steve Randy Wallman, who writes really interesting materials about economics and finance and so on. He had this blog post in 2013 or something that really stuck with me about how credit financing is fixed cost to the borrower. Asymptotically fixed costs within some range or something has the unbounded risk of destroying your business.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Equity capital has unbounded costs, but does not come with the embedded risk of possibly blowing up your business. It's interesting to think about the possibility of a continuum there, to what degree it's necessarily dichotomous. If you think about a small business, effectively their options run into that dichotomy. And if you just take a restaurant, why is it the case that one, the restaurant probably can only get access to financing that might blow up their business? And certainly maybe they kind of convince some investors to write them their first check or something, but there isn't a whole lot in the middle. And I think one interesting story from the last 15 years on the internet is the proliferation of crowdfunding, obviously, different variants of that and so forth. So I think the question of are there interesting new funding models that could be invented is a good one.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Dominant assurance contracts I thought were all interesting. They never really seemed to have taken off, but it feels like there might be kind of new points in the space. So I think there's stuff in the domain of funding models.

• 24:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Something like a DAO feels like it should work, maybe not DAOs in particular.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  We do discuss different versions of this. I think standardization is often underrated and one of the best things the EU has done is just standardize things that were previously for no particularly profound reason.

• 24:18Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  In the sense of like an internet protocol as standardization, we all just agree this is the way we do things and so everything's interoperable as a result.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically the US is obviously with the uniform commercial code and I think the US minus that would be just like a way worse place to do business. But again, in a hard to articulate way, it sounds very arcane as well. You know, the product liability requirements at this stage versus that stage, blah, blah, blah. Pretty quickly, the listener is clicking on the next podcast episode. We've thought about, are there things that Stripe could help standardize that are not standardized today? We can just be a coordination point. Obviously, this YC did an awesome version of this with safes. How much less investing would happen at the early stage, absent the existence of safes? I don't know, but that seems plausible to me that 30% or something. It seems credible that it's significant effect. Or maybe if someone else had standardized it, maybe we'd have standardized in a worse point in the space or something.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  We're going to be the whole podcast episode about this, but I think it's a really interesting question.

• 25:12Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you think about the, I like the idea of the 100 trillion, where's the next 50 coming from? I'd love to hear what you've learned about business formation and small business versus reducing frictions for existing medium or large sized businesses? And letting them get way bigger than they would but for that outstanding friction. So even that, like Chicago example, sounds like a pain in the butt, even for a real established business. Maybe the faster way is to make it easier for big companies versus make more small companies. So what have you learned about big versus small and what matters in this goal to grow the GDP of the internet?

• 25:45Speaker 02

  In terms of where Stripe is going, a lot of where we started with was make it easier for a startup to do X. The lease tax example and just generally the billing system. A lot of what the Stripe billing team has been spending time on of late is companies like Atlassian and CloudFlare and all these very large public companies who are going to moving their billing infrastructure over to Stripe billing. So that, as you say, they can not just move the payment, moving of money, but all the business logic can live in Stripe. So they don't have to build and maintain it themselves because the maintenance that crushes people.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  We're continually surprised when we build things that we conceive of as being for the low end. How frequently they get enthusiastically adopted at the high end. So for example, payment links is we want to lower the barrier to entry to Stripe. Making a couple of sales, why do you need to build a payment form? Why can't you just sign up for Stripe and put in some details of your product? And then just send a URL to your friend or your first customers or whatever. And then maybe when you reach your 100th sale or your 1,000th sale, okay, I'll do the work, build a Proper thing here, whatever. Payment links is pretty enthusiastically adopted by large companies for basically the same reason in that it's like the soil and green principle. Everything is made of people and there are humans inside these large organizations. And those humans, even larger organizations, have opportunity costs attached to their time.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  And if they can go and build some incremental new feature that aligns with the core purpose of their business, that's in general probably a more valuable thing to do than go and like build this payment form. Whenever we've built no code functionality or just generally speaking, things that lower barriers to entry, where the original persona that we have or had in mind was somebody kind of starting out. We keep being struck by, we had a user at our weekly all hands meeting last week. They're a pretty significant company. I don't know the exact employee count is, but I believe in the hundreds. His ask to us, we asked, how can we improve Stripe? He asked for more no code functionality because they're strapped for engineering resources and they just want to be able to take things off the shelf and snap them to grid. So that's been eye opening for me.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  It is also a dynamic where the very largest companies that we work with are often competing with startups and seeing new upstarts come along. And so the buying criteria are no longer as different as you might think because they know that their customers might just go to, we work with a number of traditional grocery stores. And they're all competing with the Instacarts and the ships before they were acquired. All of these small upstarts doing delivery and stuff like that. So it's like, wow, the digital experience really matters. We got to figure out our app strategy. We got to figure out our delivery strategy, things like that. But that dynamic, I think, ends up merging the considerations maybe more than they otherwise would.

• 28:25Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  The big part of the ethos of this whole Singleton idea, what got me interested in was the ability to study. Like you said, I love the Magnus Carlson example. It's so perfect. Like he wins the trivia for jazz. This is great. When you think about the deep lore of companies and companies that you've studied, I'm thinking Dutch East India Company, that kind of thing. What very old companies have you been the most interested in, learned the most from, been the most curious about and why?

