The screen zips from waiting-room black to meeting-room colour five minutes before the designated time. John Collison is already in situ, nestled to the left of a nondescript table in an equally nondescript boardroom. Collison, in step with the environs, sports a nondescript blue shirt.

However, over the next hour, as he forensically weaves together the intricate tapestry of issues facing Ireland, it is clear that Collison’s mind is anything but nondescript.

Collison, a billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist, had readily agreed to an interview on Ireland and its place in a rapidly evolving world. 

“Sure!” he responded shortly after I reached out.

He dials in from San Francisco, the city where he and his older brother Patrick launched Stripe in 2010 and where he continues to spend much of his time. 

Yet, Collison retains deep roots in the country of his birth. He has funded a think-tank, backed university programmes, renovated a stately pile in the midlands, and even bought an airport. 

His PR had briefed in advance that Collison had strong views on getting Ireland building and nurturing the local start-up scene. I was equally keen to question him on everything from Ireland’s relationship with multinationals to the trends that could define the country going forward.

However, even before I posed a question, Collison delicately interlaced the key issues in a matter of minutes, framing the conversation like a grandmaster shifts rooks and pawns around a chess board.

“We are at an interesting moment right now with the Draghi report, coming on the heels of the Apple decision, with various kinds of infrastructure questions that Ireland is facing,” Collison said.

“One thing that weirdly made a big impression on me is the Intel decision where they chose to go to Magdeburg rather than Ireland. I found that pretty concerning because, and I have no inside knowledge, but I feel like if you are Intel, there is a lot for doubling down on a country where they have lots of operations already, which has been very good for them, that is a great country to do business in. Germany is a new thing for them. It is not generally regarded as the world’s easiest country in which to do business. 

“And so, the fact that they did choose to go elsewhere, and you would have seen the commentary around their concerns over permitting and planning and the ability to build data centres. 

“To my eye, it did not seem to lead to a huge amount of introspection and handwringing about ‘Oh crap, what did we do wrong?’

“Instead, it was about the fact we don’t like data centres, which, to my mind, is a fairly loopy way of looking at things because it is such a fixed mindset rather than an expansionary, ambitious, optimistic mindset. 

“And so, I guess the general worry I have is, is there some complacency that we need to be quite paranoid about? Lots of our successes came out of quite radical ideas. TK Whitaker’s programmes were radical for the time. The EU has always been a set of quite radical ideas. We all now take it for granted, and there are nice blue signs on the roads. But it was a collection of pretty radical ideas for its time. 

“I feel like now there is some kind of fear of failure in the air where everything becomes a protracted scandal: the Children’s Hospital becomes a scandal, the Dublin Airport cap becomes a scandal. Everything becomes a scandal. It leads to a lack of ambition and complacency. 

“And yet Ireland is so well set up. We have all the big tailwinds on our side.”

And, with that, the interview begins.

*****

John Collison knows all about the narrative. He understands why people fall back on it, and why it has almost become part of Irish business folklore. 

The two Collison brothers from outside the village of Dromineer in Co Tipperary dropped out of elite US colleges, decamped to Silicon Valley and authored a few lines of code that would eventually become the backbone of the financial internet.

Along the way, they built one of the most valuable private businesses in the world ($70 billion after a recent share transaction, a figure that is up on a $50 billion low last year, yet down on its peak valuation of $95 billion in 2021) and became billionaires many times over (Forbes values them at $7.3 billion each). 

Yet, like most easily digestible narratives, Collison said it skirts with both truth and embellishment. 

“People want to reduce it to a few personalities for understandable reasons,” he said. “John and Patrick did some coding. Poof. Here is the Stripe of today.”

What Collison refers to as “the Stripe of today” has essentially become the plumbing of global e-commerce. Last year, Stripe processed $1 trillion of payments on behalf of its clients, a sharp 25 per cent rise on the year before and a figure that equates to one per cent of global GDP. 

Investors, enthused about its performance and openly giddy about the possibility of a future IPO, have long clamoured to back the business. Last year, it raised a further $6.5 billion in a Series I fundraise, which was used to disburse money to employees, both current and former, who had share options with the company. Its valuation suffered last year during the tech malaise, but it has since rebounded – Axios reported this month that Sequoia Capital had completed an $861 million purchase of shares in Stripe in a transaction that values the payments company at $70 billion.

Collison is president, while his older brother Patrick is chief executive. Yet, the younger Collison is quick to downplay the old trope of the plucky young software geeks who did good.

