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Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines, joins John Collison and Ben Thompson to discuss the economics of commercial aviation and United's major operational bets. Kirby breaks down their pandemic-era fleet expansion, the ro…
- Single-hub airports like Dallas and Atlanta generate far higher economic returns than split-hub markets like Chicago O'Hare because they avoid burning hundreds of flights fighting… Read →
- Air traffic control infrastructure drives roughly 90% of airline flight delays and growth constraints in the United States. Read →
- Scott Kirby reveals that 48% of United Airlines flights already run on SpaceX Starlink, with the fleet hitting 50% within a week. Read →
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Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team Principal and co-owner Toto Wolff sits down with Stripe co-founder John Collison to unpack the organizational, financial, and regulatory dynamics of modern Formula 1. Wolff details how the…
- Mercedes F1 employs 2,500 people across UK chassis and engine facilities, meaning the visible trackside team represents less than two percent of the total operation. Read →
- Toto Wolff built his early fortune by finding unincubated tech builders across Central Europe, offering to set up corporate structures and raise cash for 10% to 50% equity stakes. Read →
- Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 generates roughly $1 billion in annual revenue and $300 million in operating profit (EBIT). Read →
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Mark Zuckerberg and Alexandr Wang join host John Collison to discuss Meta's launch of Muse Wonder, its frontier agentic AI model. They explore the creation and culture of Meta Superintelligence Labs, the staggering capi…
- Mark Zuckerberg created an Instacart account specifically for Meta's Muse model, using it once or twice a week to invent baking recipes and order ingredients with his daughter Aur… Read →
- After hitting internal stalls on Llama 4, Mark Zuckerberg rebooted Meta's AI organization and put Alexandr Wang in charge of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Read →
- Mark Zuckerberg predicts smart glasses will not feature a traditional app store; instead, models will generate interfaces on the fly inside the user's field of vision. Read →
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Will O'Brien, founder and CEO of Ulysses, sits down with John Collison and Chris Sacca to discuss how autonomous underwater drones can transform maritime operations, from seagrass restoration and offshore wind maintenan…
- Underwater acoustic telemetry caps out at roughly 10 kilobytes per second over five kilometers, making remote cloud processing physically impossible beneath the surface. Read →
- In the 1890s, Guinness built an undirected industrial research lab that hired elite scientists without specific assignments, telling them to inspect operations and find problems w… Read →
- Heavy crewed ships command day-rates in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, worsened by global shipyard backlogs that delay new vessel delivery. Read →
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Canva co-founder and COO Cliff Obrecht speaks with Stripe president John Collison about Canva's evolution from a bootstrapped Australian yearbook tool to a global visual productivity platform. They explore the economics…
- Canva banned internal pitch decks, UX roadmaps, and milestone documents in favor of immediate, working software spikes. Read →
- Programmatic SEO generated roughly 60% of Canva's early growth after the team indexed template categories for Google search. Read →
- Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins bootstrapped Fusion Books in Perth, building a yearbook design tool to seven figures in profitable revenue before creating Canva. Read →
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Michele Catasta, President and Head of AI at Replit, discusses the company's dramatic pivot from a cloud IDE to an AI agent platform, including the intense period leading up to its successful launch. He delves into Repl…
- Michele Catasta, President and Head of AI at Replit, asserts that AI agents now let individuals scale businesses "way better than you could even imagine 6 months ago." Read →
- Replit's dramatic shift to an AI agent platform was driven by an existential "necessity" to find product-market fit, not just mission alignment, after their previous product faile… Read →
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The episode features John Collison in conversation with Barney Hussey-Yeo, founder of Cleo, a fast-growing AI financial assistant. They discuss Barney's past as a professional poker player, the evolution of Cleo's AI fr…
- Barney Hussey-Yeo, CEO of Cleo, now uses AI agents to bypass traditional reporting structures, gaining direct, unfiltered insights into his engineering team's output. Read →
- Cleo dramatically differentiated itself in the staid financial sector by infusing personality and humor, a strategy founder Barney Hussey-Yeo credits with driving engagement. Read →
- Cleo, founded in 2016, radically transformed its AI from basic supervised learning to a heavily LLM-based architecture, fundamentally overhauling its product design. Read →
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John Collison and Emily Sands discuss the current economic landscape, analyzing trends in profitability, trade policy, and labor markets through Stripe's data. They highlight the transformative impact of AI on business…
- AI is behind a new wave of solopreneurs and global-first startups, growing at unprecedented rates. Learn the 3-step 'New AI Startup Playbook'. Read →
- The current lack of broad productivity gains from AI isn't a failure, but a classic "Solow Paradox," echoing how electricity's early adoption didn't immediately boost output. Read →
- John Collison, co-founder of Stripe, outlines five escalating levels of "agentic commerce," where software agents gain increasing autonomy in making purchasing decisions, moving b… Read →
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This episode explores the current state and future implications of AI, dubbed 'day 120 of the singularity.' Discussions range from AI's economic impact and safety challenges to the rise of personal AI agents and the phi…
- Daniel Gross argues that AI's arrival, dubbed 'day 120 of the singularity,' will act as a 'lower-cost super intelligence,' driving disinflation much like China's entry into the Wo… Read →
- Consumer AI faces a core dilemma: building safe, constrained products versus powerful, internet-connected agents. Nat Friedman explicitly warns against giving even the most advanc… Read →
- GitHub, under Nat Friedman, battled internal “stage fright,” which stifled feature development despite its vital role for developers. Read →
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John Collison interviews Tony Xu, CEO of DoorDash, about the company's journey and the broader restaurant industry. They discuss DoorDash's early competitive strategies, the current trends and challenges faced by restau…
- Large language models (LLMs) offer superior recommendation capabilities for online commerce. Read →
- Trust and safety within a high-volume logistics system is a constant system-building problem. Read →
- DoorDash's biggest challenge for autonomous delivery is cataloging millions of urban items and ensuring inventory proximity, not just vehicle technology. Read →
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ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski joins Stripe co-founder John Collison to discuss how modern voice AI models operate, the architectural debate between cascaded and end-to-end speech-to-speech systems, and why con…
- ElevenLabs reached a valuation of $11 billion and crossed $450 million in annual recurring revenue with a team of 470 people. Read →
- ElevenLabs scaled past $450 million in ARR and an $11 billion valuation by committing to cascaded voice pipelines instead of unified speech-to-speech models. Read →
- Text models passed the conversational Turing test years ago, but voice models struggle with the physics of real-time speech orchestration. Read →
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Sundar Pichai joins John Collison and Elad Gil to discuss Google's historical and future AI roadmap, including why Google did not ship ChatGPT first despite inventing Transformers. They explore managing Alphabet's $180…
- Capital allocation at Alphabet has shifted from headcount tracking to granular machine learning compute budgeting. Read →
- Frontier models have created a massive intelligence overhang where model reasoning capacity vastly exceeds enterprise adoption. Read →
- Alphabet allocates parts of its capital plan, which touches a $180 billion CapEx budget, toward long-horizon bets that look marginal when conceived. Read →
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Christina Cacioppo, founder and CEO of Vanta, joins John Collison to discuss how she built the automated compliance and trust management platform. They explore why compliance serves as an essential buying trigger for st…
- GitHub automatically answers 92% of inbound security questionnaires using Vanta's AI tooling, leaving humans to handle final review. Read →
- In late 2020, Vanta's first sales rep, Eric, persuaded founder Christina Cacioppo to greenlight a $60,000 podcast ad test despite her deep skepticism. Read →
- Software interfaces are shifting from static, pre-written codebases toward transient screens built at the exact second a user needs them. Read →