Patrick Collison @patrickc

Imagine programming protein, DNA, and RNA systems like you would write computer code, or even by natural language prompting of an AI agent. @BrianHie and team just made this a reality with Proto: a high-level programming language for generative biology.

SpaceX just agreed to buy Cursor for $60 billion. Everyone is talking about the product, the models, the valuation. I’m interested in the human side of this AI story. Who built the team behind one of the fastest-growing software companies in history, and how do they think about talent at the frontier of AI? For the first episode of my new podcast, Below the Surface, I sat down with @wardadamp, @Cursor 's Head of Talent, to find out. Before Cursor, Adam helped scale Facebook through its IPO, ran global recruiting at Pinterest from 200 to 2000+ people, and built Growth by Design Talent, the advisory firm behind OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Notion, and Figma … until Cursor acquired it last year. We talked about what hiring looks like when the market is moving this fast, how Cursor does it differently, and what it actually takes to build a high-performance team right now. One of my biggest takeaways: the companies that win in AI won’t just have better models. They’ll have better systems for finding, assessing, and enabling exceptional people. Watch the full episode here: youtube.com/watch?v=-2sbeY… Or subscribe wherever you get podcasts: 🎧open.spotify.com/show/033AK9SGq… 🎤 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bel…

I asked Claude about the air conditioning debate in Europe, and it really didn’t pull any punches.

Here's me walking you through our new Stripe Directory and how we see it being used! Check it out and send us feedback: stripe.directory

Stripe @stripe

2 days ago

Introducing Stripe Directory, a new way for you (and your agents) to search for businesses on the Stripe network.

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Very early experiment but I think this will be cool. stripe.directory.

After seven extraordinary years building Stripe's go-to-market engine, I'm stepping into a new role: Vice Chair of @stripe. As Vice Chair, I'll represent the company with business, government, and policy leaders around the world, alongside @patrickc and @collision. The internet economy is at an inflection point. Governments, regulators, and multilateral bodies are making once-in-a-generation decisions about how digital commerce is regulated and enabled—decisions that will set the operating conditions for entrepreneurs for decades. Stripe serves millions of businesses in nearly every country on earth. We have both the standing and the responsibility to shape those decisions. That's what I'll be doing: engaging heads of government, trade bodies, and global business leaders to advocate for decisions that advance entrepreneurship and increase the economic dynamism that too many parts of the world have been starved of. I've spent the last 25 years of my career building things, teams, markets, relationships. This next chapter is about using all of that on behalf of the businesses that trust Stripe to power their growth. As I start this new role, I'm delighted to have @tybryson take over as Stripe's Chief Revenue Officer. Tyler brings two decades of experience building, scaling, and leading revenue-generating teams and has had a tremendous impact leading our Americas business. He knows our customers, understands what they need and we’re all very excited for his leadership as Stripe’s CRO. stripe.com/newsroom/news/…

The UK used to be twice as rich as South Korea. Now, South Korea is richer than the UK.

A very kind endorsement of @WorksInProgMag from the peerless and inspiring @kevin2kelly. recomendo.com/p/works-in-pro… You can (and should!) subscribe over at worksinprogress.co/print.

@Beuysaunt I agree with this and should have noted it. Much of the center felt like a museum to me; much more so than 20 years ago.

