YouSaid · the spoken record

Patrick Collison

lines on the record: 111
first: 2018-12-20
most recent: 2018-12-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so I remember kind of randomly mentioning when I was 12 or 13 that learning, I don't even remember why I thought this, but the learning ancient Greek seemed interesting. I think I just read some Homer or something, I mean a translation, and the language seemed interesting. And I was just saying that as some kind of random throwaway remark, I guess the way a kid does. And sure enough, my mom went and found somebody at like literally a local monastery who was willing to teach ancient Greek. And then she told me about this. And so for two years, I went to that monastery once a week after school and learned ancient Greek. And that interest never went super far. I haven't read much ancient Greek in the last 10 years. But it was the kind of thing they did. And, you know, obviously some other interests like programs.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Checked in on us every day and made sure things were fine. But we spent most of the time alone when we weren't at school. And from myself and John's standpoint, that was fantastic. We loved the freedom. But of course, they reciprocally expected us not to kind of give them cause to regret it. And then the third thing is whenever we kind of expressed interest in something, they really sort of tried to find opportunities to kind of, you know, when there was a small shoot of interest, they looked for opportunities to water it, but they never sort of thrust those opportunities on us or I never felt that kind of, or rather they never thrust the interest on us. I never felt that I was sort of following a track laid down by somebody else.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Took us to the library every day. They sort of took us traveling in the summers. If there were interesting guests coming over for dinner, we weren't kind of dispatched upstairs or totally get an early dinner before the adults came. We were sort of thrust right into the middle. So they kind of really took us seriously and showed us the world. The second thing is they really give us kind of agency on autonomy and kind of treated us as adults. And that was kind of went two ways. And that on the one hand, they give us a lot of freedom. On the other hand, they kind of expected quite a lot of us. And so our youngest brother had to get some pretty major surgery in the US back when John and I were, I don't know, maybe 10 or 12 or thereabouts. And so they were gone to the US for several weeks, maybe more than a month. And we were left mostly alone for that month. We had a neighbor who”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guys Well, we were kind of, we grew up in very rural Ireland, right? The kind of the middle of the countryside, surrounded by kind of farms and fields. And we were kind of really, we had to kind of figure out ourselves what was going to be entertaining and interesting and fun. It wasn't just kind of provided to us by the environment. And so we kind of grew up as these sort of free-range children. They were lucky where there were lots of books in the house and we read those pretty voraciously. Our parents, I guess I would say that the thing that our parents did is there's a million things, but the two that really that stand out are they kind of showed us the world.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Either others don't give them the opportunity or they sort of don't kind of give themselves the permission to just kind of have a few slightly lost years where the narrative isn't super clear. And those weirds can be hard because by definition you're not exactly sure where they're going. And it's very kind of disorienting to not know where you're sailing. And you can and do feel a bit adrift. And so looking back on that, I actually feel like it was kind of really important in kind of giving me confidence and perspective. But at the time, it definitely felt a bit unmoored.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of very ostensibly strange and surprising decisions our parents kind of supported us and so when I was a 15 year old and wanted to take a year off school to kind of just like program full time my parents were supportive of that or when I wanted to sort of sort of drop out of school to go take this totally different exam system my parents were okay with that and so we kind of had this upbringing where our parents supported us in that way and when in my kind of you know teens early 20s was kind of trying to figure out what the kind of right direction was I wouldn't say that was kind of a lost period but it was again it was definitely a highly exploratory one and so just kind of to your question of you know periods of real hardship I think a lot of people either don't get the opportunity to sort of explore multiple directions like that or they're kind of”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years before it even launched. And so maybe that whole kind of four year period, I think to many people who knew me or just kind of were around, I'm sure it looked kind of pretty scatteredly planned, maybe misdirected. And they wouldn't be entirely wrong. I mean, I certainly was not kind of pursuing some grand master plan. And I think I was actually really lucky where from sort of an early age my parents were very okay with myself and John sort of charting our own course. And you get these kind of real sort of hot house environments where there's a lot of pressure to go to the school, go to the college, pursue this career path, whatever. You really kind of feel like you're on these kind of narrow train tracks. And I would say that our upbringing was kind of the opposite, where really our parents, even when we wanted to make.