Patrick Collison
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.
Patrick Collison did not write this page. ppll compiled it from their own words, each linked to the source. Is this you? · Report a mistake
Latest x.com
What they believe
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If agents reward product quality, information about product quality will become more important and impactful.
It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful.
x.comSaid 9 Oct 2026This on korrents
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Figures across many countries in a certain historical period seem to have been solemnly concerned with the character of their nation.
I'm often struck by how figures in this period across many countries seem solemnly concerned with the character of the nation.
x.comSaid 25 Sept 2026This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These 2: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
Feed
As its own page →Hiding
15 October
13 October
11 October
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Life and FateTheir words
Grossman’s Life and Fate is maybe a useful counterpoint.
9 October
From one piece @patrickc on X 14 beliefs · x.com
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korrents.com
The biggest effect of agents on the market may well be that the rewards for better products increase.Their words
taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.
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korrents.com
The market is a massively parallelized, decentralized and highly imperfect value-attribution machine.Their words
Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine
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Their words
Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions.
+ 11 more
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korrents.com
Personal agents might change how internet demand routing works, and its value, by a lot.Their words
How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.
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Their words
This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great.
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korrents.com
Data is becoming more valuable not only for training models but as a complement to cheaper intelligence.Their words
It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.
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korrents.com
Agents will have an insatiable thirst for signals about product quality, which most people today cannot aggregate.Their words
Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals.
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korrents.com
Focusing on making a product better is going to become a more effective strategy for companies.Their words
On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!
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Their words
Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality.
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korrents.com
Personal agents will make certain kinds of price discrimination and customer cross-subsidy work less well.Their words
Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't).
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korrents.com
Personal agents will probably make people somewhat more rational in how they deal with companies.Their words
Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.
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korrents.com
Companies often use their cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of some consumers.Their words
It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc.
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Their words
Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence.
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korrents.com
If agents reward product quality, information about product quality will become more important and impactful.Their words
It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful.
6 October
1 October
30 September
29 September
28 September
25 September
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Their words
I'm often struck by how figures in this period across many countries seem solemnly concerned with the character of the nation.
Nothing matches.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 43 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
If agents reward product quality, information about product quality will become more important and impactful.
It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful.
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
Companies are, in some sense, the original superintelligence.
Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence.
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
Companies often use their cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of some consumers.
It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc.
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
Show 40 more
Personal agents will probably make people somewhat more rational in how they deal with companies.
Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies.
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
Personal agents will make certain kinds of price discrimination and customer cross-subsidy work less well.
Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't).
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
Personal agents will act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality.
Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality.
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
Focusing on making a product better is going to become a more effective strategy for companies.
On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good!
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
Agents will have an insatiable thirst for signals about product quality, which most people today cannot aggregate.
Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals.
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
Data is becoming more valuable not only for training models but as a complement to cheaper intelligence.
It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
Internet companies' monetized demand routing has created inefficiency; it is not all deadweight loss, but it is not great.
This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great.
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
Personal agents might change how internet demand routing works, and its value, by a lot.
How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big.
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
Being on the consumer's side will likely be the winning strategy for personal agents.
Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions.
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
The market is a massively parallelized, decentralized and highly imperfect value-attribution machine.
Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
The biggest effect of agents on the market may well be that the rewards for better products increase.
taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
Figures across many countries in a certain historical period seem to have been solemnly concerned with the character of their nation.
I'm often struck by how figures in this period across many countries seem solemnly concerned with the character of the nation.
@patrickc on X Said 25 Sept 2026
A body of publications is easy for AI models to consume via pretraining corpora but cumbersome for most humans due to CAPTCHAs, accounts, and paywalls.
consuming its publications is so easy for the models (the world's knowledge is neatly serried in their pretraining corpora) and so cumbersome for most humans (with trenches of CAPTCHAs, accounts, and paywalls ensuring that only the unusually dedicated reader will ever make contact)
@patrickc on X Said 17 Sept 2026
Architects oppose the kinds of buildings that most people like.
Architects oppose the kinds of buildings that most people like.
@patrickc on X Said 11 Sept 2026
The OpenAI-Hugging Face attack is one of the most important things to happen this year, and has gone strikingly under-covered.
Overall, I’m very surprised at how little media coverage there’s been around the OpenAI / Hugging Face attack. It’s clearly one of the most important things to happen this year.