• 28:51Speaker 03

  I think they're almost all interesting. The question is almost, is there something that your present circumstances that gives you reason to care and to find it memorable? I read a fairly lengthy history of DuPont, the chemical company, not that long ago, and it's super interesting. And as you pull on that thread and the history of the chemical industry and how it kind of came from the dye industry in Eastern France and Western Germany, and then the various changes it went through and how it gave rise to the pharma sector, and the whole thing is just super interesting. The chemical industry was one of the early technology industries in the sense that there weren't that many businesses with such uncertain R and D, where you didn't know what the properties of the chemicals you would discover would be.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  And so maybe it had some of the characteristics of some of the questions and problems faced by, you know, modern technology companies. And so perhaps it's interesting to see some of those parallels. It's interesting to see that, well, we republished this book by Mike Malone a few years ago, The Big Score: An Early History of the Semiconductor Industry. I think it may be surprising and striking in that book is maybe your naive model would be that somebody discovers something, one of these companies, and they're like, wow, it's a really important thing. I'm going to go start a company about random myself so they can internalize the gain or whatever. Of course, what actually happens with every case, as far as I can tell, is a person discovers a thing, but like, wow, this is awesome. We should totally go do this. We, the company they're at. And they try to convince their management that this is a real idea, we should take it seriously, whatever. And management refuses and is oblivious to it, or doesn't think it'll work, or is important or whatever.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  And then after two years of trying to convince everyone around them that this is important, eventually in frustration and out of a desire to just have the thing exist in the world, they go and do it themselves. But it's not awesome. I get to start a company. It's, Christ, okay, fine, if I have to go do this myself, I will. But it's almost out of this sense of obligation to the thing, to the discovery. It was interesting to see in the early chemical industry, you have the same dynamic. And so this just seems to be not a thing about Silicon Valley. Yeah. Exactly. But this deeper thing about human nature. You extract things like that, but I wouldn't say that DuPont is one of Stripe's top influences. Right. Tell you a funny story. Mum, when we were growing up, ran a company, her own business, called SQT, that still exists and still does.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Quality training, a kind of quality assurance training, ISO nine thousand, things like that. And in particular, there are a lot of, still are a lot of American multinational firms with operations in Ireland, that they would have had a significant demand for doing quality training for their employees. But there's definitely a lot to learn from the, and it's like a business cliche, but Six Sigma Lean Manufacturing Process Optimization Sphere. There's a lot to learn, but there are very important limitations. And I think it's not an original insight by us, that a lot of people comment on the fact that so much of modern management, culture and theory stems from basically nineteen fifty's command and

• 31:44Speaker 02

  control manufacturing organizations, and we have aped their ways of working. And in particular, you're used to working with stuff that can be measured, which sounds obvious, you know, but I have inventory that's at various stages of the production process. And for example, I can think about a balance sheet. The same works or doesn't in a fairly binary way at the end of the process. Exactly. We can determine what's this part manufactured correctly or not. We're working with all this extremely legible space. And what we find so interesting about software engineering as a domain is no one can do it that well. Now, this building is going up around us. If you were to ask the guys building that office tower, is there a much better way to build buildings? They're like, no, what are you talking about? You poured the foundation, then you do this, you do that. We figured out how to build buildings.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  Then if you go interview someone at Google or Microsoft, or I'm not singling out any large company, you ask them, what percentage productivity do they think they're running at compared to the total theoretical productivity? I think they generally tell you what, twenty percent or something like that. And part of it comes from the lack of legibility in what you're working with. I sometimes joke here that whenever we talk about resourcing and how we should resource very initiatives at Stripe, people often want to talk in terms of heads. This is a thing that needs five heads or ten heads for a year or something like that. And I always want to get them to denominate it in kilograms. We need five hundred kilograms or a thousand kilograms of engineers. They're like, but that's absurd. That's the point. So is five heads or ten heads. This thing needs a technical solution

• 33:12Speaker 02

  that could require one month or could require one year if you screw it up and do it badly. But again, we lack the legibility. We lack the meta-understanding of software engineering as a domain to be able to have good ways of reasoning about that. And so I think the fact that everyone in the industry finds software engineering

• 33:30Speaker 03

  So challenging to measure to do well is part of the fun of it. I mean, the places where we do do it well.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  And part of the opportunity for Stripe.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah, I was gonna say. If the convertibility or elasticity between dollars and good software was straightforward, then the opportunity for startups generally and Stripe in particular would certainly be way more limited than it is in that lots of companies can afford to spend way more on building good financial infrastructure than we can.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  This is the famous Buffett with a billion dollars, it is with a billion dollars test. He talks about the test of a good industry is one where imagine some rich guy gave his son a billion dollars to go blow on building a company in this industry. There are lots of places like real estate or whatever where you can actually have a pretty good swing in it and they will make life harder for you. Whereas I think there's lots of people who have tried to put a billion dollars competing in this or other software industries and it's really hard to just turn a billion dollars into high quality software.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Just ask the government.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  To that point, I think we've probably learned as much from because software, I don't want to say uniquely, because I don't know enough about other sectors, but because let's say at least software to this intersection of creative work and mechanical industrial work.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  What's your analogy?

• 34:39Speaker 03

  Half building a bridge, half.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Half writing a bestseller or something.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, this is a different version that you could use. We've learned a lot from science and learned a lot from creative domains generally. I think studying Hollywood from this lens is very interesting. I don't think there are like directly transferable ideas, I think. What's an example like about Hollywood that would be interesting? In Hollywood, and I don't pretend to be an expert in Hollywood.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  You also can't just spend 500 million dollars to make a good movie.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Oh, gotcha. You really need the auteur. The whole thing is pointless unless someone has a vision. So often at Stripe, we're discussing something and maybe yes, in theory, we should do something in this space, but the real question is, is there a specific person who has a vision here? And there's a hundred things that we would love to go fund tomorrow if there was a specific person with a vision. Of course, as Hollywood shows and as is intuitively obvious, the vision's not enough. You have some degree of execution ability and whatever skills are required in the domain and so on. There's an illegible trace of do they have the vision? I guess, is the vision a good one? Where if absent, the whole thing is just somehow going to be a failure. There's something about the unquantifiability of taste and judgment and how that makes,

• 35:51Speaker 03

  generally, I think that's tough for organizations to deal with because you can't build robust processes around that. But at least in Hollywood.

• 35:59Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  But that corporate desire to build robust processes about things is an implicit belief system.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  And then like in science, a fact that really stuck with me is Gertie and Carl Corey ran a lab at the University of Washington in the couple of decades after World War II. Six of their students went on to win Nobel Prizes.