I just visited Paris. The city seemed to be in particularly radiant shape this time. • It got me thinking about how many of the nicest built environments in the world standardize materials rather than form. Jerusalem's stone regulation makes it much prettier than Tel Aviv. Similarly, rules in the Charleston, the Cotswolds, and Sea Ranch leave a lot of flexibility in shape, but tightly restrict materials in a way that yields cohesion. In Paris's case, there are of course also some rules around form, but the consistency of the limestone (and zinc) is very pleasant. • I hadn’t before internalized that central Paris is unique for the fraction of its building stock that is traditional. There are of course some modern buildings, such as Centre Pompidou and the new facade at La Samaritaine, but they are rare and typically dramatic. Most pleasant old cities (such as London) contain more of a mixture. • Relatedly, is Haussmannian Paris the finest example of the central planning that Scott decries? "By 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation." And is the late 19th century the last time you could have done this well, immediately before the corruptions of modernism? I guess Chicago was later, but Paris certainly comes close. • From a book I picked up: In a letter of 1886 to the Ministry of Public Works, Charles Garnier, architect of the neo-Baroque Paris Opéra, wrote, “The Metropolitan Railroad, in the eyes of most Parisians, will only be excused if it rejects absolutely all industrial character so as to be completely a work of art. Paris must not be made into a factory, it must stay a museum.” Are there elites anywhere in the world today who would reject something in the physical world unless it was a work of art? One artist recently commented to me that late 19th century France had the most educated visual culture among its elites in human history. This observation struck me a few times as I traveled around. • I am curious what those who defend modern architecture say about central Paris. Do they think that one could in principle have a place built of modern architecture that people would find as attractive and that would bring joy to so many? Do they think that such a place exists in actuality today? If not, why not? Or is the goal of having somewhere pretty and attractive in their eyes itself ignoble and saccharine? To me Paris feels like a challenge of the whole project. • Walking past the Louvre at night, I was struck by its austerity and severity. It made me reflect on how Parisians in 1700 might have felt as they took it in, and the subjugation that has been associated with social structures of prior eras. (Maybe this is on my mind partly as a result of reading Charles Taylor.) It made me wonder if I should be slightly more sympathetic to modernism for embodying a sense of individual freedom and joy. The Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Grand Palais was quite a contrast. • Perhaps heretical, but Notre Dame is just not especially impressive as a cathedral, especially inside, though the restoration seems to have been excellently done, and is a terrific achievement. Overall, Lincoln cathedral (say) is much more attractive in my view. Maybe I need to read Hugo to appreciate it better. (Hugo apparently was responsible for much of the resurgence of interest in Gothic architecture. A good example, I guess, of art driving life.) • The Renoir exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay was interesting for its emphasis on egalitarian and open relations between men and women, not something observed everywhere in the world at the time. "At the same time delicate and modest – neither moralising nor Dionysian." I thought of @_alice_evans and her work. • There are now so many bikes in Paris. It means you have to pay very active attention as a pedestrian, but is overall a big improvement. Rue de Rivoli is now dominated by the pleasant whirr of bicycles. I mostly got around this way. • The Musée Quai Branly is very interesting – it’s the best tour of the world in a single compressed space that I know of. Most of the works are not impressive as such, but the concentrated breadth is great. The Ethiopian illustrated Gospels were very charming. • Maybe my imagination, but there seemed to me to be a third fewer brasseries than on prior trips. Overall, the food was good, but not better than what you get at good restaurants in the US. The median in Paris is definitely still better, though. • The Matisse exhibition at the Grand Palais was pleasant. It mostly reminded me of the observation that it is difficult to rank artists but easy to rank the work of a given artist. The Blue Nudes and The Sheaf are just very obviously among Matisse’s best work. • The Michelangelo x Rodin exhibition at the Louvre was excellent, most of all for making clear how direct the artistic lineage is. Given the 300 year interlude, we should probably be more optimistic about the prospects for revival of the best of the visual arts. I hadn't before realized that Michelangelo's career spanned 74 years. It’s easy to focus on youth and prodigious genius, but maybe enduring genius should be more central. May we all aim to be useful and productive for a large majority of a century! In this vein, David Hockney, RIP, also just cleared the 70 year career mark. • The Louvre is quite hot; far hotter than an American museum would be. Presumably because of EU/French air conditioning laws? (26 degree regulatory minima, supposedly.) • Overall, central Paris feels like it's in very good shape. Things are generally quite clean and well-maintained. Not too much graffiti (though some buildings, such as the Louvre, are very overdue for power washing.) Nowhere felt unsafe. (Given that it’s been ruled continuously by socialists since 2001, one wonders why it has fared better than many coastal cities in America. The LLMs claim that it's because much of the funding is central and because the police report centrally, not to the mayor.) Overall, is central Paris the greatest single artistic achievement in the world? That is what I came away wondering. Pictured: Ethiopian prayer scroll; Iranian qalamkari; Renoir; af Klint.

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Being comically maladapted to sunny climes, I have in endless and often unsuccessful pursuit of self-defense experimented with a sprawling battery of different sunscreens. This one is by far the best I’ve found: int.eucerin.com/products/sun-p…. (You need to illicitly procure the non-US version; the FDA valiantly shields us from its benefits due to their restrictive and seldom-updated set of permissible sunscreen ingredients.)

Works In Progress is a beacon of light in what often feels to me like a hopeless intellectual and political scene. If only academia was even half as good.

