Patrick Collison is the Irish-born CEO and co-founder of Stripe, the payments infrastructure company valued at over $90 billion. At 21, he and his brother John built Stripe from a prototype hacked together on holiday into one of the most influential fintech companies in the world. Beyond Stripe, Patrick co-founded the Arc Institute for biomedical research, launched Fast Grants that distributed over $200 million for COVID research, and championed Progress Studies with Tyler Cowen. A former teenage programming prodigy who won Ireland's Young Scientist Exhibition at 16, he dropped out of MIT to pursue entrepreneurship and became one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires at 28.
James Pethokoukis is a Washington D.C.-based economist, journalist, and author who holds the DeWitt Wallace Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. He writes the 'Faster, Please!' Substack newsletter - one of the leading voices in techno-optimism and pro-progress policy - hosts the 'Political Economy with Jim Pethokoukis' podcast, and authored 'The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised' (2023). A longtime CNBC contributor, he argues that culture - not capital - is the real barrier to the abundant, innovative future humanity could build.