Cursor Patrick Collison on programming languages, AI, and Stripe's biggest engineering decisions
Jul 17, 2025
Michael Truell chats with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe and tech visionary, about his journey in programming. They explore the early days of Smalltalk in startups and the evolution of AI in coding. Patrick shares insights on using LISP for chatbots and highlights the importance of rich development environments. He discusses Stripe's critical tech decisions, including the impact of MongoDB. The conversation also touches on programming human biology and the unexpected beneficiaries of AI, providing a forward-looking perspective on technology's future.
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Smalltalk Startup Experience
- Patrick Collison built his first startup in Smalltalk because of its interactive debugger and continuation-based web framework support.
- He found Smalltalk easy to teach new hires and valued its live development environment over deployment delays.
Early Lisp Chatbot Project
- Patrick wrote an MSN chatbot in Lisp using a Bayesian next-word predictor and experimented with genetic algorithms.
- The bot held unsuspecting conversations but never convincingly passed an explicit Turing test.
Make The IDE The Runtime
- Collison argues development environments should be integrated runtimes, not just text editors, citing Lisp machines, Smalltalk, and Mathematica.
- He wants IDEs to surface runtime data like profiling, logs, and common production values on hover.