• 36:18Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Wow.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  University of Washington is a good university, but you can't tell a story as to, it wasn't the single best university, so they didn't just skim the cream of the very best students. It's not just about, I think, the characteristics of the students coming in. There aren't that many Nobel Prizes won, Nobels here. I think we're all won in either medicine or chemistry. That's two prizes a year. And so I think it's this incredibly vivid demonstration of how there's something that they knew or that was somehow embodied at their lab that was transmitted to these people that was incredibly important that made then collectively the students in their careers vastly more successful on average than the rest of that population. And again, I think this is something that is hard to quantify. It's hard to even put your finger on what it is, but it's this really rich

• 37:02Speaker 03

  demonstration of the potency of tacit knowledge. I think for complicated intellectual work in general, that tacit knowledge that has to be transmitted through mentorship is the rule, not the exception. And a lot of our intuitions, like for example, our desire to enable tenure at Stripe is substantially informed by this, where if we're in a superficial domain where, I don't know, you can come in basically knowing it already, and then after two years, you're not that much better than the person who started last week, that will be one thing, and I think might prescribe one set of personnel and HR practices. But we're in a domain where I think the returns to experience and the returns to knowledge are really extensive. Having six years of context in our domain gives you a tremendous advantage over somebody who just arrived. I think we're informed by some of these other

• 37:47Speaker 03

  places. And maybe just on the Hollywood point, if I don't know if you've ever looked at this, but not knowing much about Hollywood, I found it very interesting. There's an oral history of CAA, the agency, that I found to somehow be a really good introduction to the whole thing.

• 38:00Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I also love the Ovitz idea of packaging. Just that as a technology. Packaging doesn't happen in business all that often, and I always wondered why not. There's a lot in Hollywood that I think is super interesting.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  One other random one to talk about is it's not published in the book, but you can get a Samus that PDF if you read around your perspectives on McKinsey, which is

• 38:16Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I've heard of this one, but this one I haven't read.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  I'm sure it's in the dark web somewhere. If you have enough Bitcoin at your disposal. The professional services, just I was reminded as you discussed tenure, professional services firms really take training seriously. Law firms, accountancy firms, consulting firms, and they take it much more seriously than I think most Silicon Valley companies. I think that's something we definitely looked at is how do you have people who are experienced with Stripe do a good job of spinning up people who are, but there's a case team leader at a consulting firm and they are really responsible for both the work, which is done by the more junior people and for those people's development. And they have to do so much of it because a lot of people graduate out that they get really in the practice of it. But I think there's something really interesting to study there of companies that by virtue

• 39:03Speaker 02

  of their business model and by virtue of just how they work, have to take training up new people incredibly seriously and just spend way more time on it than your traditional tech company where the people have a four week bootcamp and then off you go.

• 39:15Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  As I was thinking about Stripe on the way up here, what is it about the business that's different or unique? I won't pick on any one other developer facing tooling company or something, but there's plenty of other companies that built products originally designed for developers that didn't achieve this status of almost Stripe is a state of being. It has this ambient quality about it that you can just see it in the way people talk about Stripe as a company, which of course has a lot to do with both of you, but also it's achieved this thing as an entity separate from the both of you. And I'm curious why you think that is and how much of that is a lucky random side effect? How much of that was really deliberate based on decisions you made or the kind of company that you wanted to build?

• 39:56Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Because whether you wanted to or not, it has come to embody a certain era of technology business in a way that if you looked at other companies that also build similar ish products, let's say for developers in the early days, did not achieve that same thing. And I'm curious to what you would attribute that difference.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  I think part of it is we're a self-serve product for a fairly ubiquitous need.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  In a domain where it's actually hard to be self-serve. If the audiences, creators and founders and business owners, they tend to be kind of exacting in their judgments. Kind of have to because they are with respect to their own thing. And so I think a lot of the other developer-oriented companies take Databricks. Unequivocally an awesome company, but Tommy, your youngest brother, mentioned that he's seeing a physiotherapist. The physiotherapist mentioned they were using Stripe. I presume that physiotherapist is not using Databricks.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  I think some of it is probably just a bit.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  We all sure if they were though. Yeah, really want to meet this person if they are.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  The fact that we work with Amazon and Ford and Hertz and these giant companies. Databricks, of course, also serves the enterprise, but that we also can fix it at the low end is part of it. People at Stripe really care. Catchphrase at Stripe of really, really, really caring. I think the returns to care, to sweating details and so on, are also unquantifiable. And part of the problem with it is it's branding until you can, in any narrow individual case, you can coast on not caring. If Apple sent you a poorly designed invitation to something, you would still go because the overall halo of credibility that they've accrued over multiple decades will carry them through even a single poorly executed thing.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  But that means that the local incentives to care are actually not that strong. This collective action is public goods problem within the company where you can benefit from everybody else's work. And so I think the aggregate long-term returns of caring a lot are super high, but the individual local returns are low. And that creates this collective action problem. Most companies think fail to solve it and I don't particularly credit us. I think this is deeply embodied by a very large fraction of the first hundred people at Stripe. But it became this thing with a tremendous amount of momentum and endurance. And people at Stripe today are still maniacal about padding issues and spacing issues and consistency issues. We're used this word over here, but that word over there, it adds up.

• 42:20Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Is there a detail you're most proud of, of this type in Stripe's history?

• 42:24Speaker 03

  Well, the one that people often cite is we show you your API keys in sample code. And a lot of errors in Stripe will tell you what we thought you were trying to do, not just what the actual mistake is. And it's funny, even though some of those were implemented 10 years ago, we'll still see Twitter occasionally where we saved somebody a few hours because not only do we tell them that their thing didn't work, we told them what we think they were most likely trying to do instead.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  To be controversial here, I think it's very harmful to bring consumer product thinking to a space like Stripe or I think B2B space generally, because I think there is implicit or explicit, you just have users by the wheelbarrow, you treat them in aggregates, you talk about MOWs, everything is statistically tested.