@patrickc on X Said 30 Aug 2026
The difficulty of incorporating a company in Germany is understated rather than exaggerated, and it pushes founders to incorporate elsewhere.
Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.
@patrickc on X Said 29 Aug 2026
Knowing something yourself will stay faster than asking a model for it, because a lookup in your own head beats a round trip to an agent.
That's a hell of a lot slower than knowing it in cognitive L1 cache. And you can have way more round trips in your brain than you can, you know, muttering through, you know, super whisper or typing it out or whatever.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
Renouncing your own cognitive ability because the models are good is premature, because companies still pay an enormous premium for it.
there still seems to be an enormous premium on cognitive ability. And so, I wouldn't I I I I think, um, renouncing that before there's evidence that we've saturated, uh, those benefits would be premature.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
Models can prove monumental theorems and still have never written an essay worth reading.
I mean, it's very interesting, right? Because these can prove the Jacobian conjecture, you know, whatever. Uh and so clearly they're capable of these monumental feats. Um but somehow I still haven't read the LLM essay that I found super compelling.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
Dropping out of college is not a trapdoor and the reputational cost is nil: as far as anyone can tell, nobody has ever cared.
You know, I think a lot of parents think that dropping out is very risky and impune your reputation for the rest of your life and so forth. And as far as I can tell, nobody has ever cared.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
Startup opportunities are not fleeting; Silicon Valley has reliably had a surfeit of them for decades.
You know, in hindsight, I think that um that was a a poor intuition. Uh it's been pretty robustly and reliably the case over many decades in Silicon Valley has a surfeit of opportunities.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
This is not the last moment to start a company, and the belief that the window is about to close is a recurring millenarian instinct.
I mean, obviously aviation was was a pretty big deal, but uh I I I don't think it was sort of quite the um the sociological rewriting that some of the you know excitable proponents at the time imagined. So I am you know it's it's hard to predict anything especially the future but I would I would take the under on this being the last couple of years to get a company going.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
Build on a customer problem somebody viscerally feels and would pay to fix, because it is very easy to imagine one that nobody does.
something we learned from YC uh was that the importance of focusing on very concrete easy to explain customer problems. Like it's it's very easy to to hallucinate or to you know imagine some customer problem that's not actually something viscerally felt by a person who would pay money.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
An idea can be obviously good and obviously ridiculous at the same time; being grounded in a real user problem is what carries it through.
So, anyway, I'd say it like it both seemed like an obviously good idea in that people really wanted this, but also a bad idea in that nobody took it seriously. Um but I I think that I think the fact that it was ultimately the fact that it was grounded in such a concrete actual real user problem saved us.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
Some domains cannot be launched into early: where security, partners and money movement are preconditions, you have to build first.
Um in our domain, to answer your last question, because we had to do so much stuff around security and partners and money movement and infrastructure and reliability and you know, all the things. We just we didn't feel like we could scale a really good self-serve experience without getting a lot of the kind of the preconditions um and the infrastructure in place.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
Weekly contact with paying users is what the launch-early rule is really for: it means learning from reality instead of your own extrapolated conception of it.
And so, every, you know, every week, we had actual customer feedback, requests, new users coming in. We're learning things from reality as opposed to our own kind of hypothesized or extrapolated conception of it.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
The lean startup was almost the only option twenty years ago; with AI you can start something far more aggressive and ambitious up front.
So, I um yeah, I think maybe maybe a better way of saying it is 20 20 years ago that whole lean startup thing was uh was almost the only thing to do because of capital available and you didn't have AI that made, I don't know, spinning up an organization with many different potentialities and capabilities so much easier, whereas now I think you can start these much more aggressive and ambitious things up front.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
Many of the most successful companies of the last decade were built against the lean startup playbook, not with it.
many of the companies that were most successful over the last 10 years, so many of them are are very anti-lean startup, right? Uh whether it's, you know, the labs themselves or Anduril or um yeah, you you you you can go down the list. A lot of them have this characteristic.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
Before you raise money, ask what happens if you succeed - whether you will still want this company in ten or thirty years.
I think you need to ask the uh, the sort of converse of that, uh, what if you succeed? And you know, you raise money and you've customers and you've employees and a whole thing. Like are you going to be are you going to enjoy that? Are you going to want to work on that for 10 years, for 17 years, for 30 years?
