I wonder if people in their 20s shouldn't go to San Francisco. There are career paths that require accumulating a lot of expertise and studying a domain in tremendous depth.

San Francisco valorizes striking out on your own and iconoclastically dismissing the received wisdom, but the world needs lots of other things that require deep technical knowledge.

Herb Boyer couldn't have invented recombinant DNA technology at age 23; he first had to accumulate the knowledge and skills over a multi-decade career.

San Francisco doesn't culturally encourage one to become a deep expert like Herb Boyer, which is essential for significant innovations.

In science, you need to choose important and hard problems to work on, which is a different iterative process compared to companies that decide once and iterate from there.

Stripe's moat lies in its deep understanding of the payment domain and a culture that prioritizes solving the problems they claim to address.

Organizations often lose sight of their original goals over time due to generational turnover, leading to misalignment between current leaders and the founding mission.

Stripe Climate aims to create demand for carbon removal technologies, which were virtually nonexistent in 2018, by purchasing from these companies to confer credibility on the sector. In 2021, we formed Frontier, an advanced market commitment for carbon removal, inspired by previous commitments for vaccines in developing countries. We raised a billion dollars, with Stripe as the first investor, and now have contracts with 40 to 50 carbon removal companies, many of which were started due to Frontier's existence.

An anonymous survey revealed that 74% of companies in the carbon removal sector credited Frontier as a causal factor in their founding, highlighting the significant inducement effects of such commitments.

There's a lot of innovation in the biomedical field that isn't covered by patents, which can hinder the development of beneficial treatments. For example, mannose, a sugar that may have potential as an onco-treatment, lacks funding because it cannot be patented.

Many vaccines that could exist, like for Lyme disease, do not due to market failures and safety concerns, indicating a need for advanced market commitments to stimulate development in these areas.

Craft, scale, and speed are often in tension, but successful companies like LVMH and Tesla demonstrate that appreciation for craft and beauty can coexist with growth and efficiency.

Aesthetics, while difficult to quantify, significantly influence consumer behavior and are crucial for companies, even in B2B contexts like Stripe, where customer response to design matters.

The importance of multi-decade abstractions in API design is crucial; getting it right can lead to enduring benefits for developers and businesses that build on your platform.

Stripe aims to enhance existing financial systems rather than replace them, believing that integrating with current infrastructures creates more value than creating isolated solutions.

Stripe's growth is driven by both the expansion of the internet economy and the increasing share of that economy that Stripe captures, with significant headroom for growth as the global economy continues to expand.

Supporting established businesses is important because they contribute a significant amount of innovation, often overlooked in favor of startups, and they can drive consumer surplus through new products and market expansions.

The relationship between co-founders, like John and me at Stripe, is crucial for the company's effectiveness, as we bring complementary skills and a shared commitment to the company's mission.