“There has been no period in Stripe’s history when we have not been fixated with hiring really talented people and those people have made major contributions,” he said, adding: “With a lot of companies, that talent story gets undersold.”

Plus, for all the chatter about frenzied growth, Collison argues that much of what the company has achieved has taken longer than initially planned. 

“Because we set the business up to be self-sustaining, to be in a good spot, to not be reliant upon investor capital, it is okay if certain things take longer than we anticipated,” he said.

But underpinning Stripe’s success is what Collison describes as “a paranoia against complacency”.

“It is a healthy attitude,” he told me. 

“Sure, we did some good stuff in the past. But it is a big competitive world out there and there are other people looking to see what we are doing and replicate it.”

Before our interview, Collison had attended Stripe’s weekly team leadership meeting where, like every week, he heard from a Stripe customer. 

“As you might imagine, it is not an A-plus scorecard all the time. There are things they need fixing and things that we need to do better,” he said.  

“It prevents you from getting any notions and over-convoluting things because you are hearing directly from people. 

“We, as a company, are always trying to ensure that no complacency seeps in. 

“And we need to do likewise as a country.”

“I think if we were a little bit more paranoid…”

The Irish economy is growing strongly. Tax receipts, even before Ireland received its €14 billion Apple tax windfall, continue to surge. The Government will breach its spending rules this year and still post a surplus. It will do likewise next year. 

Economists argue that, if anything, the country has too much money, and not enough capacity to deploy it efficiently.

Meanwhile, crucial infrastructure, particularly energy, is creaking. Multinationals have grown jaundiced about the planning system, specifically the delays caused by the volume of objectors and the litigious nature of the process. International funds argue that despite the clear demand for housing, they are unable to build. 

It is, in essence, a tale of two economies, and John Collison understands that dichotomy better than most.

His company, Stripe, has continued to invest heavily in Ireland. It signed for 156,000 square feet of office space at Wilton Park One in Dublin earlier this year, the biggest single office leasing since the fourth quarter of 2022. It is now channelling vast sums through Dublin: one Irish subsidiary, Stripe Payments International Holdings, posted revenues last year of $3.8 billion. 

Yet, as Stripe scales its operations here, Collison also sees the obvious economic constraints.

Quoting the economist Stephen Kinsella, he described the contradiction as “supply-side progressivism”.

“So many countries have demand problems, pretty significant demand problems at that. No one wants to invest in them. No one wants to create jobs there,” Collison said.

“In Ireland, we are blown back by the fire hose of demand and it is the supply of housing, of infrastructure, of all these things where the issues are.”

Much of the supply-side problems can be traced back to the planning system, he said. 

“If you zoom way out, the current planning construct is a relatively modern invention. It is post-World War II. It is very recent. And we are unable to do all the things that we, as a country, want.

“It feels like we have to start asking ourselves the question of how we get the important things done.”

Not surprisingly, Collison lists housing and infrastructure as the two key priorities facing Ireland. 

However, to understand the lack of progress on both, he said it was important to “zoom out to some of the more cultural questions”.

“I think we should be really paranoid about this complacency because we could do so well if we could marshall the spirit, the structures and the resources. But that is a real knife-edge and it could go either way,” he said. 

He points back to 2009, the year he graduated from secondary school and when Ireland fell deeper into financial crisis. 

“We had a property bubble to end all bubbles, and then we had the reckoning afterwards in every sense – financial and economic and cultural,” he said.

“The reason I bring that up is they say that generals are always fighting the last war. And I think still, in a funny way, we are fighting the last war when it comes to 2008, 2009. There is this incredibly severe overhang. People still talk about ghost estates and all this kind of nonsense carry-on. 

“When you look at a lot of the housing debates, there is an implicit, sometimes explicit, concern about overbuilding despite the fact that overbuilding is the very last problem we should be worried about right now.”

He argued that there is a “villainisation” of “boring capital” that wants to invest in Ireland. 

“There are all these terms that get invented. They are generally named after animals, generally not with the most positive connotations – vulture funds, things like that. In a grown-up country that engages with successful shareholder capitalism, these are incredibly normal constructs to exist. In the US or other countries, no one would bat an eye,” he said.

“But again, we have this cultural overhang from the 2008 financial crisis that leads us to be very wary of foreign capital investment in the country, which is generally regarded as a good thing in other countries. 