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I went to school, I should have thought, well, maybe I want to become a physicist or a mathematician or something like that. And who knows how successful, if at all, I would have been. Maybe I wouldn't even have made the cut, but I kind of had that ambition aspiration. And I sort of felt that we'd started the company so early and it happened so quickly that I hadn't kind of really fully tested whether that was kind of a good idea or not. And so I went back to college for a second time to kind of do mostly math and physics. And so did that. And then while there, John was also in college at the same time, that's kind of when we went to start Stripe. But if you'd looked at that kind of two-year period, it was drop out of college, start this company, moved to Vancouver, moved to another country, go back to college, then start this other company. And when we started Stripe, it did not seem very promising. I mean, it seemed like this, you know, silly little developer payments thing. And again, it was another two.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, maybe just before answering that to kind of add something to what we were just talking about, though it relates to what you just asked, there's a period in my life where I did feel a bit not likely lost, but it certainly wasn't clear exactly what direction I was going in. And so we sold our first company and I lived in Vancouver for a while, worked for that company, kind of exploring some other stuff as well. This is the live media. Exactly. Yep. And then I moved to live with my then-girlfriend in Zurich. And so I lived in Switzerland for a while. And then I actually went back to college because I dropped out of college pretty early.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And not feel great. And no one sort of told me that before I started. I sort of thought that, well, if the company's succeeding, then clearly it's going to be, I don't know, not necessarily fun, but at least sort of it'll feel good day to day. Whereas the actual reality is that you're always necessarily operating at the kind of outer edge of what you can handle because if you'd spare capacity, you just tick on more. And so you're kind of therefore inevitably always on the cusp of feeling like you're sort of going to fall over. And even as we record this podcast, I mean, at this kind of moment, I feel sort of right on the edge of what I'm able to.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Them and or others. Although when you're starting a company, you sort of have to be kind of both the sort of super long, optimistic, you know, I'm just going to buy this stock and hold it for decades trader. And you kind of have to be this sort of catastrophic Talib style the world is going to hell in a handbasket sort of catastrophe trader. And you kind of have to be both. And that's just weird. I guess the thing that I think is maybe important to understand for folks is it's kind of intuitive that if a company or a new effort of any sort is not going well, that things will feel hard and you'll often feel dejected and life at least insofar as work goes is not great. But the weird part is that even if things are going well and the effort or the company or whatever is succeeding, things will still”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes Absolutely, absolutely. It's true also for. Go ahead. Well, and it's tricky. It's kind of not natural. And it's not a kind of mindset that I think most normal situations in the world kind of train you to have.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What did that look like? It was more the former, like more of this just sort of general dejection. We didn't seriously think about stopping. I think both of us are, it's less that I think we're both really determined and more, I think we're just stubborn. And so the idea of stopping just, it didn't seem like a, just I guess it didn't feel like an option for us. I don't know. Determination sounds glamorous to me and I'm not sure we have that, but I think we're just dogged. But yeah, it's more like, you know, people have different kind of emotional sort of cycles and kind of his sine wave was kind of displaced from mine. And so fortunately, he's a pretty cheery guy that day when I was super dejected, he was in his, I don't know, chipper way. He was telling me, that'll be fine. And you give it another 24 hours or something.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know, acknowledgements about we're immensely lucky among the luckiest people in history to have food and shelter and health and all these things. But humans hedonically treadmill is very powerful and we rapidly adapt to kind of take all those for granted. And so the fact that maybe in the scheme of things we should feel very grateful and lucky and you can kind of tell yourself this narrative to try to keep things in perspective, the reality is that it is just kind of pretty pummeling on an ongoing basis, even for Stripe, which perhaps from the outside might look like this kind of really neat little story. There have been kind of many such moments where it just seems hard.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“State and remain in it, you must for kind of many years is just not normal. And you're kind of, you're always sort of necessarily over extrapolating from limited data because again, you kind of should be in that one particular customer decides not to use you or one particular person leaves the company or just like some small thing happens. But you kind of have to be really asking yourself, well, is this a trend? Has something changed? Is something systemically broken, whatever. And because you're kind of always extrapolating from these bad things while maintaining this kind of long-term optimism, I think that is just a recipe for real psychological hardship. And I don't want to overstate it in that kind of all the obvious sort of.