• 43:14Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  On the active users, for those who don't know some of the technology.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Exactly. But again, people in the value say MOWs as their way of referring to the people who are using the product. But you are just, I'm not a number, I'm a free man. No, like, you're a number. Everything is statistical and everything is linked in with dark patterns. It's like, oh, complete your profile. Everything is nudging you towards some business outcome. And what we really try to constantly clopper people over the head with at Stripe is these are people starting a business who are generally really talented and they have some great idea and they have a vision for it and they're making it happen. And they have a pretty sophisticated understanding of their space and business and finance and everything like that. And you can just see it if you go talk to any of them. We have another value of Stripe that we try to really inculcate is talking up to the user. When you're writing product marketing copy,

• 44:01Speaker 02

  and you know, Patrick and I will still spend a lot of time reviewing that, you're not trying to bamboozle them with some highfalutin statements. You're trying to explain to a busy business owner who, again, go back to Charlie Munger's multiple mental models, is constantly switching between product and business and finance, all these things, why this thing will solve some specific need that they have. But it's not hucksterism, it's not sloganeering, it's having a technical discussion with someone who really knows their shit. Patrick mentioned this weekly, All Hands, we every week have. User at this fireside, we call it, where well, just for you know, 10 or 15 minutes, again, they're busy, we'll interview them about their business, how they started, how they got there, how they're using Stripe, what they'd like to see do better, you know,

• 44:44Speaker 02

  us do better, everything like that. I think that's important to stay connected to this because again, I think the classic technology product management domain is a bit, I would say, it's not respectful enough of who the users actually are and how capable they are.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  I think that's maybe too normative.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Maybe it works fine for those businesses, but not our business.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Exactly. The thing that we have to take seriously is any signup could in principle be in not that many years in the future, 5% of our revenue. And so allowing

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Because they got really big, not because we got really small.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  Yes. Allowing any of them to fall off the wagon and just shrugging our shoulders. If the distribution of possible sizes of our users was normal, I think you could shrug your shoulders. And if 1% of them, something goes wrong, then okay, that's unfortunate. We'd like to be last, but like, it's fine. But our tails are really heavy. It's kosher or something, but it's not normal. It's something with a lot of cutosis. And worse, sort of the concern you have to have is if something is going wrong for these customers, maybe it's actually biased and correlated so that it's the ones who are more successful, who are more likely to encounter the issues. And so therefore, I think your intuition has to be, to John's point, kind of exactly the opposite of the Knieper domain where when you hear a single case of something going wrong, your ears really prick up and

• 45:59Speaker 03

  you get interested because, huh, maybe it's the companies that are selling a ton in this new market. You know, what we had in the early days of Stripe was businesses implementing these multi-sided ecosystems were consistently running into compliance problems and payout problems and mechanical problems, whatever. And an attitude of, well, not that many of our customers are doing that, shrug would have meant that wouldn't have discovered this incredible opportunity that has been a huge deal for us.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  We're big into anecdotes here. This is probably the correct amount of data in the world. People have realized that data is important, but sometimes they underestimate anecdotes because it surfaces the questions that you should be asking. Data is good if you have a specific question and you want the answer to it. But as I mentioned, us, our bum day growing up, our dad For a while around a hotel, small hotel on the shores of Loch Durg in Ireland. And what I find funny is you do not need to run a complex user research study to know if you're doing a good or bad job in a hotel. You can do that. You can just walk around and go, oh, my God, this waiter is terrible because like these people have been waiting half an hour for their food. You just walk around and the questions you should be asking slap you in the face.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Sometimes literally.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Exactly. I can't think how bad things have gotten, but faulty towers. But in the tech case, again, people do a lot of the data analyses. People talk about management by walking around, but they talk about it in an internal management context. You gotta do the management by walking around with the customers and in the actual market.

• 47:21Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How much more likely do you think it was that you became entrepreneurs, given that both your parents were? Is that something we can simulate what makes more businesses? My dad was an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur. Your parents both were. You both are. Maybe there's stats on this. We can just answer the question, but for you personally, how much of an influence was it? That they were both doing that and you watched them.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  You gotta do the twin studies, find some twins separately. Exactly. Yeah. I remember when we were playing in the garden when we were like six and eight or something. We used to often play. We don't internet at that age, so we had to play in the garden and we'd play as, I don't know if you were starting a company, but I guess running a company. I guess just because that's what our parents, our dad was a fireman, we'd have been firemen. It's hard for me to say, no, it had no effect. When I think back to those anecdotes, I never, I think, were first engineer your whole childhood. And even if it is somehow attributable to our parents, I don't know, maybe it's genetic, maybe we lack the risk averse gene or something, but we've underdeveloped prefrontal cortices or something. But yeah, it's probably not really coincidental.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  There's also probably an element, you probably remember seeing this with your dad, you know, the way starting a business goes in and out of fashion. And famously after the social network, everyone decided they want to go start a business. But at least I think a lot of what we saw growing up was honestly, maybe even just the work ethic. There's other things in the customer centricity and things like that. But if you just take a single thing away, it's absolute just hours on the problem that you have to put on it is maybe useful to see firsthand. And I think that probably subconsciously seeps in. And again, I think you probably saw it with your dad. And I think maybe if you haven't seen that front, maybe you're operating with a disadvantage if you haven't just seen that firsthand to really engrain it with you.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  We work quite hard on Stripe, but I think we work less hard on Stripe than our dad did at the hotel or our mom did at this training company. And just, we are not at the office for most of the weekend. He was at his office necessarily. And so even just that, we get to take weekends.

• 49:09Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I've seen you talk a lot about your relationship with your parents and their businesses and everything, growing up. What's it like as adults? How has it shifted in interesting or surprising ways as you've become adults and getting married and the whole deal? What has shifted most and what's it like now?