“I think there is a very long shadow of 2008 and the bust that is causing us to make slightly funny decisions.”

On social media, Collison has frequently highlighted the “red tape” and “ecological paperwork” associated with Irish planning laws; last month, he referenced a solar farm being denied planning permission in Co Westmeath. More recently, it was a planning refusal on a 900-unit scheme.

It is a theme he again raised in this interview. 

“We have not tried just making it easier to build the things that we know that we desperately need, like housing and energy,” he said. 

Despite being one of the wealthiest countries in the world, he said Ireland was currently “penned in by objectors” and that the structure of the system was preventing crucial infrastructure being built.

“The current equilibrium we have is a policy choice that student housing gets blocked because of the nesting of some starlings. There is an implicit choice there that we think this particularly starling nesting location is more important than students being able to probably attend university in some cases. That is a choice that a country can make,” he said.

“You will probably find people on both sides of the choice. I think if you were to put it to a poll, more people would come down on the side of student housing. But it is a choice. But it is an emergent choice where we have ended up, where I don’t think anyone ever particularly voted on that issue and so we have ended up on a somewhat meandering path-dependent history of where we have gotten to this point.”

He said the same mindset was also seen in the difficulties building data centres and in the cap on the number of passengers at Dublin Airport.

“You can have a collection of objectors leading to what is a matter of national policy,” he said. “There is a policy choice in terms of how we set up the country between individual rights and matters of national priority. All the way at the other end you have China or something like that. Maybe people don’t want to be China but there is a spectrum here in terms of the choices you can make. 

“We tend to talk about the very specific issues. But maybe we should zoom out a bit and ask how we want these policy choices to be made.

“How do we want matters of national priority such as data centres or Dublin Airport to be decided? Should they be left in the hands of local authorities? Is that the correct policy choice? It feels like there is a robust debate to be had there.”

He points to California YIMBY, a non-profit organisation that has pushed for the liberalisation of planning restrictions.

“The Californian YIMBY folks have had fabulous success with essentially liberalising the process, streamlining the process for the construction of homes. It was very difficult to get approvals in California. They have not solved everything but they have made significant progress in a number of narrow areas. And, as a result, you see lots of people taking advantage. We should be thinking about doing something similar,” Collison said.

Collison is keen to point out that he makes these criticisms because he believes in Ireland’s future and he remains optimistic about the fundamentals of the economy.

“We have all the tailwinds. We have multinationals knocking on our doorsteps wanting to invest and create jobs. We have people wanting to come and visit Ireland, but with the passenger cap, we are saying, ‘No, please don’t’. 

“Complacent is the best word I can come up with to sum up the attitude. I think if we were a little bit more paranoid…”

John Collison on the Apple tax case

“I think on matters of corporate tax, businesses are very happy with Ireland and respect Ireland as a country that cares about creating certainty and a pro-business environment in that regard.

“All the debates about the OECD Beps work and the new 15 per cent, Ireland acquitted itself very well there and similarly with the Apple case. It was just abundantly clear to businesses that Ireland was a good place to invest in that regard.

“Paschal Donohoe is held in very high esteem for his work on that at European and global levels among business leaders.

“No business has any worry about that. They do have worries about infrastructure and housing. As we recruit people to our Dublin office, it is not a great pitch on the housing side.”

Regulation, innovation and Usain Bolt

Last month, John Collison made his way to the CHQ building in Dublin docklands to visit Dogpatch Labs, the entrepreneurship and innovation hub. He met with numerous founders, offered advice, and then answered questions in a fireside chat. “Let the market teach you things. Build, pivot, scale,” he told the attendees.

What was surprising about his attendance was the fact that it was not surprising at all. Despite being president of the world’s most valuable private company, Collison routinely makes himself available to the Irish start-up community.

He is also aware of the issues; in this interview, he pointed to the procedural problems around EIIS, a scheme that offers tax breaks to investors in start-ups. 

He was also heavily involved in conceiving and developing the Immersive Software Engineering programme at UL, a groundbreaking partnership between the university and the business community to produce top-level developers. He regularly visits the UL campus to meet participants. “Our first course was small, 25 matriculants,” he said. “Then 40. We are now up to 56 students in the third year.”

The way Collison sees it, the start-up scene of today in Ireland is “night and day” from when he and his brother were launching Stripe. 

“It is brilliant to see. There is a vibrancy about it,” he said.