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I just remember being kind of immensely dispirited and kind of talking to John about, well, is there really actually any point doing this? And again, what's kind of important to me about that moment is not that kind of things were actually all that bad, but kind of the opposite. Objectively, they were fine. That date wasn't really much worse in the previous day. But I think the kind of this kind of inevitable thing when you're creating something where on the one hand you have to be kind of very optimistic because if you weren't optimistic, you wouldn't bother doing it, especially in the face of such hardship and uncertainty. You also have to be very pessimistic because you have to, I mean, there are tons of problems and you have to be kind of very tuned to spotting them so you can go fix them. And so you kind of exist in this kind of superposition, this juxtaposition of kind of pessimism and optimism. And you're kind of an extreme on both axes. And that's just like a weird psychological.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sorry. Just explain what that is. The core stripe payments engine broke. And so our customers just couldn't get paid and couldn't accept payments from their customers. And we didn't have many customers back then. Maybe there were 100 or something. But that was still 100 businesses. It felt like a huge deal. And we fixed it. It was only down for me 30 minutes or something.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll give Ken the stripe version, the personal version. So with those caveats on the stripe side, the thing that I think is kind of important to communicate is despite things having been relatively smooth in that macro sense, it often is just extremely hard. And I remember sort of early on after one particular meeting back in, I don't know, 2011, 2012, like just after the meeting, the API broke. And so the API...”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, exactly. So it really helps that we were happy to entertain anything at all. And the last thing worth mentioning there is, we bought the domain and started to rename all our code and the website and everything. And then one day in early January, we kind of flipped the switch and everything became Stripe. somehow on the checklist of all the things to change and do, we neglected to add an entry for tell our customers. And so people woke up in the morning to go to dev payments.com and check their sales and whatever. And they get redirected to Stripe.com. And so we got a lot of sort of confused customers being like, are you guys hacked? Have you been phished? What's going on here? Fortunately, back in January 2011, we had very few customers. And so when I say we got these emails from customers, I mean probably all five of our customers emailed us.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd have to go back to check the details. But there wasn't a big lengthy negotiation. There was maybe a little bit of back and forth. Yeah, no, we really lucked out. I mean, what helped us, of course, is we weren't wet at any of these names, right? If the guy had said, you know, it's $200,000, well, that would have been exactly two seconds of thought and we'd have moved on to something else. Under carbon.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're just at some point trying to think up single monosyllabic English words that didn't have some kind of strong pre-existing association. And Stripe, it turns out, was available relatively cheaply. I think $10,000 or $20,000, which that's not cheap in some sense. But compared to the costs we were living of having a terrible name, it seemed like a good deal.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Code or what some problem or something, we would have sort of a little discussion about what could we name this company? And we had all these books around the office, just all sorts of random stuff. You just page through them and come up with a word and toss it out to the group and be like, well, should we call our company this? And so remember, John was trying to learn how to ride a motorcycle. And so we had a motorcycle repair manual. And so we had a lot of motorcycle words. Should we call the company carburetor, which fortunately did not make the cut. So it was not going well, as you're hearing. We eventually decided to write a little script to just come up with kind of random potential names and actually to kind of check whether the relevant domain names were available because it was important for an online company that we kind of have the dot com. And I can't even remember how, but Stripe is one of the words that ended up sort of on our list of names to check.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, exactly, yes. Yeah, we really embrace remote work. So we're already finding a bit of an uphill battle. And then at the end of the meeting or something, they'd ask us our name or for our business card or something. We'd have to hand over this thing that doesn't even look like a company name. They'd look at it as like, oh, but what's the company name called? We're like, actually, sorry, sir, it's this thing. So it was just, it was all bad. And not only did people often misspellish, but it was kind of a moment of celebration if anyone ever correctly spelled it. And so we kind of came to accept the need for a name change. And naming things, as I'm sure you know, is pretty hard. And so I remember, I think it was the winter of 2010, which was a very wet winter out in California unusually. And I just remember all these kind of dark evenings at the office for as soon as you kind of got stuck with your”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Company had all this SLASH stuff spelled out, the product was just DEV payments.com. And so kind of the naming schemas didn't even really match. And so we would have these meetings and we describe what we do. And we were already fighting an up-to-date battle here. I mean, we were, as John says, sort of three squirrels in a trench coat, sort of trying to masquerade as like a real thing and like evading all these questions about where exactly is our headquarters and how do we not say our bedroom in a way that's not a lie and how do we say we have an open floor”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are definitely a powerful example that, as you say, it is not. And so Stripe was originally incorporated as slash dev slash finance inc spelled SLA-S-H-D-E-V, S-L-A-S-H, et cetera. The slashes were actually spelled out. And the reason for that is a long story. I won't bore you with it. It was like a programming joke, but we thought it was funny. I think it was the rest of the world to our.