Stripe's core mission is economic growth — not payments, not developer tools. The product is downstream of a much larger thesis about raising the GDP of the internet.
Key highlight
Stripe's stated core mission is 'economic growth' — not payments infrastructure. Framing the company at the level of civilizational output, rather than at the level of its product, is the move that connects everything else Collison does: Progress Studies, Fast Grants, Arc Institute, YIMBY housing reform, Stripe Press.
Highlights (5)
Co-founded Progress Studies with Tyler Cowen: a call for a new field dedicated to understanding how and why human societies improve, and how to accelerate that progress deliberately.
Backed Fast Grants during COVID to get money to scientists in days instead of months — a live demonstration that grantmaking speed itself is a bottleneck on discovery.
Believes in the 'housing theory of everything': that housing scarcity is upstream of inequality, declining fertility, weakened innovation, and political dysfunction. Hence active support of CA YIMBY.
Operates across an unusually wide portfolio for an active CEO — Stripe, Stripe Press, Arc Institute, Fast Grants, climate purchasing, housing reform — organized around a single theme: accelerating civilizational progress.
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