• 49:24Speaker 03

  Well, it's interesting to watch now with a bit more adult perspective to see where maybe our childhood perceptions weren't correct. And we used to make fun of our mom growing up for working a lot. And in an admiring way, now she retired nominally a few years.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Unsuccessfully.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  She's had multiple failed attempts to retire.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  She tried to retire a few years ago and now somehow has found herself. I think she helped a hospital. Our youngest brother has a, today relatively mild, physical disability. So she became very interested in its treatment and how to do that well. And very long story short, ended up writing a book about successful treatment for cerebral palsy. And through that learned that, well, there are these other conditions that don't have good treatment manuals for them. And so she's working with a Floyd, in fact, by a hospital in Minnesota, where they're collaborating to produce a whole series of books on the treatment of different physical conditions. And so I think five of those books will come out for the next 12 months. And this is her retirement.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Definitely not Minnesota.

• 50:21Speaker 03

  Interesting for us to watch as adults.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  You asked Emma about old organizations that coming to learn a lot from. Was it the Royal Society who had the mission of reducing the gap between best practice and standard practice?

• 50:33Speaker 03

  Good question. I don't remember.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  Part of what Mam is doing is also working at, we're doing some stuff philanthropically in Ireland, improving cerebral palsy care. And again, it's amazing the degree to which different treatments are, happen on a geographical basis for no real good reason. The condition doesn't know where you are. And so they have some of the leading treatments in the world for cerebral palsy are in Australia, where they've developed these interventions that work really well. And so they're now working on rolling them out. I mean, it's not just these. They're also doing some research and stuff like that in Ireland. But I get very excited about the idea of how can we advance the state of the art, but even just bringing things up to the state of the art in a lot of domains really has, I guess, the entirety of the lean manufacturing rollout in the United States in seventies and eighties, but just bringing things up to the state of the art.

• 51:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  As you think about the future of Stripe, you guys are so lucky, you have so much time to do whatever the answer to my next question is. What do you want it to be that it's not yet? And or what do you want it to be more of? Like most specifically in the decades to come?

• 51:35Speaker 03

  An important thing that Stripe today is that we're always trying to remind people who join, because Stripe is, say, 12 years post-launch, and so they might not appreciate this necessarily, that just measured against the goals we set out to solve when we started, there's still not only a lot to do, but in certain ways, we're even further from solving them than we were at the outset, where in the very beginning of Stripe in, say, 2011, accepting online payments or moving money online basically meant facilitating pretty basic, pretty straightforward credit card transactions. But now, over the last couple of years, there's been this incredible proliferation of payment methods, usually run by central banks, but you know, all sorts of different wallets and national payment schemes and so forth that have added. The good news is they've brought immense numbers,

• 52:19Speaker 03

  like billions of new people online and enfranchised them to participate in the internet economy. But the flip side is they've made the landscape so much more complicated. And we're now in this funny position where even very sophisticated companies are often inadvertently restricting their customer bases to be only a relatively small percentage of what they could be if they're sort of comporting themselves properly. So just assessed against kind of the most basic criteria of, is Stripe making it easy for a business to accept revenue from, let's say, at least 90% of internet users? The standard for that has gotten an awful lot higher. And while Stripe is now way more powerful than it ever was in the past, it's interesting that just the complexities of the world are also advancing considerably.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  And that's before you get into all the other stuff that's happening around different tax things and regulatory things and data privacy things. Now you need to have an Android app and an iPhone app, and the complexity of the whole landscape is considerable. So we want Stripe to be a global programmable money movement engine for all of these different use cases and possibilities, available to businesses everywhere in the world and capable of executing transactions on behalf of people anywhere in the world. And as we just think of the n-dimensional matrix of functionality entailed in that, we still have a long way to go.

• 53:37Speaker 02

  And then the second part of your question was what about Stripe to be?

• 53:40Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What I'm getting at is, say, you're retired, hopefully better than your mom, and you're in your rocking chair, and you want Stripe to be described as X, Y, and Z. You'll be able to feel like you can rest easy, you've done a good job, because Stripe is blank or has done blank, like that kind of looking backward.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  Have you read Tim Wu's book, The Mastercard? Yes. I really liked that book, and there's lots of random, I learned lots about the history of radio that I didn't know, and so it's always fun in that way. But when you think about it, as you reflect on it, you should be scared, because basically the takeaway from the book is every other information network that has been started has started out with lots of innovation and the healthy ecosystem. Low barriers to entry. Exactly, low barriers to entry, and has ended up as a monoculture, regulation-captured oligopoly with two or three big players that get to extract rents. And that has happened with every other information network to date. But we'll see if it happens to be a threat.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  Unsettling note that Tim Wu leaves you on. The internet is different, and the internet is, I think one could argue, a bigger deal than all those other technologies for lots of reasons. But the warning signs are there, and you see this a lot where a lot of internet commerce stops at national borders, which should not be like the packets don't travel any slower as they cross them. The gravity equation in trade says that trade falls off with the square of distance. And that maybe makes sense if you're shipping beef, it goes off, it's complex to ship across countries, you have to refrigerate, everything like that. It makes less sense when you're shipping software, and yet the gravity equation still exists in digital trade.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  And so, again, I think part of our hope would be, there is a real plausible world where we end up with four or five big internet companies that are the internet companies that have a really outsized share of the online activity happening there. And it's not that it's illegal to start a company, it's not that it's impossible to start a company, but the barriers are so high to break through.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  That no one is preventing you from starting at telco, but nobody does because the barriers and the costs are so high. That would clearly be a really bad outcome and should make us sad. And so I think if we could feel like we contributed to the next 70 years of vibrancy in the internet economy, which of course is just becoming the global economy generally, where you're continuing to make it accessible for new entrants to come in and compete on a level playing field with all the existing folks, I'd be pretty happy with that.