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Once you attach a real sales and marketing engine to that, it's going to be really freaking hard for a big company to effectively compete because, again, this kind of organizational transformation into being good at software is just so profoundly hard.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if they want to have a great fleet of cars, they can very reliably turn capital into a great fleet of cars. But for some reason, they can't seem to turn, and in fact they can probably even turn capital into like a cool advertising campaign. There's enough good agencies. But for whatever reason, they can turn capital into good software. And it would be immensely valuable for them if they could, but they can't, or at least they don't. And I don't think it's for lack of trying or lack of kind of realizing this. And so I think actually small companies don't realize how much of an upper hand they have here, where if they can create a product that is kind of so much better than the status quo that they start to get sort of organic.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like it's probably pretty bad. It's kind of old. Like the animations already work right. It's kind of laggy. All this stuff, right? But that's weird. They probably have a nice building, a nice headquarters. And there are many things they can decide to do and just do it pretty competently. They can kind of turn their capital advantage into a sort of an advantage in some other area. Like if they”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, kind of related to what you just said, one of the just really strange facts about the world, and I don't kind of fully understand why this is the case, is how hard it is for organizations to build good software. And I know that sounds strange in that, I mean, lots of organizations build some software, but it is just really weird, right? If you think about sort of what a really good website or iOS application or whatever it kind of is and feels like it's really strange, I mean, it's not easy to build a really good website or iOS app or whatever, but it's not rocket science. And given that it's not rocket science, why are there so few of them? Just think of kind of any big major company and think of their website or app.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly Yes There's always a kind of seductive psychological temptation where if something isn't growing to tell yourself that it's because, well, I haven't invested enough in distribution. It's kind of harder to sort of come to realize or to tell yourself that, well, maybe our baby is just a bit too ugly. And so I think people are just very psychologically biased towards sort of blaming anything about growth on things that sound like sales or marketing. And then the”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Buy a competing billboard or pay more for the Google Ads or whatever. And so again, we didn't kind of realize all this in advance, but I think that ended up really helping us”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're sort of talking at people and showing them these fancy presentations and whatever, but they're not actually using the product directly, if they find out sort of a year later that it sucks, well, that's kind of fine, or at least it's fine in the short term because you've already got the revenue for the sale or something. Whereas if you have to compete on the merits of the product and just kind of rely on people kind of being honest about how well it works or doesn't, that kind of forces you to just build a kind of product development organization that can compete and so it might be harder to kind of get that initial traction, but if you can get there, you actually really have kind of an upper hand relative to kind of more traditionally incentivized companies because they've probably gotten a bit lazy and a bit ossified and just a bit less competitive on this access. And once you can make the battle about the quality of your product and the quality of your product development, if you can get”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, this actually brings me to kind of the second thing that I was going to mention in terms of the other kind of helpful consequence of kind of marketing ourselves this way, which is it actually kind of creates better incentives for us. Because if you think about sort of more traditional marketing, and by the way, to be clear, I'm not dismissing in any way kind of traditional sales of marketing. I mean, Stripe has salespeople and marketing people, and they're immensely important in sort of in the organization we're now building today. And so I'm kind of specifically talking about kind of strategies to kind of get started in the early days and to kind of get some initial traction. Anyway, that said, the super valuable thing about sort of pursuing these kind of non-traditional channels is if you think about a traditional marketing organization and kind of what it's, or traditional marketing in general and kind of what the incentives are, the incentives are to kind of talk up the product or to kind of pre-announce things ahead of when they're actually ready.