Stripe co-founder and President John Collison has been nominated to join Microsoft’s board of directors. (Stripe Photo)
When Stripe co-founder John Collison interviewed Satya Nadella on his company’s podcast last fall, he asked the Microsoft CEO for advice on building a platform business. Collison will soon get to see how Microsoft does it up close.
Collison, 36, the co-founder and president of the Bay Area-based payments platform, has been nominated to Microsoft’s board, the tech giant disclosed Wednesday in its annual proxy statement .
He would fill one of two board seats opening up at Microsoft’s Dec. 8 annual meeting. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman said in June that he would leave , and the proxy reveals that Disney CFO Hugh Johnston, who chairs the board’s audit committee, is not seeking re-election either. Both have served on the board since 2017 .
The proxy also notes that former EY CEO Carmine Di Sibio, appointed to the board in May , will stand for election by shareholders for the first time.
Microsoft’s board currently has 13 members, including Di Sibio. With Hoffman and Johnston leaving and Collison joining, it will go back to 12, the same number it had before Di Sibio joined in May.
Microsoft says Collison “brings extensive entrepreneurial and operational experience, along with deep expertise in technology.” He started Stripe with his brother, Patrick, in 2010, and businesses using Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in payments in 2025. Collison does not sit on any other public company board.
The board determined that he is independent, after considering ordinary business dealings between Microsoft and companies tied to its directors. The proxy doesn’t mention any business between Microsoft and Stripe, but the two companies already work together.
Stripe helps power Copilot Checkout , which Microsoft launched in January to let U.S. users of its AI assistant buy from Etsy sellers and other retailers without leaving the chat. In 2023, the companies teamed up to let businesses take card payments for paid events in Microsoft Teams.
The companies’ work together came up in the November episode of Stripe’s “Cheeky Pint” podcast. Collison said Stripe was building a platform business in agentic commerce, in which AI agents shop and pay on behalf of people, and asked Nadella what advice he had for a company building in such an early market.
Nadella said the key would be making it simple for small merchants to sell through AI agents, without asking them to set up servers or adopt a string of new technical protocols themselves.
The relationship goes back years. Nadella said he first visited Stripe’s San Francisco office when he was running Microsoft’s cloud business, before he became CEO.
He said Stripe reminded Microsoft of something it had once been good at, “following the developer, being where the startups are,” and said that thinking “led me even to GitHub,” the code-sharing platform Microsoft acquired in 2018 for $7.5 billion .
