
Patrick Collison on Stripe’s Early Choices, Smalltalk, and What Comes After Coding
From AI + a16z by a16z
March 24, 2026 · 53 min · Episode 91
About this episode
Michael Truell interviews Patrick Collison about Stripe's early decisions and the impact of AI on productivity.
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.
People in this episode
Host: Michael Truell
Guest: Patrick Collison
Topics covered
- Stripe
- API design
- Smalltalk
- Lisp
- economic productivity
- coding
Keywords
- Stripe
- API design
- Smalltalk
- Lisp
- economic productivity
- MongoDB
- Ruby
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Stripe, Cursor, Anysphere
Products: Smalltalk, Lisp, MongoDB, Ruby
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