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah I remember a guy who worked at Stripe and who still works at Stripe, his name is Evan, he wrote a blog post about how to debug Python, which is a programming language with GDB, which is a debugger. It didn't really have much to do with Stripe. It was actually a really good blog post. And this is probably back in 2012. And I just remember that that got a whole bunch of traffic. And as a consequence, people kind of fan out about Stripe and maybe kind of realized that we knew something about what we were talking about from a technical standpoint. And it moved the needle for us back at a time where really nobody had heard of us.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of the internet had changed, but we just kind of made a very deliberate bet on these kind of superior distribution channels. And I think that actually really helped us in two big ways. One is it's kind of obviously cheaper. And so you look at a lot of other companies, especially companies selling to businesses, and they spend vast gargantuan amounts of money on their kind of sales and marketing strategies. And early on, we didn't have to do that. And so it was kind of transformatively impactful in that sense. Maybe if we'd had to kind of spend a lot on sort of getting started, it perhaps would have been, that could have been a severe enough barrier that we wouldn't have gotten over it at all. Maybe the company would never have happened. So that's the first. The second is...”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of quote unquote correct thing that maybe kind of 30 years ago or something, because there were sort of much slower or fewer kind of distribution channels that who won and what got used, we kind of determined more by marketing budgets or by sales decks or whatever, but that there was a new kind of sort of transparency and kind of efficacy and information dissemination that the internet now made possible that shifted the way that a product could really get adopted. And so just very concretely, our sales and marketing strategy for a very long time was writing blog posts that we just thought were good and interesting, or at least we hoped were, and building a good product and hoping that people would tell others about it. And I really don't think that that would have worked 10 years previously.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In So, I think there are two that really jump out to me where I think they were actually kind of somewhat deliberate. Well, I'll give two and maybe I'll think of more. So one is we had sort of grown up reading slash dot this early kind of tech news website, but it was kind of crowdsourced and hacker news and Twitter and blogs and all these kinds of services. And I guess we just sort of had a belief that how people find out about things in the world had changed. And in particular, the market was getting more efficient. And by efficient, I mean that it was becoming more likely that people would come to discover the”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“YC is one of the most amazing inventions of the past 20 years. And I think PG's essays are still a goldmine that sort of like Alan Kay, I think, are still like people kind of know they're great, but I think they're sort of even better than people appreciate.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Questions, or do they all interpret it the same way and so on? But the kind of very high level thing that sort of came back was that companies across the board report kind of availability of software engineers and just like ability to kind of do things with software as being as big or even bigger a constraint on their progress as access to capital. And that's just such an amazing fact, right? In that sort of economics for its history basically has been sort of a science of in some sense access to and kind of distribution of capital. And we're just at this kind of moment of transformation where, I mean, on some level, you can exchange capital for software talent and output and so on. But it's actually really hard to do. And I think companies globally are really struggling with figuring out how to make that happen. And so anyway, we just had the good fortune.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said, hey, I really think we should be using this kind of much more straightforward or sort of much more powerful technology. Unlike a decade before, they were actually being listened to. And so again, this isn't sort of a thing we knew in the way that we could have argued for it in 2010, but it was a thing we kind of was somehow in our bones. And again, we were just lucky where we started right around when the world started to transform in this regard. And actually, we did this survey earlier this year where we kind of surveyed a whole bunch of, I don't want to say kind of traditional, but sort of not software companies. We sort of surveyed companies fairly broadly across multiple industries. And we just asked them kind of what's holding them back. And that's a very imperfect methodology, of course, because it's hard to know what the kind of candidate answers there should be. And maybe this.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We just kind of have this very naive understanding of the world. However, we're lucky where the world really, I think, started to change around 2010, 2011, where companies around the world and especially in kind of the US and Europe really got the memo, like big traditional companies that they would have to take advantage of what software was making possible and really transform themselves if they wanted to kind of survive and prosper. And so, you know, fast forward kind of five or six years later, even the kind of more traditional stodgy or companies that would have needed this kind of super complex enterprise field team to kind of engage with, they were actually now starting to listen to their own developers. And when the CT”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Banks and so on are comprised of good people who want to do the right thing and may speak a different language or whatever, but they're reasonable. And I guess the other thing is we really had this mindset because of, I guess where we came from, the kind of developers and makers and software were just going to continue to become increasingly important. And it's really amazing where when we started out We kind of our idea was that developers would just like we would build a good product and developers would start using it and that would be the story and we didn't even know that was such a kind of a stupid distribution strategy and go-to-market mechanism. We didn't even know how much enterprise marketing and enterprise sales motion and all the rest we were kind of skipping over.