Patrick Collison: The Stablecoin Future, Milei's Memecoin, DOGE for the DoD, Grok 3, Why Stripe Stays Private

The episode opens with host Jason Calacanis introducing David Friedberg, joking about a Valentine's Day appearance on Megyn Kelly's podcast, and announcing the first-ever duo to fill David Sacks' seat while Sacks is busy elsewhere. The guests are the brothers behind Stripe, whom the transcript calls "the Colson brothers."

The guests recall that they last met Chamath eighteen years earlier, while they were working on a previous startup (rendered in the transcript as "Octomatic"). They were roughly 17 to 19 years old and living in a San Francisco two-bedroom apartment with about six people working out of it. One participant, then a junior principal at Mayfield, describes the meeting with some regret: "I could have invested a dollar." He says an investment either did not happen or the company shut down, after which the founders quickly started Stripe, and he "just watched from the sidelines the whole way." He calls it a lesson about not picking up the phone at any point over seventeen years.

The guests' version adds a detail: offered something to drink, the visitor asked for water, and because the dishes had not been done, a glass had to be "gingerly" washed first. They also put the rejection in context. When Stripe started, the fintech sector "basically didn't exist," and people did not think it was a good idea for people in their early twenties to take on PayPal or regulated incumbents. They say "the vast majority of investors we spoke with in the first year or two of Stripe turned us down," so the visitor "were not anomalous."

Asked to explain Stripe, Calacanis describes it as a payment processor for startups, noting that the All-In startup uses it for ticket sales and pays it about half a million dollars a year. He also says Stripe has 10,000 employees. The guests correct the framing: Stripe now serves not only startups but "the world's largest enterprises," naming Hertz, Amazon and Ford, with Marriott added in the conversation. They originally thought Stripe would only be for startups, but "as time went on, we just found out it was kinda broken for everyone."

On scale, the guests say Stripe processes "more than a trillion dollars a year." Against global GDP of roughly a hundred trillion dollars, that comes to about 1%. They acknowledge the comparison is imperfect because GDP counts final goods and Stripe processes more than that. They still call it reasonable because Stripe is mostly used to sell final goods.

every kind of money movement is going from being manually orchestrated to being orchestrated by software.

The guests describe this as the structural, secular trend behind Stripe's expansion past payments. Payments is where Stripe started and is still its largest business. Customer demand has since led it into lending, card issuance, treasury and money storage, cross-border money movement, and stablecoins.

The guests say Stripe and crypto "have grown up together." The Bitcoin white paper came out in 2008, the year before they started working on Stripe. Stripe tried to make Bitcoin work as a payment method, but it fell short. It is good as a store of value, "a gold substitute," but transactions are slow and expensive, and "You never know exactly how much you're gonna get because it's not denominated in dollars."

By contrast, they say stablecoins on an Ethereum L2 or Solana are "now really good." Late last year Stripe bought Bridge, which they describe as "building the Stripe of stablecoins." Their examples are SpaceX using it for treasury management and companies offering US dollar services to people around the world. Their view is that stablecoins are "the first really big payments use case" for crypto, arriving now "because the tech is good now."

Asked whether some regulatory event or set of conditions could break the Visa and Mastercard "duopoly," the guests do not predict one. They say stablecoin adoption is strongest where there is a cross-border component: corporate treasury across countries, remittances, and people abroad who want dollar balances. In the US and Europe, "things work pretty well." They note that big changes in how people pay, such as UPI in India and PIX in Brazil, both designed by central banks, have also happened in emerging markets and not in the US and Europe.

The guests also push back on the idea that card networks simply extract rent. They say most interchange fees charged to merchants flow to issuing banks, and almost all of that flows back to consumers through the credit the cards provide and through rewards. Card programs, they say, "are not actually big profit pools" for most major banks. Any substitute raises trade-offs: lower consumer rewards, weaker consumer protections, or less consumer credit.

it it is a set of trade offs, and it's not as simple as this this, enormous rent extraction happening.

The use case the guests call "taking off right now" is consumers in other countries holding dollars. Most people live with currencies that are less stable and more inflationary. Their example is Nigeria's naira, which they say has devalued "by a factor of, you know, three or four over the last couple of years." They compare this to the eurodollar system of the 1970s and 1980s, which gave companies stable dollar storage but had a minimum transaction of about a million dollars. Today, they say, a consumer in Ecuador can hold a 10 US dollar balance, which was not available before. They argue this also helps the US, because the dollar's reserve-currency status is "in the process of becoming much more deeply established."

One participant adds a policy argument: legalizing stablecoins and giving them rails, with US issuers like USDC, means "we can regulate them and they have to buy treasuries," so "Dollar supremacy continues." The same remark criticizes Tether over its lawsuits and bans in various countries. That claim is made in passing and not discussed further.

Using All-In as the example, the guests confirm that a Stripe merchant can turn on stablecoin acceptance, which today uses USDC. Asked whether Stripe will have its own coin, they say Bridge already has "a small stablecoin" but is "primarily a set of software APIs." The exchange includes running jokes about the guests now sponsoring the All-In summit.

On paying vendors in stablecoins to cut fees, the guests say that is possible, but domestic US bank transfers, though "kinda slow," are "fine" and "really cheap today." The real "hair on fire problem" is international. Their example is Scale AI paying contractors around the world, where sending money to people in the Philippines "starts to get really annoying and expensive." They expect domestic use to "come later."

The guests then widen the question beyond stablecoins. They say most companies lose "one, two, three percent of revenue to AP and AR." Some of that comes from the payment rails, but much comes from inefficient processes: people sending invoices, reconciling by hand, and matching transfers to bank statements. Stablecoins would be part of the fix, "but there's more to it." Separately, Stripe Billing, which they say was just announced to have passed half a billion in ARR, targets this problem. In the conversation it is compared to invoicing products like FreshBooks.

Asked whether payments between two Stripe customers could simply be ledger entries, the guests agree that the share of money movement where both sides are on Stripe "is obviously growing" and could lower fees over time. They argue the costly parts are calculation, ID verification and risk, so the main savings would come from less fraud because both counterparties are known. Their example is a payroll company that told them fraudulent sign-ups can cost "millions of dollars in a single attack," which makes a trusted node more valuable than a bare routing and account number.

One participant notes that official data such as non-farm payrolls and GDP keeps getting revised, which makes it unreliable for market participants. He asks whether Stripe, which sees a large share of the economy, has considered publishing economic sentiment. The guests say they have, and they feel "a bit rueful" for not doing it.

They give two reasons it is hard. First, Stripe's data skews toward online and innovative companies, and during COVID "the online economy was doing great" while the offline economy was "a different story." Second, Stripe is growing and changing so fast that strong year-over-year growth on Stripe may not reflect the wider economy. Even so, they say the team built "a pretty reliable, kind of, leading indicator for inflation" from recent years of data. They would like to share it openly because better economic data is "a public good." They do not describe the indicator's method or results.