Ben Southwood @bswud

6 days ago

The entire modern world, including capitalism and industrialisation, happened because we beat NIMBYism and vetocracy in 18th-century England. Today, the vetocracy, the stakeholder state, the NIMBYs stop us building the nuclear power plants, railways, houses, towers, bridges,

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The @Tempo mainnet launched 93 days ago. Quick summary of the current state: • Run rate payment volume is around $3 billion. There's a long way to go, but it's cool to see real usage already emerging. (It took Stripe a lot longer than 93 days to get to $3 billion.) • As a blockchain, we obviously don't know about all the different use-cases. (Please tell us if you're doing something cool with Tempo!) Larger companies using Tempo include @Deel, which is using Tempo to pay out to their vast network of contractors, and @Meta, which is using it via @Link for global payouts. There are a bunch of other large companies working on Tempo integrations that'll be announced soon. • Internally, developing on Tempo has been fun, and Tempo is now Stripe's default blockchain for new features. • On the AI side of things, there appear to be around 1,000 active services selling to agents via the Machine Payments Protocol (@mpp). There's a useful directory of available services at mppscan.com. 570 unique agents, for example, seem to have purchased from @ExaAILabs, and 332 from @openweather. I don't know how long it'll take for this use-case to become big, but it seems all-but inevitable that it will within a few years. • Today, @Stripe, @Visa, and @StanChart are running Tempo validators. Validation will become more decentralized over time. • The Tempo team is building a lot of new protocol functionality. For example, privacy zones, receive policies, and virtual addresses. (Details for all on the Tempo blog: tempo.xyz/blog.) In general, our belief is that there's a lot of functionality to be built at the blockchain level to make higher-level applications easy and performant. The original thesis behind Tempo was that both AI and stablecoins would stretch blockchains in new ways, with need for privacy, fees denominated/payable in stablecoins, batch transactions, microtransactions, faster confirmations, and so forth. Overall, this still seems like the right set of bets, and the agentic stuff is happening somewhat faster than I was expecting. "1M stablecoin TPS, with the vast majority from agents" still seems like the right north star.

In partnership with @stripe, Hermes Agent now supports a full suite of Stripe skills. Your agent can buy things, pay per-call APIs, and provision its own SaaS, with configurable safety limits on every action.

Very much enjoyed this piece in the latest @WorksInProgMag about how Alberta became a rat-free sanctuary and the only significant human-inhabited place on earth that is free of them. Excellent "you can just do things" energy. "William Lobay, a crop protection supervisor at the Alberta Department of Agriculture, came up with the idea of a buffer zone focused on the area of prairie and parkland that was most vulnerable to penetration. In late 1950, Albertan officials approved his Rat Control Zone, a roughly 600-by-29-kilometer strip along the part of its eastern border with Saskatchewan. In the zone, William Lobay and his colleagues surveyed cargo and vehicles that entered the province, and inspected vulnerable sites like farms, grain elevators, feed stacks, barns, sheds, and abandoned buildings, where food and shelter made rat establishment most likely." worksinprogress.co/issue/albertas…

Almost every single person on Earth lives with rats. Only 5 million people out of 8 billion live rat free. They are the Albertans. Alberta is the only significantly human-inhabited place on Earth that is rat free. It achieved this in the 1950s as rats invaded from the East, by introducing a rodent surveillance state, obliging every citizen of the province to report them and terminating any sightings with extreme prejudice. They laid 63,000 kg of arsenic across a 600-kilometre-long, 29-kilometre-wide Rat Control Zone along the province's Eastern border. Back then, rats were so unfamiliar in Alberta that officials distributed preserved rat corpses to teach people what the enemy looked like. One pest-control officer held public meetings at which he ate warfarin-soaked oatmeal to show it was safe. And it worked! They held rats off and numbers remained so low that the surveillance and eradication system could keep numbers at essentially zero for years, at extremely low costs – Alberta spends about 11 cents per resident on rat control measures, much less than neighbouring provinces that are infested. Today, Albertans have grown so unfamiliar with rats that they frequently mistake squirrels, gophers, and other small animals for them: of 875 reported sightings in 2025, only 47 turned out to be actual rats. Pet rats are banned, vehicles entering Alberta are checked, and sightings are responded to with overwhelming force. Could the rest of the world manage it? Probably not. The secret was to stop them before they could establish themselves. For the rest of us, we probably need gene drives. Read the story of how Alberta won the war on rats at Works in Progress now. worksinprogress.co/issue/albertas…

Congratulations to @eoghan, @destraynor, and the whole Fin team!

Eoghan McCabe @eoghan

a week ago

We’re excited to share that we just signed an agreement for @salesforce to acquire @fin_ai for ~$3.6B. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027. Fin started as Intercom 15 years ago. We changed our name to cap our transformation

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New providers now available on Stripe Projects: @Wix @laravelphp @HeyGen @prisma @automattic @p0 @ExaAILabs @Base44 @ClickHouseDB @supermemory  @usekernel @blaxelAI @getmetronome @AgentPhoneHQ @e2b @postalform

Delighted to partner with @LloydsBank to bring Stripe’s capabilities to millions of new businesses. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…