Patrick Collison

speaker

460 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 28 Apr

Patrick Collison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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The a16z Show · Patrick Collison on Stripe’s Early Choices, Smalltalk, and What Comes After Coding · 20 Feb 2026 podcast

I think just the idea wasn't that strong.

Um but we also chose Ruby for s for Stripe so uh

I wish.

Um and um I'm I'm ninety nine percent sure the answer that is no.

Uh it um it the the the company that acquired us was mainly a talent acquisition, so um yeah, the the code base itself was was less relevant.

Yeah, so so that was a project.

Uh it was um a little critter that used MSN Messenger, uh which was you know all the rage uh at the time.

I guess that puts that that's like maybe a specific kind of you know sedimentary layer in the you know chronology of different uh instant messaging solutions and probably dates me quite precisely.

Um and it was a really simple

Bayesian next word predictor, like there was nothing really that sophisticated there to the end there was anything sophisticated.

It was maybe that it used like that the training data was the conversations it itself had on MSN Messenger rather than kind of general text corpus.

And and you it it it worked reasonably well.

And you know, it better versions looked a couple of words ahead and and you know, what have you.

And a couple I mean, it never really passed the Turing test where you know people have actual suspicion that they're trying to, you know

exercise this this uh discernment um but it certainly passed some weaker version of the Turing test where you know they they were unsuspecting uh and you know people ended up having quite quite lengthy conversations with it.

Yeah.

It c th th and that was part of how I discovered Lisp and I remember Paradigms of AI programming by Peter Norvig being a really formative book and had you know all sorts of uh interesting approaches there.

Um it didn't have anything on neural networks, I'm almost sure.

And

And I never I mean I'd read some Marvin Minsky stuff, Society of the Mind or whatever, on on on neural nets, but I never really seriously looked at them.

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