Patrick Collison
person on 34 shows · 111 statements across 58 episodes · said 525 times in 243 episodes since 2016
20VC 132 
Lenny's Podcast 58 
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 34 
How I Built This 30 
TBPN 27 
In Depth 22 
the a16z Podcast 20 
My First Million 19 
the Knowledge Project 17 
Founder's Journal 16 
Cheeky Pint 15 
Startups For the Rest of Us 13 
All-In 13 
Top Founders 11 
the Neon Show 10 
Founders 9 
American Optimist 8 
David Senra 8 
Sourcery 8 
Capital Allocators 8 
No Priors 7 
the MAD Podcast 7 
A Product Market Fit Show 6 
Latent Space 5 
BG2 Pod 4 
the Official SaaStr Podcast 4 
the Startup Ideas Podcast 4 
Mixergy 2 
Another Podcast 2 
BigDeal 2 
Invest Like the Best 2 
WTF is with Nikhil Kamath 1 
Catalyst 1 
Masters of Scale
On the record as a speaker too: Patrick Collison across every show, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year, every show
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 132Lenny's Podcast 58the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 34How I Built This 30TBPN 27In Depth 22the a16z Podcast 20My First Million 1925 more shows
2026 82 mentions in 46 episodes 2 per episode
- How Stripe Built Their New Website · Y Combinator
- Michael Ovitz: The Psychology of Power
- Alex Rampell: The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers & Labour | The Future of Venture · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Tall Poppy Syndrome, Bytedance Gets Blackwell Chips, WSJ Mansion Section | Diet TBPN
- He raised $75M—but kept his team to 21 people & pays everyone the same salary. | Cos Nicolaescu, ... · PMF Show
- Ai Goes Parabolic | OpenAI Co-Founder Greg Brockman
- AI Researcher Uses GPT to Save His Dog From Cancer
- Building a Power Company for the Next 50 Years | Zach Dell, Base Power
- 38 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 140 mentions in 62 episodes 2 per episode
- Airwallex CEO & Co-Founder, Jack Zhang: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- General Catalyst CEO, Hemant Taneja: Lessons Scaling GC to $40BN in AUM · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- What makes (or breaks) executive hires | A deep dive with Eeke de Milliano (Stripe)
- Michael Ovitz – Reinventing Talent and Building Momentum at Treville (EP.455)
- Why Stripe Paid $150M For A Young Indian Startup | Saurya Prakash Sinha, Recko
- CAA Co-founder Michael Ovitz: Failure Is Not an Option
- Focus, fresh eyes, and pet psychics
- Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield
- 54 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 88 mentions in 49 episodes 2 per episode
- Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead)
- How To Go Beast Mode As A Founder
- Bastian Lehmann: How the Uber Deal Went Down and How a $2.65BN Deal Turned into $5BN | E1137 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Keith Rabois on Rejoining Khosla Ventures | E1102 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Secrets Of Investing Early – Lessons From A Billion-Dollar Investor · Joe Lonsdale
- No Priors Ep 66 | With Y Combinator President and CEO Garry Tan
- Tom Blomfield: Do the Best All Raise Pre-Demo Day & YC's Fundraising Advice to Startups | E 1152 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- DOGE kills its first bill, Zuck vs OpenAI, Google's AI comeback
- 41 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 64 mentions in 21 episodes 3 per episode
- Lessons from scaling Stripe | Claire Hughes Johnson (ex-COO of Stripe)
- Episode 659 | Indie Hackers' Newfound Independence + The SaaS Pla...
- Paul Graham's Essays Part II
- Lessons from Stripe on adding new products | Tara Seshan (Watershed, Stripe)
- Secure, Private, Powerful: Dust’s Vision for Enterprise AI Agents | Stanislas Polu
- How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe)
- 5 Internet Goldmines To Spot The Next $1B Trend | Steph Smith (#529)
- Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)
- 13 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 36 mentions in 17 episodes 2 per episode
- The art of product management | Shreyas Doshi (Stripe, Twitter, Google, Yahoo)
- The nature of product | Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group
- Shreyas Doshi: The 6 Product Metrics You Need To Know; The 3 Types of Product Leader | E913 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- How FTX Scaled A $30 Billion Company With Only 30 Engineers!