Famously, the Collison brothers moved to Silicon Valley to turn Stripe from code to corporate behemoth. Now, however, he feels the country is on track to build big companies out of Ireland. 

“I drive to work past an Intercom billboard every day. They are doing a great job. There is Workhuman and other examples. I feel good about the direction of that,” he said. 

The biggest blocker, however, remains technical talent, he said, adding it was why the company had got involved with the software engineering programme in UL.

“We have the right kind of problems now,” he said, referring to the course. “Some of the students drop out to start companies. Some are getting picked off by companies trying to recruit them. There is incredibly strong demand. Intercom hoovered up a pile of them. But it is working. 

“Our aim is to make software engineering more attractive to more students because, as I think back to when I was doing the Leaving Cert, it was not necessarily top of the list. If you were already into computers and already into programming, you would do it. But there were other courses, like dentistry or architecture, that if you were a smart person you would do it. Software engineering was not on that list.”

Overall, he said the quality of companies and the general start-up ecosystem was improving all the time. “There are things we can do to improve it. Housing would help. More streamlined work permits would help. More students coming out of university in software would help. There is a bunch of stuff we could do to improve it, but simultaneously it is the best it has ever been,” he said.

Collison’s upbeat assessment of innovation in Ireland comes just weeks after the publication of a sobering report by the former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi on competitiveness in Europe.

The EU, according to Draghi, has fallen well behind the US and is facing increasing threats from China. Draghi said this slowdown in growth in the EU had been “ignored” for years. “In my view, we are already in a crisis,” he said.

Collison has digested the report and has a nuanced view of its conclusions.

“Tobi Lütke [the CEO of Shopify] made a good point on a podcast I was listening to recently: Countries need to stop comparing themselves to the United States and Silicon Valley, the all-time most productive economic and innovation engine there has ever been,” Collison said. 

“Maybe I should not compare my athletic achievements to Usain Bolt’s because I will feel bad about myself. But I am actually pretty fit and do pretty well when it comes to running. But it is a surefire way to make myself feel bad.”

Collison said the question was about what the bar is for Ireland. “Clearly, we have been doing well and we have been doing well in the IT sector, on a per capita basis. Pick your denominator or data set, we are doing great. The Dublin docklands is a real tech hub. I was down at Dogpatch the other week doing a fireside. The energy was amazing. Nothing like it existed 15 years ago. 

“We should feel happy. W should not beat ourselves up too much. That is the positive side of it.”

The Draghi report stated that start-up companies were being hindered by “inconsistent and restrictive regulations” when they tried to grow in Europe, with many opting to relocate to the US to raise finance from venture capitalists.

Collison said it was positive that Draghi had opened the conversation about regulation.

“A thing I found most interesting was that he head-on talked about ex-ante versus ex-post regulation and the over-eagerness to have too many regulators, too many different directives interpreted by national bodies. That is basically what Meta was highlighting in their recent complaints about data protection regulation,” he said.

“We spend a lot of time in the US business context and a lot of time in the European business context, there are two very different approaches to regulation in the two spheres, to put it mildly.”

Collison referenced Ronald Reagan’s famous quote: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

“In the US, they definitely subscribe to that,” he said. “They think a lot about the cost of doing business and the burdens of new rules and new schemes on businesses. 

“The downside of the US approach is you have a huge amount of out-of-date regulation, some areas where there is industry or regulatory capture. By contrast, the EU takes good regulation very seriously, the regulators are very informed and very skilled about the domains they are working in.” 

He said a good example was the Payment Services Directive, which aims to simplify and increase competition in the payments industry. It was, he said, a better regulatory framework for fintech than anything that exists in the US. 

“As a result, the EU has this really vibrant fintech sector, with fintech lenders, neo banks, all these kinds of stuff. It is much more vibrant than in the US. Those regulators are very informed, very sharp, very pro-competition. They are always thinking about how they can enable more competition,” he said. 

Overall, however, he said that, in his view, European regulators are not thinking about the costs and burden of regulation. 

“GDPR is a good example, where it was a coherent set of policies and a crisp regulatory intent behind data protection. However, there probably was not enough debate over the costs of it. The consensus now is that it was probably easier on a relative basis for the big companies to deal with than the small companies, and it probably has advantaged the big companies relative to small firms, which probably was not the intent going in,” he said.

Rambling, AI and social media

The conversation has moved to walking and rambling in Ireland. 

It turns out that the issue is a “personal hobby horse” for Collison. 