• 56:15Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I love that. I think it's Peter Thiel's notion that diagram of the investing perspective, the best things being seems like a bad idea and is a good idea. The intersection is where you want to live. And I'm curious, I think last time we talked in this format, you said something about the most impressive thing about the big internet companies is that they've ridden multiple waves. They weren't one trick ponies. They successfully evolved. I wonder how you square those two things. The waves maybe seem obvious, maybe one was might have been crypto. Now it might be AI, might be something else, material science or biotechnology or something. I don't know. How do you think about that zero billion Jensen Huang idea with Peter Thiel idea up against AI is obviously the thing we should focus on as you think about Stripe's future?

• 57:00Speaker 03

  I think the nature of the problem for a Facebook or for a Snapchat or a Pinterest or something is actually quite different because they're serving a consumer sensibility. It's ultimately a kind of entertainment product, this utility and messaging and so forth. But some significant portion of the use is entertainment. And there's a lot of in principle fungibility across different pursuits there. And on some level, watching Instagram stories is competing with Netflix. Maybe it's even competing with ChatGPT. I don't know. Because consumer taste by its nature evolves, I think that necessarily puts one into this mode of wave riding, whereas.

• 57:41Speaker 03

  Stripe operates at a lower level of the paste layering diagram. You have fashion and infrastructure and culture and these different sedimentary layers evolving and changing on different time scales. And at the infrastructure layer that Stripe operates on, things change more slowly. That's bad news in the sense that it's not possible to have these insane meteoric appreciations in the overwhelming majority of cases. But the flip side is if you get things right, you can compound for a very long time. And I've always found it striking that the internet really never grew in any given year at an insane rate. It's just been this incredibly durable 30% a year compounding for several decades. 1.3 to the 40 just ends up being a large number.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  So I think Stripe has more of those dynamics and you can see this if you look at businesses like Visa or Mastercard or something where they're obviously conceived in a pre-internet world and yet the wave of the internet, it obviously changed their business in various ways, but it didn't fundamentally restructure it. And with everything on the horizon, it's still the case that there are going to be businesses and transactions and exchanges and associated challenges and complexities that-

• 58:56Speaker 02

  Homeless and said, money can be exchanged for good services.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  Come with that, exactly. So I think Stripe, because of its position in the ecosystem, needs to strike the right balance between spotting the opportunity in these waves. And we're excited about the fact that basically all of the AI companies are implementing revenue models at the outset of necessity because it's expensive to run inference and training and everything. And basically all of those companies are doing it on Stripe. It's hard to find an exception. And not only they're using Stripe for the most basic payment, but they're using all the higher level functionality on top of that because they have sophisticated needs and they're sophisticated companies. Jump back for a second to just your previous question, it's sort of how we want Stripe to be. And we've talked a lot, I guess, over the course of this conversation about prosperity and net growth and why we care about that and how we think Stripe can be implicated. And all that's obviously important and true, but the thing we maybe haven't said or touched

• 59:41Speaker 03

  on as much that just in your invocation of the rocking chair and sepia tones and so on, looking back, something about beauty and craft. If Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn't beautiful and Stripe doesn't embody a culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship.

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  I'll be much less happy. I think the returns to both of those things in the world are really high. I think even beyond the pecuniary or financial returns, I think that just the world's uglier than it needs to be. It's a free lunch where one can just do things well or poorly, and beauty is not a rival risk good. We can do it in architecture, but my intuition is that more of Stripe's success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things and for rational reasons. Because what does a beautiful thing tell you? Well, it tells you the person who made it really cared, and you can observe some superficial details, but probably they didn't only care about those and then everything else in a

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  very slapdash way. And so if you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not an irrational thing to do. There's a reason there's a very intricate filigree on the $1 bill. Yeah, right. And then I think the kinds of, like there's something about the talent selection, and the people who like good APIs and good architecture, like good software architecture, tend to prize things being done nicely and well in other domains and so on. So I think there's this.

• 1:01:11Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's just a nice warm and fuzzy thing. It's very rational.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  I think there's this bundle of self-reinforcing loops such that it is a sensible thing to do. I think people behave quite differently in spaces that are beautiful. Banks had it figured out 100 years ago where bank buildings should be nice. We're just continuing that tradition.

• 1:01:26Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  They lost their way.

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  It's really convinced me that the financial returns to craftsmanship and beauty, which I believe are greater, are nosh greater. It's still good. It's still good. Life's too short.

• 1:01:39Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you think back on Stripe's history and had to identify the most important impactful memorable conversation between the two of you, what would it be? Individual conversation, I mean.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  I remember a conversation we had, I remember even the restaurant, we had it at in the summer of 2000.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Ten, when we'd been working on Stripe for seven months. And the question was.

• 1:02:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Right there.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  No, no, no, this was whether you were going to drop out or not.

• 1:02:07Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  Or I guess we were going to drop out, but John was the one more on the fence. And it was this probably somewhat dispassionate conversation. It's just how big a deal could Stripe be? And we just gotten excited about it in the beginning. It's fun and cool to solve this problem. They were talking almost for the first time about like, well, where could it really go? If this is not just a little random side project, what could it become? And that's I think the first time we'd ever sort of really taken a step back and talked about in much more in coagent larval form, some of these same ideas that we're discussing here. I remember that one. The flip answer is conversation back to 2900, we're walking home from dinner and just decided to start working on Stripe. And as I said, you know, how hard can it be? Famous last words.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think a more serious answer might be in that conversation as on Valencia Street, the wine bar where you were morose and you were just down maybe two or three years into Stripe. Is this even working? Is this even worthwhile? Not growing fast enough, things like that. I think that actually maybe gets to one thing we're very lucky to have is a good team dynamic where I think it's really, it's just like a lot for anyone. I don't know how you do it. It's a lot for any one person to have on their shoulders. I think two people will naturally have various cycles that they go. And I, of course, just like, what are you talking about? It's great, you know, it's going to be fabulous. But I think just because he was maybe in a more pessimistic humor at that point. And I was in an optimistic humor. And if you're just naturally will have highs and lows, you'll tend to cancel each other

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  out and act as dampeners for each other, or even just act as someone to talk through the issues with and stuff like that. I feel very fortunate that I think not that many people have real partnerships that they can work on something worthwhile on on the multi decade horizon. And again, maybe if more of those partnerships were formed, we get more interesting multi decades opportunities. Because again, I think we think with Stripe, we spent the first 10 years getting the table steak stuff out of the way. And now the next 20 years, you could do a bunch of the really interesting stuff where you have the platform and the ability and the fighting fit army to actually go execute on it. But a lot of people just don't get to that point.