- Reviving a Culture of Innovation with Tyler Cowen · Joe Lonsdale
- The Network State with Balaji Srinivasan
- How to Build a Board of Advisors | Darryl Hicks, Founder of Flexpay · PMF Show
- E75: Fast shuts down, board culpability, Elon buys 9% of Twitter, deplatforming's evolution & more
- 9 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2021 14 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- 6 Years, 6 Lessons
- E30: Ramifications of Biden's proposed capital gains tax hike, founder psychology & more
- Norby Is SMS and Email all in One, Raises $4m at $20m Valuation
- 'Digital transformation' - beyond the silly slogan
- How to launch a $100M DTC brand | My First Million #194
- Shopify and digital transformation
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 25 mentions in 16 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Sahil Lavingia on Rolling Funds and Their Impact on The Future of Venture, How To Evaluate Market, Team and Product, The Value of Party Rounds & The Pros and Cons of Multi-Stage Funds Investing at Seed
- Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC
- 20VC: Reid Hoffman on Investing in Airbnb and Passing on Stripe, The Different Styles of Truly Great Leaders, How To Think Through Ownership and Price in Venture & How To Ensure Venture Partnerships Always Have Trust and a Learning Mindset
- 20VC: Sequoia's Ravi Gupta on His Lessons From The Hyper-Growth of Instacart, The Key Question To Ask When Building or Evaluating Teams & The Importance of Investing In and Detecting Slopes Rather Than Intercepts
- 20VC: Vinod Khosla on What Venture Assistance Really Means, Why Many VCs Are Not Qualified To Advise Founders & Why Startups Can Innovate So Much Faster Than Incumbents
- 20VC: Retool Founder, David Hsu on Why YC Is Helpful Pre Product-Market Fit but Not Post and Why VCs Are Not Helpful Pre-Product Market-Fit but are Post, Why it is Difficult to Become Unprofitable if You Set Yourself Up For Profitability Early & Why VC Th
- Episode 526 | Launching, Learning, and Teaching with Justin Vincent
- 20VC: Sequoia's Roelof Botha on His Biggest Lessons Working Alongside Don Valentine, Mike Moritz and Doug Leone, Leading Sequoia's US Business and What Sequoia Do To Retain Their Edge at the Top & The Crucible Moments That Define Startup Success
- 8 more episodes that year, every mention in 2020 →
2019 10 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments
- 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living
- 20VC: Clearbit Founder Alex MacCaw on How To Successfully Negotiate with Investors, What Value-Add Do VCs Really Bring & Why You Should Only Have Operators on Your Board
- 20VC: Why Passion Is Overrated When It Comes To Starting Companies, Why VC Is Overrated As A Financing Mechanism & Why You Should Never Sell Your Company with Waseem Daher, Founder & CEO @ Pilot
- 20VC: Y Combinator's New President, Geoff Ralston on The Single Most Important Perspective An Investor Can Provide A Founder, The Biggest Lessons From Working Alongside Paul Graham & Why You Will Lose As An Investor If You "Profile Invest"
- A CS Education That's Free Until You Get a Job - Austen Allred of Lambda School · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 48 mentions in 13 episodes 4 per episode
- Stripe: Patrick and John Collison
- 943 Bootstrapped and Rich, $14m 2017 From Helping Suppliers Accurately Print
- After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin · Y Combinator
- Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front · Y Combinator
- 20VC: Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook on The Commonalities of The Truly Great CEOs, How To Hire The Very Best Execs, Why Cash is A Defensible Moat Today & The Pros and Cons of M&A and IPOs
- 20VC: Investing Lessons From Observing Doug Leone and Bill Gurley, Why It Is Easier To Be Contrarian As A VC Than As An Angel & What It Takes To Run Tinder's Product and Revenue Alongside A Seed Fund with Jeff Morris Jr, Founder @ Chapter One
- The Path to $100B by Paul Buchheit · Y Combinator
- SaaS Metrics Masterclass: Pricing Strategies and Billing Models with Stripe
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 9 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- The Future of Money: Banking on Fintech
- Your Whole Goal Is to Not Quit - Courtland Allen of Indie Hackers · Y Combinator
- 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige
- 739: How Has She Has 3x'd Revenue to $700k MRR in Just 11 Months?
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 9 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- Jessica Livingston : How to Build the Future · Y Combinator
- EP 439: $9m Raised, GoShippo Helps Little Guy Drop Ship 1,000,000+ Packages Per Month Already with CEO Laura Behrens Wu
- EP 413: SaaS, $242k MRR, $13 Million Raised to Re-Invent Business Email with Mathilde Collin of FrontApp
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
The latest 60 statements about Patrick Collison, every show
Nariyawala: Collisons, Friedman, Gross Took Matic's Entire $23.5M 2021 Round
“John and Patrick Collison, and then Ned Friedman and Daniel Gross, they were just really interested in investing, so they just came in and took the whole round... 2021 was 23 and a half million dollars.”