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
The schleps of building a payments company were repaid, because no Stripe customer has ever turned out to be boring.
But yeah, just like it's it's I've never met a Stripe customer and thought that's boring. Um so so it's actually the business as a whole has been the opposite of uh of the Schlep Blindness um instinct.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
The fear that a big lab will simply build your product is overstated, because no organisation can aggressively prosecute a hundred priorities at once.
And just human organizations are complicated and it's very hard to have um to manage to aggressively prosecute 100 different priorities and to deal with all the issues and interference that arises among them and so forth. And so, you know, Google has done incredibly well in a bunch of specific places, but it's not like Google has done all the things even if in some kind of basic material sense, uh Google maybe, you know, had that ability.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
New businesses are being started at close to twice last year's rate, the largest relative jump Stripe has ever recorded.
Um, as I speak, the number of new businesses starting on Stripe is up around a bit under, but around 2x year-over-year, um, which again is the largest relative jump, uh, we've seen.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
The new wave of businesses is not lightweight slop: the median one is doing better than a year ago, and more of them clear every revenue threshold.
Um, but actually the median business, uh, is doing better this year than a year ago. Um, and so and then if we kind of, um, stratify and look at the probability that any given business will reach some revenue threshold, a million dollars, five million dollars, 10 million dollars, whatever, um, those all seem to be getting better.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
By every objective metric Stripe can see, there has never been a better time to start a business.
Uh, business are uh, the time to revenue for new companies incorporated with Atlas is declining. And so, by all the kind of objective metrics we can look at, uh, it seems to be a better time than ever to start a business.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
Enterprises buy from startups now because the risk of keeping the status quo has come to look larger than the risk of the startup.
But now, people know that, well, the risk of the status quo is actually extremely high. And so, even if there's risk in doing all the new things, well, this path also looks pretty dangerous. And so, I really think there's never been a better time for startups to to sell um and to have their products get adopted at, you know, pretty meaningful scale right out of the gate.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
AI will not centralise the economy into a handful of companies; there are going to be many thousands of winners.
But based on what we can see at Stripe, the hunger and the intensity with which other companies are either getting started, taking advantage of these new capabilities, or existing companies are retooling, I don't worry about the centralization in the same way. Uh I think there I think there are going to be many thousands of winners.
Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? Said 31 Jul 2026
The cognitive costs of air pollution are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasised -- most EPA materials do not mention them at all.
Air pollution is a very big deal. Its adverse effects on numerous health outcomes and general mortality are widely documented. However, our understanding of its cognitive costs is more recent and those costs are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasized. For example, cognitive effects are not mentioned in most EPA materials.
Pollution by 18 Nov 2019
Returns to effort do not visibly diminish; the binding constraint is how much hard work you actually enjoy, not where the curve flattens.
To the extent that you enjoy working hard, do. Subject to that constraint, it's not clear that the returns to effort ever diminish substantially.
Advice by 5 Jul 2018
A large fraction of what the people around you believe is mistaken, and nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself.
More broadly, nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview.
Advice by 5 Jul 2018
Great work is usually done far younger than its fame suggests: people were grey-haired when they became famous, not when they did the work.
People who did great things often did so at very surprisingly young ages. (They were grayhaired when they became famous... not when they did the work.)
Advice by 5 Jul 2018
Beliefs others hold too
Personal agents will act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. 2 hold this
Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality.
@patrickc on X Said 9 Oct 2026
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Recommends rcmnd
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Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Recommends Life and Fate
Grossman’s Life and Fate is maybe a useful counterpoint.
x.com 11 Oct 2026
Loved Chris Arnade's blog
Chris Arnade's blog continues to be one of the very best: https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/.
x.com 11 Sept 2026
Liked Muse
I've been enjoying Muse: https://muse.ai. Among many other things, you can use it to buy anywhere on the internet with @link.
x.com 8 Sept 2026
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Recommends WorksInProgMag
You should subscribe to @asteriskmgzn, in addition to @WorksInProgMag of course. They have a very good print edition.
x.com 4 Sept 2026
Recommends asteriskmgzn
You should subscribe to @asteriskmgzn, in addition to @WorksInProgMag of course. They have a very good print edition.
