Stripe's John Collison says double majors will win the AI era, and he's only betting on two types of people
Stripe cofounder John Collison says double majors and high-agency people will win the AI era. Here's his reasoning, and the data that might back it up.
Stripe cofounder and president John Collison discussed why multidisciplinary thinkers will thrive in the AI era during an appearance on the TBPN podcast.
- Two groups Collison is betting on – Double majors and "high-agency people" are the two categories he says will thrive over the next 10 to 20 years.
- AI removes the cost of breadth – Collison says AI makes it easy to gain functional knowledge across disciplines without years of formal study.
- Tech job openings are up 14% – Despite fears about AI replacing engineers, TrueUp data shows hiring has actually risen so far in 2026.
Stripe's president just gave Gen Z a reason to stop apologizing for double-majoring. John Collison, who cofounded Stripe with his brother Patrick in 2010, said on the TBPN podcast that he's "bullish" on people who pair two academic disciplines, predicting they'll "do incredibly well over the next 10 to 20 years" as AI reshapes how work gets done.
Collison's logic is specific, not vague optimism about education. "If you understand software and understand marketing, you now can go massively improve the entire marketing funnel for your company," he said. The value isn't in knowing two unrelated subjects for their own sake, it's in being able to connect a technical capability to a business function without needing a translator in between. AI, in his framing, removes the cost that used to make cross-disciplinary fluency hard to acquire. "You can just go read the books now or you can talk to your AI about it," Collison said, crediting the late investor Charlie Munger as an early advocate for the same idea.
"I think multidisciplinary thinkers are going to do incredibly well." - John Collison, Cofounder and President, Stripe
Double majors aren't the only group Collison is betting on. He named a second category he's "super bullish on": high-agency people. "We know this at Stripe. The people who are like, I've been talking to customers, I know exactly what we should do, we got to go fix this, the people who have that pep in their step and they want to go make Stripe better. They are so much more empowered thanks to AI," he said. The throughline between both groups is the same: AI rewards people who can act on a problem themselves, rather than people who wait for a specialist or a larger team to be assembled before moving.
What this means: Collison is making a specific claim about leverage, not credentials. A double major used to signal discipline and a heavier course load. In his framing, it now signals someone who can independently bridge two domains that AI hasn't yet learned to bridge on its own, which is a different kind of value than the degree itself ever directly created.
Collison isn't alone in this view, and the broader pattern says something about where confident voices in tech are actually landing on AI and education. Anthropic president Daniela Amodei has argued that as humans and AI work together through this transformation, people skills matter more, not less. Liberal arts majors that have historically paid the worst, anthropology, psychology, education, are being reframed by some executives as more valuable specifically because they're the disciplines AI is worst at replicating. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has made a similar point about soft skills, pushing employees to lean into communication and critical thinking rather than treating those as soft extras alongside technical expertise.
Collison was also direct about what he thinks is wrong, not just what he thinks is right. Asked about predictions that AI will end software engineering as a career, he didn't hedge: "I think those people are high, honestly." That's notable coming from the cofounder of a company that processes a meaningful share of global online payments and has every incentive to actually know whether AI is closing or opening doors for technical talent. There's some data backing the more optimistic read, tech job marketplace TrueUp told Business Insider that tech job openings have risen almost 14% so far in 2026, even as headlines about AI-driven layoffs continue elsewhere in the industry.
Whether Collison's prediction holds depends on whether companies actually reward the kind of bridging skill he's describing, or whether they default to hiring narrow specialists and letting AI handle the translation between domains instead. If double majors really do have an edge over the next decade, it should show up first in hiring data and starting salaries for graduates who combined a technical major with something further afield the kind of signal that would take a few more graduating classes to confirm either way.