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think there's two different kinds of knowing, right? There's kind of conscious, explicit knowing where you see that there's kind of a prevailing belief or something and you understand why it's wrong and you have some kind of proprietary insight that everyone else doesn't have. I think there's another kind of sort of quote unquote knowing, which is just you have a belief or a model of the world and you don't even realize that it's different to others. It's kind of some deeply internalized thing that just for whatever circumstantial reasons you happen to have ended up with. And I think for us, it actually wasn't so much that we had a, in the beginning, this kind of comprehensive deep understanding of the space and realized how everyone else was mistaken, we just had like a particular perspective because of how we”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Comprehensions, there's some combination of mockery or dismissiveness or, again, kind of emotional objection. Whereas I really think we should be encouraging and celebrating them. And the weirder the effort is, the more they deserve our support.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. But I really think one of the strangest things to me in the world, as I look out, is that people kind of don't celebrate this experimentation enough. If it doesn't seem to them the right thing to do, they get kind of offended by it or it seems to there's some kind of emotional response to it. Whereas I think at least the response I try to kind of cultivate myself is I think that's a bad idea. It does not make sense given my model of the world. And I'm delighted it's happening. That's so great. And if it fails, well, that's unfortunate. And if it succeeds, we all get to learn something. That's kind of what's so great about the transmission of knowledge that if it works and only one particular small instance, everyone gets to benefit from it. That's so cool. And yet when people try kind of strange things that don't match are kind of, again, pre-existing”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decisions like what kind of organizational structure you're going to have, I think you actually want to bias towards being relatively conservative.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Describes that. I don't think that's a priori a ludicrous idea. Maybe that'll work. But I think the sort of the bias should be that for any radical departure from the kind of prevailing status quo, it's probably not going to work. I think there's probably a 90% chance, maybe higher, that kind of any meaningful deviation is a bad idea. And so again, to kind of return to getting at the beginning, I think we should celebrate the fact that all these experiments are happening and should really cheer them on and should really hope that they succeed. And kind of we ourselves should choose maybe some small number of experiments that we really believe in to engage in. But I think for these kind of really high important sort of trapped”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I don't deeply understand it, but I think it is, I think, as I understand it, the core idea is having kind of differing decision-making bodies, like groups of people that are responsible for major areas of the company rather than having a kind of more traditional hierarchy. And so perhaps, again, this is my superficial understanding. But so perhaps you might have some set of people who are responsible for making compensation decisions, some other set of people who are responsible for deciding what the product strategy should be for next year and some other set of people who are responsible for figuring out how the office should be decorated, but those sets of people don't need to kind of map on to some traditional hierarchy and they can be partly overlapping or bigger or smaller or whatever. And when one does”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Google, Facebook, Apple, or Amazon. And I think doing better is just really pretty difficult. And so I actually love the fact that people are experimenting here, the rise of remote organizations that have no physical headquarters or attempts to have, I mean, buffer has been trying sort of this kind of radical transparency down to kind of compensation. Some organizations like Medium and Zappos tried or are trying holacracy. And so I love the fact that all these experiments are happening.”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the kind of general idea here behind this is. Look especially like maybe IBM of 1950, this parallels but very material differences. However, I think that most of the experiments have failed. Most efforts to do something that's kind of substantially different to the kind of best practice of the day, most of those efforts fail. And so I think when you're designing a particular organization doing something that truly might kill it is just like a pretty risky thing to do. And evidently the way Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others are organized, Amazon, what have you, I'm certain it's not perfect. I'm certain that not only can you do better, but you can do substantially better. I really believe that. But at the same time, it's kind of empirically adequate to be”
2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT