The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
John Collison reads as The Visionary because he recognised, as a teenager, that the internet's commercial layer was broken and built Stripe to fix it at civilisational scale. As co-founder and president, he articulates a future where economic infrastructure runs as seamlessly as electricity, and he has pursued that conviction through product decisions, global expansion, and deliberate patience on valuation.
“And that was because it was just like they all had to be invented from scratch. And then there were just only a small number of people who even understood the software and how you could possibly apply it. There just weren't that many of us running around who did that. So John Dor has famous internet.”
“That's right. And by the way, you get this phenomenon. You see this all over the place, and you see this in Gallup does this great poll of trust of trust in institutions and the numbers are just all cratering. And the crater, the declines are accelerating.”
“Are there people who can do the 300 milliliters. Wish I had met more of them by now. And then the other side of that is why is it understudied? And literally, I think this goes back to the same thing as why do people get mad about cryptocurrency is I think this.”
“Exactly, as we like to say, it's a 934 professor. It's a country club kind of thing. The other, by the way, great economic fallacy that I just see everywhere right now is this idea that AI is somehow going to be this hyper, you know, this hyper successful thing, hyper acceleration of productivity and dramatically change everything, destro…”
The David Rubenstein Show: “John Collison”
LISTEN AT THE SOURCE ↗THE RECORD IS CHECKABLE