The a16z Show Patrick Collison on Stripe’s Early Choices, Smalltalk, and What Comes After Coding
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Feb 20, 2026 
Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe and former Smalltalk/Lisp tinkerer, reflects on early engineering choices and long-term trade-offs. He talks about interactive development environments, API and data-model decisions that shape organizations, using AI for coding and research, and applying foundation models to biology. Short, sharp conversations about tooling, runtime insights, and the future of programming.
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Early Lisp Chatbot Experiment
- Patrick wrote an MSN Messenger AI in Lisp using a simple Bayesian next-word predictor and genetic algorithms.
- It fooled unsuspecting users into long conversations but never convincingly passed an active Turing test.
Bring Back Integrated Dev Environments
- Modern development has regressed to separating runtime, editor, and environment, losing live integration benefits of Lisp machines and Smalltalk.
- Patrick wants a return to development environments that combine runtime, editing, and debugging into one cohesive UI.
Show Runtime Data In The Editor
- Surface runtime profiling, logging, and production variable distributions directly in the editor to speed debugging and understanding.
- Integrate those overlays into hover and inspect flows for immediate context.