Dill: Stripe design team only presents endorsed options to Patrick Collison
“Usually, well, for something like this, Patrick was definitely a part of the decision-making process, and so usually, you know, with the team, we will look at quite a large range, then we will down select to, you know, a subset of those, and say, like, okay, t…”
Gil: Patrick Collison's Arc Institute is first major biology institute in decades
“Like Patrick from Stripe started ARC, a biology institute, like one of the first new major biology institutions in decades that's doing really interesting things, right?”
Grosser: Great founder brand marketing alone cannot build a predictable revenue engine
“A lot of founders, Guillermo's a good example, John and Patrick were examples of this well, are like excellent brand marketers, but that does not a predictable revenue engine make on its own.”
Ovitz: Stripe's Collison brothers are among the smartest executives in tech
“And I think the Collinson brothers are two of the smartest guys in the business.”
Patrick Collison spent 2.5 hours interrogating Ovitz's career mistakes
“Patrick sits down. He said, are you ready? I said, yeah, I'm starving. He goes, no, no, no, no. See your book? I said, yeah. He says, I have a lot of questions. I said, oh, sure, anything. He said, no. I want to know. I've marked every place you made a mistake…”
Collison: India's largest generic manufacturer paid a $500M fraud fine
“The largest generic manufacturer in India, I forget its name paid a half a billion dollar fine in 2013. Yeah, for rampant fraud and falsification and abuse of the biosimilarity analyses and so forth”
John Collison admits Stripe was much more Patrick's idea than his own
“Stripe was much more his idea than mine.”
Collison told Taneja in 2010 that Stripe's ideal customers weren't born yet
“Cause I asked him who are your ideal customers? And he said, they haven't been born yet. And he was talking about the developer movement. Remember this is 2010, right?”
Agrawal: Patrick Collison advised that a startup's first API design is always wrong
“One of the pieces of advice I got as I was starting this company, I spoke with Patrick Collins at Stripe. On building an API business, he said, like, your first API design will be wrong. Just know that.”
Chas Englander: Patrick Collison resolved Fancy's Stripe ban within an hour
“On the payments one, we emailed Patrick directly and he responded. Like, within an hour, he sorted us out.”
Stripe founders asked Robinhood not to tokenize their shares, says Tenev
“I've shared this viewpoint with Patrick and John, and they give me some variant of, oh, well, we're just a small Irish family company. Please don't tokenize my shares.”
Ovitz: Stripe's Collison brothers are two of the smartest founders he has met
“He and his brother, John, are two of the smartest guys I've ever met, and a lot smarter than me.”
Vercel's Guillermo Rauch and Stripe's Patrick Collison backed Browserbase
“Guillermo from Vercel has also been a very inspirational person for us, and we're lucky to have them both as a customer and an investor. Patrick Callison from Stripe, another angel investor that we're really happy to have on board.”
Patrick Collison told Jack Zhang he will build Stripe for 20-40 years
“Patrick just like said to me that he's going to build Stripe for the next 2030, 40 years.”
Patrick and John Collison were Stripe's first true marketers
“John and Patrick were the first marketers at Stripe because they were developers themselves. They truly understood the developer community. And when that audience for Stripe was squarely developers to begin with, they knew exactly how to authentically reach th…”
Mah: Paul Graham said I'd rival Patrick Collison and Sam Altman
“Paul Graham, even he was my mentor and he's like, you're going to be one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time. You, Patrick Halston and Sam Altman.”
Mlejnsky: Patrick Collison Said Stripe Did the 'Collison Installation' Only Three Times
“I asked about, like, three years ago when I had a chance to ask a question from Patrick Collison, like, how many times you did the Collison installation? And he was like, three times, but then after that you probably don't want to do that because you want to a…”
Reeves: Gusto's early angels included Systrom, Stoppelman, Shah, and Collison
“Kevin is a friend from college, and Instagram, I mean, he's an investor in Augusto, so, you know, it was fun to talk to him about some of the scaling stuff, but actually, I think, ah, you know this more than anyone, like, tech is pretty broad, so even back the…”
Patrick Collison: Stablecoins will probably become the common payment rail
“I think stablecoins are going to be a big part of a big part of the solution. I actually don't think that's going to supplant all the consumer-facing networks. I think we're going to see consumer-facing networks It's built upon and that, you know, substantiall…”
Patrick Collison: Stripe fraud metrics dropped 80% over past two years
“Various fraud metrics across the industry and the ecosystem are way up over the last couple of years. And Stripe's actually down by 80%”
Patrick Collison: 79% of surveyed top scientists would alter research without NIH grants
“We ran a survey of scientists back a couple of years ago of top scientists, and four out of five, like, 79% of them told us That if they could just spend money however they wanted, if they weren't kind of limited by, you know, what they're prescribed by these …”
Patrick Collison: Arc Institute spends around $100 million annually
“So ARK spends around, ah, a hundred million a year. And it started about, ah, three years ago.”
