Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe (#353)

“If people around you don’t think what you’re doing is a bit strange, maybe it’s not strange enough.”
— Patrick Collison

Patrick Collison (@patrickc) is chief executive officer and co-founder of Stripe, a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet.

After experiencing firsthand how difficult it was to set up an online business, Patrick and his brother John started Stripe in 2010. Their goal was to make accepting payments on the internet simpler and more inclusive. Today, Stripe powers millions of online businesses around the world.

Prior to Stripe, Patrick co-founded Auctomatic, which was acquired by Live Current Media for $5 million in March 2008. In 2016, he was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship by President Obama. Originally from Limerick, Ireland, Patrick now lives in San Francisco where Stripe is headquartered.

Also, as you can tell from seeing just a selected segment of his reading list shared in the show notes below, he’s one of the most well-read people I know.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can find the transcript of this episode here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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Want to hear my interview with one of the founders of Duolingo? Listen to my interview with Luis Von Ahn, the co-founder of Duolingo, in which we discuss what 2-3 books and resources he’d recommend to entrepreneurs, language learning tips, early mentors and key lessons learned, and how to recruit and vet technical talent (stream below or right-click here to download):

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QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• Connect with Patrick Collison:

Stripe | Website | Twitter

• Choice Selections from Patrick’s Reading List:
  
  • The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon
  • The MindñBody Problem by Jonathan Westphal
  • Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger by Charles T. Munger
  • Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and His Astonishing Exploratorium by K.C. Cole
  • Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos by Thomas Petzinger Jr.
  • The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop
  • Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos
  • If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb
  • The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch
  • The Paris Review Interviews, I: 16 Celebrated Interviews by Philip Gourevitch and The Paris Review
  • Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas by Seymour Papert
  • Out of Mao’s Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China by Philip P. Pan
  • Democracy in America: Abridged Edition by Alexis de Tocqueville
  • Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern by Douglas Hofstadter
  • Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns
  • Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn by Richard W. Hamming
  • A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel
  • Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp by Peter Norvig
  • Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy by Nick Bostrom

• Y Combinator
• Auctomatic
• District
• The Untold Story of Stripe, the Secretive $20 Bn Startup Driving Apple, Amazon, and Facebook by Stephen Armstrong, Wired UK
• Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University
• Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future Edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer
• ARPANET and the Origins of the Internet, DARPA
• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
• Xerox PARC
• What is Brownian Motion?, The Fuse School
• “We Cannot Predict the Future, But We Can Invent It” by Garson O’Toole, Quote Investigator
• Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google (FAANG), Wikipedia
• Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer: Our Transparent Formula and All Individual Salaries by Joel Gascoigne, Buffer
• What is Holacracy?, holacracy.org
• Holacracy and Self-Organization, Zappos Insights
• Medium Drops Holacracy: How We Dealt with Their Challenges at Springest in the past Three Years by Ruben Timmerman, Medium
• A Collection of Paul Graham’s Essays
• Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham
• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule by Paul Graham
• Do Things That Don’t Scale by Paul Graham
• Slashdot
• Hacker News
• Exploring Python Using GDB by Evan Broder, Stripe
• How Did Stripe Come Up With Its Name? by Greg Brockman, Stripe CTO, on Quora
• Hedonic Treadmill by James Chen, Investopedia
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Live Current Media
• “Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
• Lough Derg House and The Lake Cafe
• Surely the Smartest Redhead in Ireland — at 16 by Miriam Lord, The Independent, Ireland
• ISO 9000 Series of Standards, ASQ
• The Advice I’d Give Past Me by Patrick Collison
• Asperger/Autism Spectrum Fact Sheet, The Asperger/Autism Network
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Patrick’s Recommended People List
• Patrick’s Recommended Twitter Reading List
• Keeping Up with the Kardashians
• Happiness and Life Satisfaction by Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser, Our World in Data
• Are the Amish Unhappy? Super Happy? Just Meh? by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex
• These Are the World’s Happiest Places by Dan Buettner, National Geographic
• “Gross National Happiness Is a Lie”: Oakland’s Bhutanese Refugees Speak Out by Jason Ditzian, The Bold Italic
• How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region by Joe Studwell
• How the World Works by James Fallows, The Atlantic
• History of Japan in Nine Minutes by Bill Wurtz
• How to be More Productive by Using the “Eisenhower Box” by James Clear
• Earning Your Stripes: Patrick Collison on The Knowledge Project podcast with Shane Parrish
• Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step by Edward de Bono
• Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono
• Automattic
• “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman
• The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance by W. Timothy Gallwey
• You and Your Research by Richard R. Hamming
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

SHOW NOTES

• What does Chris Sacca have to say about Patrick Collison? [06:03]
• For the well-read Patrick, what makes a book particularly great? What titles get recommended and gifted most? [09:37]
• Why The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop has a special place on Patrick’s bookshelf (which lends further insight into how he vets his reading list). [13:53]
• On the importance of giving ideas — whether they’re wrapped up in books or companies — time to fail before venerating them as innovations, and not writing off an idea you might tackle uniquely just because someone else has already tried it in a different way. [20:44]
• When beginning Stripe, what did Patrick and his brother, co-founder John, know when entering a seemingly saturated market that nobody else knew? [28:50]
• What does Y Combinator’s Paul Graham mean when he uses the term Collison installation, and what decisions were made in Stripe’s early days that — in retrospect — turned out to be really important? [35:04]
• The tendency of many startups to overvalue PR and marketing, the siren song of high praise, and the shocking shortage of good software from companies that should — but don’t — understand its importance for driving organic traction in today’s marketplace. [46:32]
• The future of your company is probably not going to hinge entirely on the first name that you give it — as Patrick demonstrates by telling us how SlashDevSlashFinance, Inc. became Stripe. [51:22]
• A day early on when Stripe hit a hurdle, how it was overcome, and how this affected Patrick on a personal level. [58:07]
• What did the conversation between the Collison brothers look like that day? Was there anything that trained them to develop the appropriate mindset to deal with these sorts of problems on a regular basis? [1:03:44]
• Does having such supportive parents make the sometimes odd courses Patrick and John chart for themselves easier to navigate? [1:08:27]
• Patrick fills us in on the kind of upbringing he and his brothers had in rural Ireland as “free-range” children, and how their parents cultivated their curiosity — from including them in dinner conversations with other adults to camping all over Europe to finding a local monk to teach Patrick ancient Greek when he expressed a passing interest in learning it. [1:14:44]
• Some wise advice from Patrick about developing your own worldview — even if you don’t happen to fall within the “prime” years between 10 and 20 — and heuristics you can use to help. [1:26:06]
• Patrick’s recommended people lists. [1:34:37]
• Why is Patrick so fascinated by economic history and development economics? [1:37:09]
• How does one gauge perceived economic progress against happiness? Or put another way, why are a lot of Ethiopians generally happy until they get television sets? [1:40:30]
• What levers does Patrick think we might we pull to better equalize happiness around the world? [1:47:08]
• What progressive strides has South Korea made in a relatively short period of time that might serve as an example to currently troubled areas looking forward to their own development? [1:53:28]
• Suggestions Patrick has for people who are trying to increase the speed of their decision-making process, and concepts and books that have been helpful to me. [1:58:20]
• When I’m agitated about any number of things, “What would Matt Mullenweg say?” is a question I often ask myself. Members of your close peer group can be helpful to your decision-making process even if they’re not physically around to ask. [2:06:37]
• In many cases, the only way you can have more complete information is to make what might be the wrong decision and then course correct. [2:10:18]
• Patrick recommends a few books that might help with decisional course correction — or reformatting the approach to make sure you’re not wasting time devising the best solutions imaginable for the wrong problems. [2:12:05]
• Parting thoughts. [2:16:41]

PEOPLE MENTIONED

• John Collison
• Barack Obama
• Molly
• Charlie Munger
• Frank Oppenheimer
• Chris Sacca
• Larry Page
• Paul Graham
• Yoda
• Marc Andreessen
• Neal Stephenson
• M. Mitchell Waldrop
• J.C.R. Licklider
• Bret Victor
• Alan Kay
• Evan Broder
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Laird Hamilton
• Lily Collison
• Denis Collison
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Abraham Lincoln
• Oscar Wilde
• J.R.R. Tolkien
• Tommy Collison
• Homer
• Harsh Sikka
• Almighty Rello
• Graham Duncan
• John Arnold
• Stewart Brand
• Pseudoerasmus
• Max Roser
• Scott Alexander
• Joe Studwell
• James Fallows
• Friedrich List
• Bboy Pocket
• Reid Hoffman
• Michael Nielsen
• Edward de Bono
• Matt Mullenweg
• W. Timothy Gallwey
• John Tukey
• Jocko Willink
• Cal Fussman
• Peter Attia
• Hamilton Morris

The Tim Ferriss Show is one of the most popular podcasts in the world with more than one billion downloads. It has been selected for "Best of Apple Podcasts" three times, it is often the #1 interview podcast across all of Apple Podcasts, and it's been ranked #1 out of 400,000+ podcasts on many occasions. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page.