John Collison on Stripe’s growth plans, the obsession over an IPO, and…a potential sibling cage match

Before you ask, no, I have no idea when or if Stripe is going public. And, to his credit, John Collison, Stripe president and cofounder, is even-handed about our collective obsession over it.

“People love speculating on this,” he told Term Sheet over the phone. “We have no news to share, and when it’s time to share, we’ll share it.”

It’s an approach and response that evokes some of Charlie Munger’s famous advice, delineated in Poor Charlie’s Almanack (recently republished by Stripe Press): “Avoid unnecessary transactional taxes and frictional costs; never take action for its own sake.”

Stripe just released its annual letter and Munger, who passed away in November, figures heavily in it. It’s an interesting time for Collison and his brother, Patrick, Stripe’s cofounder and CEO, to be thinking about Munger publicly. Munger prized candor, simplicity, and humor—he was a value investor, always with an eye toward longevity. And it’s undoubtedly a moment where Stripe is thinking about the long game.

In 2023, Stripe hit $1 trillion in total payment volume, the letter reveals. I asked: Why is this Stripe’s headline number? For Collison, total payment volume reflects two things: the company’s “rate of customer acquisition” and how businesses perform “once they join Stripe.”

The letter also emphasizes that Stripe is cash flow positive. I, for one, have been mildly desperate to know how efficient Stripe is (show me the margins, I’m begging you), but Collison reassures me that Stripe’s efficiency and cash-flow-positive status are linked.

"We've been driving a lot of [efficiency] over the course of the last few years, which is how we’ve ended up cash flow positive,” he said.

These metrics are both revealing and mysterious—we on the outside know only so much about how Stripe is performing, but we do know that the company is huge, massive in a way that’s hard to explain. (The company's valuation notably got a bump in February, up to $65 billion from $50 billion about a year prior.) Where does Stripe grow from here?

“We are very early in the overall Stripe growth trajectory in the markets that we serve,” Collison told me. “Just to put concrete numbers on it: We're a trillion dollars in payment volume, we're very proud to have passed that milestone. But, depending on how you define digital payments, it's $50 trillion-plus in total payment volume. So, we’re less than 2% of the overall digital payments market.”

Practically, that means Stripe is looking to the “revenue and finance automation space” for its next iteration of growth, and acquisitions are always on the table, Collison said.

“We’ve always got acquisitions on the brain,” he told Term Sheet. "We're always looking for companies, but it’s also very hard to set a goal of ‘I’m going to acquire one company a quarter, roughly of this size.’ So, it’s opportunistic.”

Like many people, I’ve found a lot of comfort and insight in reading Poor Charlie’s Almanack over the years. And I quite liked Collison’s distillation of Munger’s essays, writing in his 2023 foreword: “His essays extol the virtues of free enterprise, yes, but also of doing business the right way, with integrity and rigor. Of taking your work very seriously, but never yourself.”

That’s not something Collison just wrote, it seems to be who he is. I tested him a little—I told Collison about my editor’s suggestion: the Collison brothers, in a cage fight against another famous pair of fintech siblings, the Winklevoss Twins.

“I think that idea is so last year—Elon and Mark already took that!”

A beat. I expected him to leave it, but was delighted as he entertained the joke, contemplating his odds against the Winklevii, ex-Olympic rowers.

“They’re very tall! If I’m going to be in a cage fight with someone, I would pick someone less tall and athletic.”

So, he’d prefer a different opponent?

“Yes, find some very small brothers for me!”

I’m working on it. In the meantime, it’s clear that Collison has taken Munger’s advice to heart: Never take action for its own sake.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com