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Recommends Tempo
Tempo is growing very quickly and there are a lot of new use-cases coming online. Reach out to the team if you’re building with stablecoins.
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their own
Liked Show-Stopper!
There's a closely-related genre of great books (like Masters of Doom and Show-Stopper) that cover important projects in the industry's history.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Liked Masters of Doom
There's a closely-related genre of great books (like Masters of Doom and Show-Stopper) that cover important projects in the industry's history.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved Swimming Across
Swimming Across -- Andy Grove's memoir.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved Revolution in The Valley
Revolution in The Valley -- a hundred stories from the early days of the Mac, collected by one of its creators.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce
The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce -- the origins and cultural context of Fairchild and Intel.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved Making Silicon Valley
Making Silicon Valley -- there aren't many books that say a lot about the Valley pre-Shockley; this one goes back to the 30s.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved Season of the Witch
Season of the Witch -- a cultural history of San Francisco from the late 60s to the early 80s.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved From Counterculture to Cyberculture
From Counterculture to Cyberculture -- Stewart Brand and his surrounding milieu.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved The Little Kingdom
The Little Kingdom -- the early days of Apple Computer and the Macintosh.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved Something Ventured
Something Ventured -- a lighthearted history of the venture capital industry.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved The Chip
The Chip -- the invention of the microchip.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved Man-Computer Symbiosis
Man-Computer Symbiosis -- established the vision of computing that inspired Engelbart, Kay, etc., to pursue what they did.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved Computer Lib/Dream Machines
Computer Lib -- one of the greatest books about the possibilities of computers ever written.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved The Idea Factory
The Idea Factory -- sets the context for the hardware inventions that directly led to Silicon Valley.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved Dealers of Lightning
Dealers of Lightning -- the best history of PARC.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved The Whole Earth Catalog
The Whole Earth Catalog -- the library at PARC was first composed simply of the books that the Whole Earth Catalog recommended.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Loved Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech
Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech -- the definitive history of Genentech.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
What others say about Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech →
Loved Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s
Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s -- a brief history of the venture capital industry since 1973.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
What others say about Heat Death: Venture Capital in the 1980s →
Loved The Dream Machine
The Dream Machine -- probably the best overall book about the early days of computing and the internet.
patrickcollison.com 19 Aug 2024
Liked Jose Luis Ricón
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Liked Dan Lemire
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Liked Gwern
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Liked Scott Alexander
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Liked Luke Muehlhauser’s blog
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Liked Marginal Revolution
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Liked Alexey Guzey’s links
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Liked Sam Enright’s newsletter
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Where they publish
Site patrickcollison.com Their own site: reading lists, open questions, and notes on progress.
A plain personal site — books read, questions they would like answered, notes on fast-moving projects and on how science gets funded. Updated slowly and worth reading whole.
Link verified 1 Sept 2026.
x.com @patrickc Short-form on Stripe, science funding and progress.
Short posts and replies on payments, scientific progress and institutional dysfunction, and the place new writing gets pointed at.
