Stripe co-founder John Collison opened his Stripe Sessions 2026 keynote in San Francisco by telling the audience the market sell-off that briefly wiped a trillion dollars off software-sector market cap was a misread of where AI is showing up, and that the real signal is in business formation and revenue scaling, not equity prices.
"Since we last talked together, it's been a little wobbly. In January, the software sector lost a trillion dollars of market value in about 30 days," Collison told the keynote audience at Moscone Center. He pushed back on the prevailing narrative that AI is about to commoditise software-as-a-service revenue. "But interestingly, this is a prospective worry. It's not revenue softness that's happening right now. SaaS payment volumes on Stripe, they're actually a good chunk higher today than before the sell-off. So, SaaS is still growing just fine."
Collison argued the wider market repricing is healthier than the bubble-watchers suggest. "The markets are being tediously rational. The most profitable companies are the ones being rewarded with outsize valuations," he said, contrasting the current environment with the dot-com era when the index was, briefly, more generous to the least profitable names.
On the K-shaped consumer narrative dominating macro coverage, he said Stripe's payments data does not support it. "If we look at the ratio of high-income to low-income consumer spending in our data, in a K-shaped economy, you'd expect this chart to be going up. But it's the opposite. The line is trending gradually downwards. The gap between high-income and low-income spending has been shrinking."
The headline data point came on solopreneurs. Stripe's head of data and AI Emily Glass, who joined Collison on stage, said the volume of one-person businesses doing more than US$100,000 a year in revenue has hit a level that reframes the small-business category. "Solopreneurism is now how close to 5 million Americans earn their living," she said.
International dynamism was just as striking. "New business registrations are up 40% in Australia, up 70% in Finland, up 80% in France," Glass said. Stripe's Atlas incorporation product, which lets founders register a US company online, hit its 100,000th customer this year. "Atlas companies incorporated in 2025 are raking in twice as much revenue as the class of '24 was by this point. But it's the class of '26 that's really cooking. Just a few months into the year, the class of '26 is tracking to five times the revenue of last year's cohort," she said.
Collison framed the borderless playbook as the new norm. "Take the top 100 AI startups on Stripe. The median earns most of its revenue internationally and sells into 55 countries within its first year of existence," he said.
He also disclosed a top-line figure that quantifies Stripe's window into the global economy. "Stripe now processes almost 2% of global GDP," Collison said, adding that the cumulative downloads of payment-related skills on Anthropic's Claude platform — 125,000 in 12 weeks — show that machine-to-machine payments are already a real category.
The closing argument leaned on economic history. Collison pointed to the 30-year lag between Edison electrifying lower Manhattan in 1882 and US output-per-worker growth more than doubling in the 1910s, and to economist Robert Solow's 1987 line that computers were everywhere except in the productivity statistics. "Transformative technology looks for a long time like it's not doing much. If you're looking at the economic gauges, you're going to sit there and you're tapping the gauge, is this thing on?"
His takeaway for the room was direct. "The minimum efficient size of a serious business is collapsing. Solopreneurs are scaling to seven figures and beyond. Agents are buying from agents. Companies are launching globally from day one."