Ireland has some of the most restrictive land use in Europe when it comes to the rights of walkers, something which grates with the Stripe co-founder. 

“We have so much natural beauty, it would be such an incredible boon to tourism. When we have done individual greenway projects after a huge amount of work by motivated people, they have all been roaring successes, which maybe suggests that we should open up more land in the countryside. Again, other countries have done this much more successfully and engaged with private landowners to open up the land,” Collison said.

Collison used the issue to highlight a broader point. Ireland, he believes, should take best practices from other countries and implement them here. The country, he said, does not need to reinvent the wheel continually: “Sometimes, we just need to show more curiosity,” he said. 

“I wish we looked at other European countries and got ideas from them,” he said. “In business, a common thing to do is benchmark against best practices. Maybe some at Stripe will say it is not possible, but I will ask how someone else did it. We should do more benchmarking,” he said.

He pointed to the public transport infrastructure in Copenhagen, as well as city planning in London. Ireland, he said, was behind both despite having better public finances.

“We should look at other cities around Europe and hold Dublin City Council to a higher standard than we do in terms of the work they are doing,” he said. “One of my inspirations for immersive software engineering in UL was Waterloo in Canada. We did not have to invest. We just had to look there. We also got a lot of inspiration from Twente in the Netherlands.”

His mother, Lily, is currently working with the Cerebral Palsy Foundation to help revolutionise the delivery of cerebral palsy care in Ireland. Collison is backing the project. 

“They are taking best practices that are known in other contexts and helping deploy them in the HSE. It will lead to leading-edge research, but we don’t have to even do that yet because there are best practices that have not been deployed,” he said. 

He repeats: “We need more curiosity.”

I ask how he and his brother instilled that curious mindset across Stripe. “We spend a huge amount of time talking to our customers,” he said. “We try to be very aware of the space of what other companies are doing. You will hear some business leaders talking about not being competitor-focused, and they are customer-focused. They say they don’t pay attention to their competitors. 

“One, I just don’t think that is true. They are overstating the case versus how they actually act. Secondly, what is way more customer-focused is being aware of, and fully understanding, your offering and your competitor’s offering. If people are choosing your competitor’s offering, you should be paying attention and learn from it. We try to avoid complacency and be aware of what is going on,” he said.

I ask about his views on AI. It is, he said, “simultaneously overhyped and a very big deal”.

“Both of those things can be true. There is always a term of the day that the management consultants are really excited about: the internet of things, 5G, and the fourth industrial revolution. Now it is AI.

“It is a huge deal and we are using it a lot at Stripe. It will be a huge productivity increaser like computers were and like the internet was. I won’t spend too much time thinking about the doom and gloom social predictions that some people trot out. I think it will be good in a reasonably boring way,” he said.

He is more exercised about the impact of social media on public discourse, a trend he believes is more political than economic.

“It used to be the case that everyone in Ireland got their news from either a state media organ, like the state broadcaster or national media. Now people get a huge amount of their news, information and infotainment from social media where there is no sense of what should be propagated,” he said. “That feels like a big political change.”

*****

The interview is drawing to a close, and Collison is keen to stress that despite his criticism, he remains enthused about Ireland’s potential. The tailwinds, he said, favour Ireland’s prospects.

But he said the country should not ignore the warnings, such as concerns being echoed by various multinationals.

“I think the companies are very clearly telling us what is the problem. Housing is expensive for employees. I have no faith that any important infrastructure will get built. We don’t need to keep polling the multinationals. More FDI is clearly good for Ireland. We would clearly be energised and excited about trying to attract it. And we know what those companies care about,” he said.

“Sometimes you can imagine things where there is some tension. But more infrastructure and more housing benefit us all. If we figure it out it should lower energy prices, lower housing prices, and it could create jobs. You can’t get more win-win.” 

He points to IDA Ireland, something he describes as a “radical idea of its time”, and Ireland’s subsequent corporate tax strategy.

“It is funny to imagine trying to introduce the corporate tax policy that caused so much prosperity in Ireland in today’s environment. The debates would do your head in over it,” he said.  

“We had all these radical ideas that worked. Now we are failing at a bunch of major investment ideas. It would be okay if we were failing and were really unhappy about it as a country. But we are failing at these opportunities and people seem to be okay about it.”

Against this background, I ask how Ireland can avoid stagnating.

“Being paranoid about complacency is an obvious answer,” he said.