Why Stripe Is Rebuilding for Agents

John Collison, co-founder of Stripe · Sourcery

John Collison is co-founder of Stripe, the payments company he has built for 17 years with his brother Patrick. Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in payments in 2025, up 34%. Its goal is to increase the GDP of the internet. Recent acquisitions include Bridge, Privy, Metronome and OpenRouter.

Summary

Collison argues that agents will rewire commerce because filling out web forms adds no value for anyone, and computer use gives agents a way to work across the web without waiting for each site to adopt a standard. Stripe is changing what it is good at, since coding agents, not developers, now integrate its API, and AI products need usage-based billing and multiple models. He expects more breaches in the next five years than in the last five, with startups better placed than old tech stacks. His company's own lessons are old ones: no shortcuts, stick with it, protect your reputation and start with what the user wants.

1. The Backwards Compatibility Layer. Collison says nobody fills out web forms in their spare time, and a personal agent that knows your shipping address and payment details can renew a driver's license for you instead. Two things must mature for personal agents to work: they need a meaningful amount of compute, and computer use needs to become a mature technology. He calls computer use the ultimate backwards compatibility layer for the real world, because the DMV could take years to add an MCP server and it does not matter if agents can simply use the site. He expects it to be the next hop after transformers, LLMs and reinforcement learning. ▶ 1:23