Patrick Collison: Powerful biological AI models will require phenotypic data
“There's a certain amount you can probably derive sort of, you know, from first principles just by looking at genomes, but I think the really powerful models are going to need to do exactly what you say, and to feed in a lot of ancillary, phenotypic, and just k…”
John Collison: Patrick and I will still be running Stripe in 10 to 20 years
“This is our life's work. You know, we're not going anywhere. We'll be very happily running Stripe in 10 years' time, in 20 years' time.”
Crivello: Moonshots require greedy search execution rather than rigid planning
“As long as you have some inductive bias about like some loose idea about where you want to go, I think it makes sense to follow a sort of greedy search along that path.”
Gil: Fewer young breakout startup founders exist today compared to a decade ago
“Generationally, you go back 10 years, and it was Patrick, and it was Zuck, and it was Dylan from Figma, and you can kind of come up with a list. Today, there's many fewer, and I'm starting to see some of them in AI emerge again, right?”
Stripe's founders would prioritize design even if it lacked business sense
“You know, design certainly does make, you know, business sense, but even if it didn't, they would still do it, and I think that, that, that's that x factor. That's the thing that's gonna make, you know, hard decisions along the way possible. And certainly wort…”
Justin Kan Started Atrium for Founder Status Rather Than Legal Passion
“The problem was Justin Kahn wasn't passionate about the legal field. He was starting Atrium largely because he wanted to be a higher status founder, and I really appreciate the fact that he's open about that, so he wanted to be in the pantheon with Patrick Col…”
Rachitsky: Customer research should update mental models, not dictate features
“Instead of doing user research, talking to customers, informing what to build, it's talking to user, talking to customers, informs your mental model of what the customer needs. And then that informs what to build.”
Clifford: EF raised $160M evergreen permanent capital fund in 2021
“In 2021, we raised one hundred and sixty million dollars onto our balance sheet to become like an evergreen permanent capital vehicle. And we raised that from a mix of You know, very well-known entrepreneurs, people like Reid Hoffman, but also John and Patrick…”
Rachitsky: Patrick Collison credited '7 Powers' with helping build Stripe
“Patrick Collison being quoted in that book, not only was he just like wrote part of the foreword or was a quote, he basically credited Seven Powers with helping build Stripe.”
Puri: Stripe founders manually onboarded their first 100 to 200 customers
“As soon as somebody showed any sign of interest, they would say, awesome. Do you have your laptop on you? I can just set you up right now. I'll do it for you. And they would literally brute force get customers on board. The person would open up their laptop an…”
Caldwell: Patrick Collison personally checked in weekly with early Stripe customers
“I was an early Stripe customer at my startup and yeah, Patrick would like we used Google talk at the time. Patrick would be sending me messages like on a weekly basis, just like checking in. And so again, it's funny how successful these folks get, but yeah, Pa…”
Scriven: Wife Faith was among Stripe's first three employees
“My wife Faith she's a pretty low key person, but she was actually it's a debate whether she was the first or second or maybe, maybe third, we'll see, but employee of Stripe, you know, and she was, you know there with John and Patrick in their apartment, you kn…”
Stripe CEO Patrick Collison met global experts to calibrate executive hiring
“Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, made it a point to meet with, quote unquote, the best in the world in each field so he could get a sense of what a great candidate looks like.”
Andreessen: Patrick Collison funded an independent biotech research institute
“Patrick Collison has a biggest, you know, and his wife have a big new biotech research institute at Stanford along those lines, or associated with Stanford, but it's a separate thing that they're funding.”
Yanowitz: Startups never get easier because founders constantly optimize for max pain
“This idea that it gets easier as you grow, right? That's I think anyone startups are like this weird or being a founder is this weird thing where like, I think what they, you kind of hold constant, the rate at which you can tolerate problems and Everything els…”
Doshi: Stripe co-founders regularly conducted user research with frontline staff
“Patrick and John, until a very, very long time, as the company was scaling, and to a point where you wouldn't expect the founder to do so they were talking to customers. They were talking to users, and not only that, in many cases, they would kind of, you know…”
Patrick Collison required new Stripe products to plausibly add $10B in enterprise value
“When Stripe got larger and larger, the question became not only why now, but like, what's the opportunity on the table for this idea? Like, this has to be an idea where we could eventually work it out to Patrick's, you know, sort of bar was, is this gonna add,…”
Cortland Allen: Patrick Collison checked in annually on Indie Hackers founders' happiness
“A large part of it is like, Hey, how do you, are you guys happy? You know, are you doing what you want to do? You still have the same fire. You still have the same drive. He's asked me that question every single year that we've been at Stripe.”
