PATRICK COLLISON, the 31-year-old cofounder and chief executive of Stripe, is an
exceedingly careful thinker. In his Twitter bio, he identifies himself as a “fallibilist,” by
which he means he likes to probe every system of ideas, looking for its bugs. Collison
fits a Silicon Valley archetype: a programming whiz who dropped out of college (MIT)
and started a company now worth a stratospheric sum ($35 billion, on paper). But unlike
others in his cohort, he speaks in strikingly self-effacing terms. At a conference in May,
he described Stripe as “a hard-to-understand and maybe boring company.”
Well, fair enough. But let’s give it a whirl. There is a piece of plastic in your pocket.
Every time you enter the number on it into a website or app and click Buy, money moves
from you to the vendor. The process is fast but not instantaneous. The payment travels
through a hidden domain of processors and merchant banks, each of which charges fees
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