John Collison

Co-founder of @stripe.

[John Collison @collision]

Agentic commerce with Claude and Stripe @Link!

[Stripe @stripe]

We’re working with Anthropic to help you run your businesses inside Claude Duet.

• Make purchases with @link
• Issue refunds and understand business trends with the Stripe MCP

[Ben Thompson @benthompson]

I always intended Stratechery to have a sponsorship component; it just took me 12 years to get back to it. That I could do so with the company that made the subscription business possible makes me so happy. There is nothing better than endorsing a product you whole-heartedly believe in.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Ben has for many years been the best analyst in tech. I’m very much looking forward to this new @stratechery + @stripe partnership.

https://t.co/iFdKSV8NQ7

[Stripe Press @stripepress]

Nomad Letters: The Full Collection of the Nomad Investment Partnership Letters to Partners, 2001–2014, now available for preorder: https://t.co/oNIxT4wyH8

[John Collison @collision]

.@MercedesAMGF1 is the leading F1 team and the best business in the sport. Toto Wolff is the only owner-principal. I was excited to sit him down and understand his business background, how they run engineering under the constantly-changing rules, his views on the industry, and how he's preparing for succession.

00:00:22 Spotting driver talent
00:06:24 Engineering and team selection
00:09:11 The F1 cost cap
00:25:21 Toto’s early investing career
00:38:15 Running Mercedes as an owner
00:46:47 Why F1 team values exploded
01:08:24 Succession planning

[John Collison @collision]

.@willob of @ulyssesinc joins @sacca and me for a pint to discuss how subsea robotics is unlocking Earth’s last frontier. We talk about the physical constraints of operating 1,500 meters underwater, why seagrass holds 20% of the ocean’s carbon, how green tape hinders environmental restoration, and why hard tech startups are verticalising hardware manufacturing. (Plus, Will's interesting Guinness history facts.)

[John Collison @collision]

Tomorrow on Cheeky Pint: @willob of Ulysses joins @sacca and me to discuss why seagrass is the ultimate carbon sink, scaling underwater hard tech (deep tech?), and selling sea drones to the US Navy.

[John Collison @collision]

Cheeky Pint is back! Mark Zuckerberg @finkd and Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wang came to the pub to discuss their new frontier model, Muse Wonder.

00:00:24 Muse’s breakout use cases
00:07:28 The model is the product
00:14:35 Muse Wonder
00:24:56 How frontier models are built
00:48:26 Betting $100B
01:07:21 Agentic commerce
01:19:34 OpenRouter
01:20:06 Beyond the smartphone
01:27:00 Funding
01:34:06 Why AI won’t be winner-take-all
01:40:46 Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)
02:08:11 Working for Mark Zuckerberg

[John Collison @collision]

Cheeky Pint returns Monday in our new pub! Lots of great guests lined up for this season.

[John Collison @collision]

You can now binge watch Cheeky Pint on your @united flight.

[jess lozano schmitt @JessLozanoS]

your Cheeky Pint experience just got upgraded!! now on @united ✈️🍻

[jess lozano schmitt @JessLozanoS]

your Cheeky Pint experience just got upgraded!! now on @united ✈️🍻

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Open Standard, $OUSD, is now live!

Open Standard is a new USD stablecoin with a very large network of participating partners (https://t.co/DLdavkVEL3). It's designed to be exceptionally secure, reliable, and developer-friendly. Importantly, most yield is shared directly with partners rather than being internalized by the stablecoin issuer.

Stripe is adopting OUSD in a number of core product flows.

[John Collison @collision]

Will Manidis on the "scale economies shared" concept at the heart of Nick Sleep's letters. Nick's letters have a cult following amongst investors, and we're delighted to be publishing them at Stripe Press.

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

i first read the Nomad letters when i was 17, and they changed my life. this is an embarrassing admission to make about a collection of hedge fund letters that primarily circulated as a stolen pdf in value-investor circles, and have now become enough of a meme to enjoy a second life of their own. but on the occasion of their republication in beautiful form by Tammy and the team at Stripe Press, i thought it was worth reflecting briefly on the impact these letters had on me.

Sleep and Zakaria’s fundamental truth (truke?) is often, and incorrectly, remembered as “scale matters.” everyone knew this when Sleep was writing.

the real insight was that scale is most powerful when its benefits are surrendered directly to the consumer.

the thing i remember most from Sleep is his wonderfully strange “robustness ratio,” which measured the amount the customer saved against the value retained by shareholders. value escaping the firm to the consumer, rather than being captured by it, was the metric of a great business. a great business is a lossy one.

this places Sleep in an interesting position opposite the other greatest anglo-investor of his generation, Chris Hohn. Nomad and TCI look similar from a distance: concentrated portfolios, long holding periods, indifference to benchmarks and, eventually, the conversion of their private fortunes into large philanthropic efforts.

they differ not merely in the fact that Hohn decided to continue (and even convert to Hinduism so that he could manage his portfolio in the next life, as reported in the FT), but in that their ideal businesses are exact mirror images. Hohn loves an irreversible asset that can extract a tax on its customer. in Hohn’s world, if a company possesses pricing power, it should, and must, exercise it.

rather Sleep’s ideal company possesses pricing power and repeatedly and consciously declines to use it.

the emergence and now total dominance of the labs makes this distinction newly urgent and would, on its own, be occasion enough to republish the work, quite apart from how beautiful and important the letters are.

our instinctive response to a discontinuity in technology is to invest at the frontier. Sleep’s letters are at least some reason for caution. technical leadership can be copied or simply made irrelevant by the next advance, and capital floods towards visible scarcity just before technology eviscerates that very same scarcity.

god knows Sleep was never hostile to technology. he made more money on Amazon than almost anyone else. but, at least in my reading, he was skeptical of technical novelty as a moat in its own right.

what mattered to him was whether that technological step had been converted into a self reinforcing relationship in which the customer privatized the gain.

in Nick’s frame, and he's welcome to correct me (although my sense is requiring him to lift a hand off of the wheel of a f450 in the hills of northumberland at this point would be a step too far) the enduring AI business may therefore be the one that passes declining costs on most aggressively, not one that preserves scarcity, bombs its own customers margins and tries to eat as much of the application layer as possible.

i find it increasingly useful to use the pair trade between totemic-hohn, and totemic-sleep actions as a frame in which to view the actions of the frontier. my guess is, in the fullness of time, or at the very least in this life (hohn is welcome to prove me wrong in the next), that Sleep might have won this bout.

very glad to see these letters in print.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

We are excited to announce we are partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores, offering people an easy and delightful way to shop and check out with Muse.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Architects oppose the kinds of buildings that most people like.

(I’ve wondered if one could further corroborate this by using Flickr/Instagram or similar to investigate the building traits that correlate with photo frequency.)

[Alexandr Wang @alexandr_wang]

1/ we partnered with @stripe to add convenient payments to Muse with Stripe Link. Muse can make purchases for you; and it asks for your approval before spending your money

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

I've been enjoying Muse: https://t.co/ynb57nMDw4. Among many other things, you can use it to buy anywhere on the internet with @link.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Grok Bot can now purchase anywhere with @link.

(If you haven't tried Grok Bot, you should. It's very good.)

[John Collison @collision]

Instinct can make purchases on your behalf (with supervision!) with Stripe Link!

[Noah Shinn @noahrshinn]

Instinct + Stripe

Instinct users who make purchases spend over $1300/month on average through Instinct. Using Instinct to make high value purchases is a sign of trust that we deeply value.

We’re partnering with Stripe to deliver a more seamless payment experience. Instinct has enabled use cases that involve payments including:
- Planning and booking international trips
- Ordering weekly groceries and household essentials
- Booking yoga classes, ski tuning sessions, doctor’s appointments, car part repairs, and more
- Getting you the best price for anything you’re looking for

[Darby Wong @darbyw]

Big news — @clerkyinc is joining @stripe! 🤝

Startup formation on Clerky is booming and more attorneys than ever before are working with clients on Clerky. As part of Stripe, we're going to lean into this momentum and keep building for high-growth startups and attorneys with the same team and focus that we've always had. We're not going anywhere!

Over the years, like most startup founders, I've heard a lot about Stripe and how they do things. More times than I can count, I've thought "oh, that's how we do it too" or "that makes complete sense". As we've gotten to know the team at Stripe better, it's become even clearer that we think alike in many ways. Equally important, we're both obsessed with making life as easy as possible for startups.

At a personal level, I'm excited for us to join Stripe as well. As a young startup attorney, I remember filing a charter amendment to change the name of a client from "slash dev slash payments" to "Stripe" and kind of preferring the original name ("Stripe" is good too though). And when we started Clerky, @patrickc was incredibly kind and introduced us to investors without even being asked. It's been amazing to watch Stripe grow since then and I could not be happier that it'll be our new home.

Thank you to all the startup founders and attorneys that have trusted us over the years. And thank you to all our employees past and present, our investors, @ycombinator (especially its incredible legal team), @cjoneslevy, @JohnBautista, and countless others who believed in us. So many people helped us along the way, often unbeknownst to us. We've benefited tremendously from the magic of the startup ecosystem and we're honored to keep building for it.

🙏