John Collison

your Cheeky Pint experience just got upgraded!! now on @united ✈️🍻

i first read the Nomad letters when i was 17, and they changed my life. this is an embarrassing admission to make about a collection of hedge fund letters that primarily circulated as a stolen pdf in value-investor circles, and have now become enough of a meme to enjoy a second life of their own. but on the occasion of their republication in beautiful form by Tammy and the team at Stripe Press, i thought it was worth reflecting briefly on the impact these letters had on me.

Sleep and Zakaria’s fundamental truth (truke?) is often, and incorrectly, remembered as “scale matters.” everyone knew this when Sleep was writing.

the real insight was that scale is most powerful when its benefits are surrendered directly to the consumer.

the thing i remember most from Sleep is his wonderfully strange “robustness ratio,” which measured the amount the customer saved against the value retained by shareholders. value escaping the firm to the consumer, rather than being captured by it, was the metric of a great business. a great business is a lossy one.

this places Sleep in an interesting position opposite the other greatest anglo-investor of his generation, Chris Hohn. Nomad and TCI look similar from a distance: concentrated portfolios, long holding periods, indifference to benchmarks and, eventually, the conversion of their private fortunes into large philanthropic efforts.

they differ not merely in the fact that Hohn decided to continue (and even convert to Hinduism so that he could manage his portfolio in the next life, as reported in the FT), but in that their ideal businesses are exact mirror images. Hohn loves an irreversible asset that can extract a tax on its customer. in Hohn’s world, if a company possesses pricing power, it should, and must, exercise it.

rather Sleep’s ideal company possesses pricing power and repeatedly and consciously declines to use it.

the emergence and now total dominance of the labs makes this distinction newly urgent and would, on its own, be occasion enough to republish the work, quite apart from how beautiful and important the letters are.

our instinctive response to a discontinuity in technology is to invest at the frontier. Sleep’s letters are at least some reason for caution. technical leadership can be copied or simply made irrelevant by the next advance, and capital floods towards visible scarcity just before technology eviscerates that very same scarcity.

god knows Sleep was never hostile to technology. he made more money on Amazon than almost anyone else. but, at least in my reading, he was skeptical of technical novelty as a moat in its own right.

what mattered to him was whether that technological step had been converted into a self reinforcing relationship in which the customer privatized the gain.

in Nick’s frame, and he's welcome to correct me (although my sense is requiring him to lift a hand off of the wheel of a f450 in the hills of northumberland at this point would be a step too far) the enduring AI business may therefore be the one that passes declining costs on most aggressively, not one that preserves scarcity, bombs its own customers margins and tries to eat as much of the application layer as possible.

i find it increasingly useful to use the pair trade between totemic-hohn, and totemic-sleep actions as a frame in which to view the actions of the frontier. my guess is, in the fullness of time, or at the very least in this life (hohn is welcome to prove me wrong in the next), that Sleep might have won this bout.

very glad to see these letters in print.

Instinct + Stripe

Instinct users who make purchases spend over $1300/month on average through Instinct. Using Instinct to make high value purchases is a sign of trust that we deeply value.

We’re partnering with Stripe to deliver a more seamless payment experience. Instinct has enabled use cases that involve payments including:
- Planning and booking international trips
- Ordering weekly groceries and household essentials
- Booking yoga classes, ski tuning sessions, doctor’s appointments, car part repairs, and more
- Getting you the best price for anything you’re looking for

One second you’re getting a nice tan, the next second the Blue Angels are buzzing by 5 feet from your head 🇺🇸

Introducing GPT-Live, a new generation of voice models for natural human-AI interaction.

Rolling out in ChatGPT starting today.

You’ll want to turn the sound on for this one.

we've done it before, we can do it again.

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/…

Breaking: Manna to cease drone delivery flights in Ireland, blaming planners and regulatory haze.

Will focus abroad (incl US, UK, Europe) instead, it says.

Jobs likely lost but R&D centre will stay in Dublin

independent.ie/business/manna…

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 just weeks ago. We were a darling of the SaaS era and invented so many of the patterns you see in software today. Nearly four years ago, in need of a reboot, we jumped on weeks-old modern LLMs to create and define the category we know as Customer Agents today.

Salesforce invented modern software and SaaS. And @benioff is like the final boss of tech founder CEOs. In seat for 27 years, he’s one of the last of his era. Still pushing, pivoting, placing big bets. It’s a privilege for @destraynor and I to get to partner with him and join forces with Salesforce upon close at this most fascinating time. And will be very fun to get their help bringing Fin to magnitudes more consumers.

To our customers: Over the past few years we’ve been shipping intensely. Including recently our groundbreaking model, Apex, and our paradigm-defining internal agent, Operator. With the resources of Salesforce this will only accelerate. And yet little will practically change. I’ll still be CEO, Des will still be running R&D, we’ll both still be committed to continuing to lead this category. Thank you very sincerely and deeply for your belief in us.

To all of our friends, our families, and our employees, past and present: While this is not the end, it is a major, pivotal, special, and emotional moment for us. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. For everything.

To my cofounders, my exec team: Look what we built. Four young lads with a dream and nothing to lose. And a home grown exec team who pulled off the greatest and arguably only late stage software company pivot to AI, and invented one of the most important categories in AI. Thank you for sticking through all of this with me.

And now, time to get back to work. See you at our next product launch in a couple weeks. (:

another reporter's laptop sound went off as the jurors were entering, this time someone who was watching stripe sessions at the same time of the trial (!?)

i will spare their identity out of camaraderie