Episode

Patrick Collison on Stripe’s Early Choices, Smalltalk, and What Comes After Coding

Podcast: AI + a16z
Published: Mar 24, 2026
Duration seconds: 3173
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Summary

Michael Truell, CEO of Cursor, sits down with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe and an investor in Anysphere, to talk about Collison's history with Smalltalk and Lisp, the MongoDB and Ruby decisions Stripe still lives with 15 years later, why he'd spend even more time on API design if he could do it over, and whether AI is actually showing up in economic productivity data. This episode originally aired on Cursor's podcast.