YouSaid · the spoken record

Patrick Collison

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

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  1. “Alan, I would say, is kind of quite widely recognized as a genius. But despite that, I think he is still kind of underrated. I think he will be even more highly regarded in 50 years or in 100 years than he is today.”

    2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Is not an industry that sort of spends a lot of time looking to its past in a way that I think is really both a strength and a weakness in that people are always trying ideas that have failed kind of tons of times before and they're kind of oblivious to the fact they've failed tons of times before and that really is kind of a good thing because sometimes the fact that it has failed five times before does not mean that it's going to fail the sixth time but it can of course also in some ways be a weakness where we don't kind of build on ideas that precede us. Alan Kaye's line about this is computer science is a kind of pop culture where it's sort of this kind of brownie in motion rather than kind of really building layer by layer. And so in that broader culture, I think the Dream Machine is kind of an outlier.”

    2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “An object oriented programming, which is kind of the main programming paradigm that's used today. And so they were just like really critical in kind of the history of what we consider modern technology, modern software. Anyway, Alan Kay worked there and was one of the kind of leading researchers there. And then Brett Victor is one of the most interesting researchers software creatives working today. I remember Alan saying that the Dream Machine is the kind of is semi-ique among computer history and technology history books and the really kind of gets it right. And obviously, you know, we're a pretty young field. And so there hasn't been a whole lot of kind of research and deep scholarly scrutiny, at least to the extent that there might be for, I don't know, math or physics or something. But this book really stood out. And the technology industry”

    2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “It was out of print. There were a couple of copies on Amazon. After I finished it, I was so excited about it that I went and bought a whole bunch of them to give away to people at Stripe, to give away to my friends, and fairly quickly re-exhausted Amazon's pretty limited supply. I think I first heard about it from I think some combination of Brett Victor and Alan Kay. Alan Kay, many of your listeners will already know about for anyone who doesn't, he was a researcher who worked at, who's kind of best known for working on Xerox Park, which was this amazing industrial research lab that was kind of played a sort of formative role in the creation of the GUI, the graphical computer interface, and Ethernet, the kind of one of the main networking technologies.”

    2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Than any other single person to being the individual kind of causally responsible for its creation. He funded Either takes the time or has the time to kind of really go deep in that matter. And it's striking that if you look at sort of how the Dream Machine came to be, he was funded by a grant. As I recall, it was the Sloan Foundation. I could be wrong on that, but I believe it was the Sloan Foundation. They thought this was, I mean, obviously kind of a super important period in history, but sort of, you know, Waldrup was not on toiling under the clock to get a book out by Christmas. He was really trying to sort of capture an important series of events in the arc of technology. So that's really what stands out about that book.”

    2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Here, right? So Yes. Okay. Well, so first off, I think you should mostly ignore the books that are published every year. Take advantage of the fact that quite a lot of books have been published, say, up to 10 years ago. But the books published up to 10 years ago, people have had a lot of time to kind of filter through them and sort of try to select the real gems there. And of course, there are a lot of false negatives. Like there were a lot of great books that just never, for whatever reason, got the attention they kind of deserved. maybe that sort of they don't have the salience that they ought to have for you but but i i really think people should be kind of much more biased towards uh older books than they are i think the dream machine is a good example of this and i think there are kind of two things i guess that uh stand out in the dream machine um uh the first is uh mitchell waldrop the author he really spent the time well i guess i should describe what it is it is a book about the history well it is nominally a biography of jcr lickleider um and you know many people were responsible for the creation of the internet uh but i think licklighter has more claim”

    2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Of books that sort of seem interesting and high quality, but before I'm necessarily ready to read them at that moment, and maybe I'll kind of read the beginning or a couple chapters or something, but not really kind of commit to finishing it. And I'll leave it out around the house. Those books on the bookshelves, those books on the kitchen table, those books beside the couch, there's books in my bedroom, there's usually books on my bed and so on. It's kind of in your mental landscape. And I often find, I guess, that kind of six months later or 18 months later, something happens, something you're reminded of something, and you realize, oh, man, I really should get back to whatever book it is.”

    2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Possibility, or something like that. I'm pretty sure I'm getting that name wrong, but it's along those lines. And they actually published a book of science fiction written by, well, I guess a whole host of authors with a foreword from Neil Stevenson about exactly this idea, the importance of optimistic visions and kind of science fiction as sort of flagging points on the horizon that might be interesting directions to sort of try to paddle towards. So anyway, I think that for books, this kind of matching of kind of your mindset and kind of what's important to you at the particular moment with the kind of content itself sort of really matters. I think a corollary of that is that it's actually valuable to sort of, or I at least find it useful to sort of buy a lot of.”

    2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Cultural capital and how it is that people choose what to do and to aspire to and focus on and try to make happen in the world and the degree to which they're willing to take risks and the importance of visions and the importance of mentors and people to look up to and all that. Anyway, and kind of specifically the idea that perhaps in the kind of first half of the 20th century or maybe the first two-thirds of the 20th century, there were kind of lots of examples of that and perhaps, I mean, I'm not sure whether this is the case or not, but maybe perhaps there are fewer of those today. Anyway, thinking about this of late, and of course, I'm not the first to kind of point this out or raise this as an issue, but I stumbled upon just a couple of days ago a book published by, I'm probably going to get the name wrong, but there's a center at ASU. It's like the Center for Science.”

    2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “I think, well, I find personally actually that it really matters a lot sort of when I read a book and sort of the frame of mind that I'm in at the time, sort of when I stumble across it. And often I'll kind of start a book at some point and maybe revisit it sort of months or in some cases even years later and find that it has kind of a completely sort of renewed resonance or significance or something. And so I think those kind of Chris and Mark Andreessen and others talk about this idea and of course many people at this point talk about sort of product market fit and founder market fit. I think with books there's really something around sort of reader book fit and the kind of particulars of that moment. And so just by way of example, I've been thinking a whole lot of late about sort of the importance of kind of”

    2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I think we should probably just end the podcast right now. I don't think there's any possible way that any human alive today or who's ever existed in human history could possibly live up to that.”

    2018-12-20 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT