Patrick Collison on Stripe’s Early Choices, Smalltalk, and What Comes After Coding

It's interesting to me that we haven't experimented in some sense that much with the paradigm of programming over the past twenty years. Yes. You put those together, you now have the ability to, again, at the kind of level of the individual cell, to read, think, and to write. And this starts to really feel like a new kind of Turing loop and to have its own sort of completeness. I think that's a case where the right API design, the right abstraction design, ended up having just quite significant business ramifications. I think the basic idea of as development environment and not just text editor is really the right idea, and that's something I want to see a return to. Patrick Collison wrote his first startup in small talk. Its development environment let him fix errors mid request, inspect stack frames, and resume execution. And he wanted that more than he wanted a mainstream language. He and his brother chose Ruby and MongoDB for Stripe instead. Those decisions still define the company fifteen years and forty four seconds of annual downtime later. Now Stripe is shipping v two APIs, rewriting core abstractions first designed in 2010. It's taken years. Defining the new APIs is the easy part. Making them work alongside everything already built on the old ones is, as Coulson put it, more like an instruction set migration than a product launch. This conversation previously aired on Cursors podcast also gets into why AI hasn't moved product to v numbers, what today's dev environment could steal from Lisp machines, and Collison's work at Arc on foundational models for biology. Michael Truel, CEO of Cursor, sits down with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe. Well, it's great to have you. Thanks for Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. Good to be here. I've heard that your first startup was written in small talk. Please explain. I don't know what there is to explain. It's the best programming language. Well, I had I'd worked on Lisp and Lisp dialects, before that. And, actually I'd I'd worked on Lisp web frameworks. And, when we went to build our first startup, we we first wrote it in we we first implemented it in Rails. And then I found compared to Lisp that development process kind of frustrating. And, I mean, we don't need to get into full details, but I thought that continuation based web frameworks were really the right way to implement web applications. There were no continuations, in there there's no continuation based framework in in Ruby. And, I was kind of searching around. I found that there was, a good one that had just been written in Smalltalk. And so I decided to play with it a little bit. And then I found that Smalltalk is actually this extremely interesting development environment, that had a lot a lot of the aspects of Lisp that I'd really appreciated there, like, you know, and a fully interactive environment …