Recent
- I very highly recommend visiting the UK's great cathedrals, e.g. Lincoln and Durham. I did so earlier this year and find myself reminiscing about them quite frequently. Some of the most beautiful buildings in the world. 15 Oct 2026
- Today is probably a good time to check in on things with @privy_io, which became part of @stripe just over a year ago. Our acquisition was predicated on three factors: stablecoin growth, self-custody as a key enabler of broader global coverage, and rapidly increasing demand for programmable financial infrastructure. As we said at the time, "money has to reside somewhere, and Privy builds the world's best programmable vaults." Since then, the Privy team has executed exceptionally well: assets in Privy wallets have grown ~25x, monthly active developers are up ~3x, revenue is up ~9x, and Privy n… 15 Oct 2026
- Today is probably a good time to check in on things with @privy_io, which became part of @stripe just over a year ago. Our acquisition was predicated on three factors: stablecoin growth, self-custody as a key enabler of broader global coverage, and rapidly increasing demand for programmable financial infrastructure. As we said at the time, "money has to reside somewhere, and Privy builds the world's best programmable vaults." Since then, the Privy team has executed exceptionally well: assets in Privy wallets have grown ~25x, monthly active developers are up ~3x, revenue is up ~9x, and Privy n… 15 Oct 2026
Show 17 more
- Stablecoin-backed cards make make global balances instantly usable at 100M+ businesses. We're looking forward to working with @plasma to advance the space. 15 Oct 2026
- New from @stripepress: the definitive guide to sales. I notice that startups today are scaling sales faster than ever, making it more valuable to get structures and incentives right from the outset. 13 Oct 2026
- I’m very biased, but the new @WorksInProgMag is IMO a masterpiece in both design and content. 13 Oct 2026 worksinprogress.co
- Brothers Karamazov was Einstein’s favorite novel, a verdict he shared with Freud, Hillary Clinton, and Murakami. Dostoyevsky was Pope Francis’s favorite author. Indeed, he approvingly quoted Elder Zosima; perhaps an interesting case of art molding life. At the risk of betraying my relative shallowness and inferiority, I confess that I did not love it. Written in the shadow of the death of Dostoyevsky’s son (also Alyosha), and, more broadly, after a life of repeated tragedy, Karamazov attempts most of all to address the problem of evil in Christianity. Ivan presents a trenchant argument, askin… 11 Oct 2026
- Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rat… 9 Oct 2026
- Remarkable assemblage in the new @WorksInProgMag: - @RobinRivaton and @bswud on how China's cities, and the competition between them, have driven its rise to techno-industrial preeminence, - @danwwang on Chinese and American second-tier cities, - @tylercowen on the food of Brazil, - @vpostrel on the invention of supermarkets, - @CharlesCMann on the discovery of porcelain, - @salonium on the myth of accidental scientific discovery, - Stephen Kotkin on Leninism's fatal flaw, - @owl_posting on biomedical hedge funds, - @PMArslanagic on the formula for lovable cities, - @pietergaricano on Ukraine… 6 Oct 2026
- We're hosting a small event to discuss the latest advances in AI and biology this Friday evening, featuring @arcinstitute researchers and others. Apply if interested! 1 Oct 2026 forms.gle
- Track $OUSD growth at https://t.co/HXKo5dXaia. 30 Sept 2026
- 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. 30 Sept 2026
- I've long wished that online mapping services were far richer and higher-density. They elide so much detail today! We have gloriously high-DPI screens... I want to wallow in cartographic filigree. AI of course now makes this possible: 29 Sept 2026
- Very good post from @AtalantaArdenM on the role of suffering in art: https://t.co/eyzqdV0G7E. 28 Sept 2026
- The small Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in London's Postman's Park is quite moving: an assembly of earnest Arts and Crafts tiles commemorating people who died saving the lives of others. George Watts, the creator, in 1887: "My proposal, as you know, is plainly this: that the memory of the deeds of heroism constantly recurring in our everyday life should be perpetuated and honoured as such deeds should, for they illustrate the character of our people as a nation of great acts." And elsewhere: "It is a great pity that they should only receive the recognition of a newspaper paragraph, and be… 25 Sept 2026
- Some data we recently assembled on entrepreneurship/compute in Europe: https://t.co/x8pbpHLun7. We hope that one of the useful roles that Stripe can play is in collecting and publishing empirical data pertaining to entrepreneurship and industry in Europe. There's growing appetite to get Europe on a better footing, and cross-sectional comparisons can often shine light on where opportunities lie. If you're interested in this kind of thing, we publish more at https://t.co/YoZDuYbaBi. 24 Sept 2026
- 🆕: @Meta and @stripe are partnering to make it easy for businesses to accept agentic payments using the @Muse Connector Platform. Learn more: • https://t.co/kGsKMULe3m • https://t.co/Fn5U2QRaaz • Email jweinstein@ / @jeff_weinstein 19 Sept 2026
- Very good piece, as usual, from @jburnmurdoch: 19 Sept 2026 ft.com
- Tempo is compounding very quickly. Seeing a lot of new stablecoin + agent use-cases. 17 Sept 2026
- Given how wary academia (understandably) is of the effects of AI on many disciplines, it is particularly ironic that consuming its publications is so easy for the models (the world's knowledge is neatly serried in their pretraining corpora) and so cumbersome for most humans (with trenches of CAPTCHAs, accounts, and paywalls ensuring that only the unusually dedicated reader will ever make contact). 17 Sept 2026
Link verified 1 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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