• 1:04:15Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  The same vein, setting aside maybe the very earliest years, is there a defining moment in the business's history that comes to mind?

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  Very continuous business. Everything we do starts very small and it just compounds for a long time. And Atlas is now a double-digit percentage of all Delaware and corporations in the US. And that's like including multinationals incorporating subsidiaries.

• 1:04:40Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  That's all Delaware corporations.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Of the true startups, I mean, I don't know the exact number is, but it's a lot. We launched Atlas in, I think, 2014 or 15. And so it's just 80 years of compounding to now be really big. But everything we do has that shape. It's a product that I'm really excited about this year that I'll leave nameless for now. It's doing super well and I think it's going to be a huge deal for our users in a bunch of different ways over the next couple of years. We've been working on version of this product since literally 2014. I think after a decade, it's going to be, say, next year, if that's its 10th anniversary, it's going to be phenomenal, but it just took iterating for that long. We're not a business of discontinuities.

• 1:05:20Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You think about the way you spend your time today and you could go show your day to the 25-year-old version of you. In what ways would that 25-year-old version be most surprised about how you spend your time now?

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  For you, presumably meeting with customers. Yeah, there's a lot of customer time, which I find very energizing. And I did a lot of it back then as well, but I think maybe I would have been surprised by how continuous that.

• 1:05:45Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's also like who they are.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's one real big surprise. And again, it converts over into how we spend time and who we spend time with. We've been really surprised the degree to which basically large companies have ended up needing Stripe. And so in our Series A pitch deck, we were explaining why you should care about a business that sells to developers and startups. And so we had a slide in there where we're like, and obviously, you know, some of Amazon will never use Stripe, but there's a lot of developers out there, there's a lot of startups, and so this can still be a big deal. And of course, we've now been working with Amazon for five years and it's a super productive partnership. I would do all sorts of things with them and I spent a bunch of time with our counterparties over there and lots of other similar large companies in a similar way.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  And that's maybe part of, again, the how the product thing works where I think Patrick probably spends more time internally with the technology teams where in the abstract, how should things work? What do we want, you know, a well-designed global money movement system to be? And I'll probably spend more time. With customers that are saying, I really need you to solve X for me. And those two can meet in the middle when it comes to product.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  Like feature requests from Jaguar Land Rover or from Hertz or from Heathrow Airport.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  Versus Instacart.

• 1:06:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Or Ford, you name it. It's the complexion of the customer base.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  A lot faster than.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. It surprised me where, as John says, these companies want to be and have realized the importance. Mark Andreessen wrote the software is eating the world piece in 2009 and the Wall Street Journal published it. I think.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  It's 2009.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think it's very interesting that the Wall Street Journal published it in the sense that in what way is that a contrarian point of view? And it's hard to put ourselves back in the mindset of oh nine. The idea that software might be important was in fact this combative sentiment to express in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages. When Stripe started out, the idea that we were focused on the needs of startups was certainly a detractor in the eyes of established enterprises. Whereas now it's inverted so completely where every company of any size and significance and of the businesses that have retained any degree of agility, which is most of them, they all have plans for how to take advantage of the possibilities of the internet and the possibilities of ML

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  and the possibilities of these global customer bases and so on. And they know that, well, if they don't execute it, some crop of startups is going to come along and sort of do it in their sector for them. And so now when we go and talk to the CIO of some giant retailer or some large manufacturing company or something, the fact that we're working with actually the world's most innovative, at least new companies, is a very strong kind of positive in their eyes. This funny inversion where the same trait went from being detractor to really being a selling point. And they want to hear what are the upstarts doing so that they can go and roll it out themselves. And honestly, I've been impressed where, take Hertz as an example, you know, we're discussing them yesterday.

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  They're doing a really big deployment with Stripe. They're really excellent to work with. We're doing a bunch of stuff with United Healthcare and Optum and.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  Big companies.

• 1:08:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of these companies to a greater extent than people. Appreciate have actually hired some really good talent. Maybe 20 years ago, they didn't have people who really get software. Now, in a lot of cases, they do. And a lot of our engagements with those businesses are just really productive.

• 1:09:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  One of the coolest things in my life recently is that I have kids of a certain age now, where the kids are starting to do things that make me very proud for the first time. They're developing agency and they're doing things where it blows your hair back like, oh, my God, I can't believe they did this. It's made me really love asking people this question about pride, not in themselves, but in other people. I would love to hear from each of you, what about the other makes them most proud? You're talking to Irish people. Exactly introspection and vulnerability. It's coming from Irish people. It gives me license to ask the question.

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  Well, look, I mean, this is very relevant for this discussion. John has been serving as our interim CFO for most of this year. And I think it has always been true that John is a scholar of business. And when we were living together in an apartment in San Francisco, I'd be shuffling to bed and he'd be yelling out to me from the bedroom. You'll never guess what they said on this earnings transcript or whatever. John, I'm brushing my teeth. There's a way for both of us, we're normally engaging in the business as co-founders with one layer of indirection. And so we're very lucky to have Stefan Tomlinson joining as CFO in a couple of weeks as of the time of this recording. By the time it's out, he will in fact have started. But it's been very fun for me to watch John actually temporarily inhabit the role of CFO.

• 1:10:22Speaker 03

  And I think it's been significantly to strike its benefit. And so we're both extremely excited about Stefan. In the same way that I'm always trying to find a productive equilibrium with our product leaders, where we need to empower them and a lot of those people are really fantastic. And it would be a mistake of me to be getting in their way, but want to find some way to have some amount of productive meddling. I think similarly for John, I've been encouraging him to make sure that we retain sufficient productive meddling on the finance side because he's very good at it.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  When we had all that discussion about quality and craft and everything, that's all Patrick. And in particular, he has a remarkable eye for it and cares about it. It kind of has to be good because something will be wrong in the universe. He'll be itching, he'll be sitting awkwardly in his chair if the stuff isn't good. And we'll put in the hours, we'll be there very late the night before our conference, ensuring that the talks are in good form or whatever. But I think how that bleeds over is people really want to do great work because of the expectations that they know Patrick has of them

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  and that now they have of themselves. And I think, again, as we talk about culture, there's a really nice cultural thing at Stripe. There's tons of really talented people, and again, people who are meticulous in their craft at Stripe. But again, I think Patrick has set an expectation and a culture there where people maybe start out wanting to do excellent crafts because it is expected by him of them, and they end up wanting to do it themselves.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  I was describing a capability of John's, and probably there's lots of those. But maybe another view of Stripe would be that every organization, you're always trying to balance these dichotomies. I think lots of things are dichotomies and trying to find a reasonable intermediate point. But maybe an important one, and somehow one that we straddle, is I am grim and austere and joyless, complaining about the misplaced pixels and all the rest. And John, everyone who knows him, is cheerful and extroverted and sociable and is bringing 100 of his closest Stripe friends to the bar next door on Tuesday because it just opened and we need to inaugurate it. I think for an organization of humans that do great work,

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  you actually do need both, where you're not going to achieve super high expectations absent the standards, but it also needs to be a group of people which you want to spend time in it. Look, I don't think either of us actually are sort of on either end of the continuum here, and we're probably even less different on this continuum as individuals.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Similarity highlights the contrast or something.

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  Exactly, where we play off each other or something as a duo. But I think there's an interesting way organizations need both of those.

• 1:13:10Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  The more Irish appropriate question might have been, what does the other do that makes your eyes roll the most easily?

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  Oh, well, that

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  Same answer is actually, yes.

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  You'd add another hour to the podcast for that.

• 1:13:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I think it's been incredibly fun. I know we're coming up on time. I had the pleasure of doing this with John before, and I have a traditional closing question, so I get to direct it at you this time, since he's already answered it. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  I should have known this was coming, but I didn't prepare an answer. Everyone else has prepped for this, so you get to think about it. Apart from my parents, my principal at our secondary school, which is the high school plus plus that I attended in Ireland, which was a public school and a very good public school, but a public school that, it actually wasn't the closest public school, but our relentlessly resourceful mom thought it was better than the most proximate one and managed to find a way to... Basically, we had lived in its catchment area when the school was founded. I'm sorry, she, she...

• 1:14:11Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You chose to go from 1991.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  Exactly. So she found some way to persuade them to take us. Anyway, the principal consistently let me violate all sorts of policies and rules and turned a blind eye to many things over the years in such a way that I had a fabulous time in my five years there. And like at first, I just wanted to read my books during class and I thought I was being very deviously and effectively furtive, having nobody notice.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  No one knows.

• 1:14:40Speaker 03

  Exactly. In the small little classroom. There's no way this teacher could spot this, but I learned subsequently that he had just quietly instructed all the teachers to not complain about my ignoring, I guess, the classwork and just reading my book. I did the homework or whatever, took the test. I wasn't paying much attention in class. And then the stage I wanted to take some time out of school, mostly to spend it on working on this programming language. And he found a way to categorize this so that it worked.

• 1:15:05Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I did, yeah.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  He's still in school.

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. So actually, I did a lot of it physically in the school and parts of it he could argue while he's at school. He didn't ask me if he was going to the classes. Then at the end, I wanted to go to college in the US and not do the standard examination that everyone in Ireland does and so on. And again, he kept finding ways to make it work in theory. Very tragically, he died a few years after I left school, suddenly at a premature and early age. And so I did thank him, but I always felt regretful. I never felt that I had sufficient opportunity to thank him.

• 1:15:38Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  It's amazing how much this category of answer comes up. The two major ones are this one of someone noticed something about me and did something customized and shaped me in a certain way, or bet on me when they didn't need to. Some ways the same thing. It just comes up over and over again. I hope more and more people do that for others.

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  I think you're doing a huge service by highlighting those cases to a bunch of people who are in the position to do it. I don't know if this was your intent in asking this question, or if this is now a cool side benefit.

• 1:16:06Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You know where the question came from? So I do this as a hobby, still as my favorite hobby. Effectively, I'm focused on investing, but this is something I love to do. And I didn't know how to do it. I'm not a journalist or anything. And so I was really into the mythology of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey or whatever. And it's all the same story for all these great historical myths. And so I thought I would ask a question in the podcast that covered each of the nine stages of the hero's journey. And one of them, the stage three or four, is random helpers come and assist the hero on their quest before they get to the belly of the beast. And so the question was just, what's the kindest thing? But I had these nine questions and the rest of them suck. No one ever cared. But that one always got an awesome answer. And so that's the only one that lasted. So that's where it came from. I wish I had higher intentions.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  That's really funny. Well, I think you're now, yeah, creating more kind moments.

• 1:16:55Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's a testament to how interesting just the core thing that you have worked on and will continue to work on is that we didn't even get to in two hours, AI and all these other amazing things happening in the world of technology. But I'm really glad that we focused on the core thing because that's what got you here and that's what you're focused on for the future. I'm deeply appreciative of the time and all the insight and all the detail that's gone into it. So thanks so much for your time.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  Thank you. It was really fun.

• 1:17:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you enjoyed this episode, check out joincolossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast, complete with transcripts, show notes and resources to keep learning. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.