Hughes Johnson: Stripe adopted its mission after candidates and customers repeated website copy
“So one is, I think it's good to have a mission. When I joined Stripe, we did not. It came to be apparent that to increase the GDP of the internet was probably the mission, but Because people kept repeating that back to us. And Patrick had written it on some we…”
Hughes Johnson: A great COO dynamic requires healthy friction with the CEO
“Fantastic COO is just the right amount of friction and tension with forward momentum and mutual trust, because then the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, right?”
Lavingia: Most builders are not risk-seeking at all
“Most builders are not risk seeking at all. Right? So when you look at founders, like the founder personality type, you have to overlay so many things that are like in the minority to get someone like a Patrick Collison or a Dylan field or a Mark Zuckerberg or …”
Collison: Making twice as many decisions at half precision is often better
“If you can make, like, if you can make twice as many decisions at half the, kind of half the precision, that's actually often better. And then given the fact that sort of the rate of improvement of decision making with additional time almost necessarily tends …”
Collison: Escalated CEO decisions usually signal an underlying organizational breakdown
“There are some decisions where if I'm making it or if I have to make it, that probably suggests that something else organizationally or institutionally has broken. And I think the need for a decision from anyone, not just from me, is often like only a sort of …”
Collison: Persistent organizational friction comes from latent disagreement over goals
“I think the more troubling ones and the ones that tend to cause more kind of persistent friction in an organization are where sort of there is latent disagreement in what you're actually optimizing for but that's kind of never explicitly surfaced and uncovered…”
Collison: Discrete organizational decision-making is overrated compared to continuous systems
“I'm inclined to say, I don't know if I actually believe this, but I'm inclined to say in response to that question that decision making in organizations is slightly overrated in that organizations are not like investment entities or funds or managers in that o…”
Doshi: Company culture is set through modeled behavior, not stated values
“Overall, from both, I sort of learned the importance of setting the culture you want simply by consistently being an example of the behaviors you want to replicate in the organization. So instead of kind of talking about values, I saw both of them just kind of…”
Doshi: Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison fits the visionary craftsperson product archetype
“My assessment would be that Patrick is very much a visionary craftsperson type person, so, you know, every time I've interacted with him, and I learned a lot from, you know, about product from interacting with him. That's been the conversation is, is the visio…”
Collison: Early Stripe paged founders if chat went unanswered over 30 seconds
“And so we wrote a bot that would just page one of us. If somebody asked a question, they didn't get a response after more than 30 seconds or something, and someone would kind of groggily, bleary-eyed wake up and, like, help them out and then go back to sleep.”
Caldwell says founders prioritize financial engineering and treat product as an afterthought
“Too many founders treat product as an afterthought. They're basically trying to do financial engineering, and the product is like delegated.”
Friedberg predicts Stripe will become the most valuable private company
“That's gonna be the most valuable, valuable company. That's private right now.”
TechZing interviewed Travis Kalanick and Patrick Collison before they built unicorns
“We have a good track record of interviewing people who then go on to build unicorns. So you know Travis Kalanak, and also Patrick Oleson.”
Reid Hoffman ranks Stripe's Collison brothers alongside Airbnb's Brian Chesky
“Now, they're spectacular. They're literally, like, they are in the set, you know, along with, you know, the entrepreneurs that, you know, I've invested in, you know, the Brian Cheskis and the Chris Hermsons, the entrepreneurs that I learned from, they are magn…”
Allred: The Bay Area Is History's Greatest Squandering of Potential Wealth
“I think Patrick Collison has said something about the idea that in 50 years we'll probably look back at the Bay Area as one of the greatest squanderings of potential wealth that the world has ever known, and I tend to agree.”
Gupta: Sequoia backed Stripe founders before they wrote any code
“At the time, Patrick and John at Stripe, when all they had was an idea and not a single line of code, because they were remarkable and they were daring.”
Patrick Collison's serious projects have always been tools creating leverage
“I mean, from a very early stage, I was interested in sort of working on tools or just kind of building things that created leverage for others, and that basically the whole point of working on this programming language was to provide a tool that would make it …”
Patrick Collison: Significant work is very commonly done in one's twenties
“By the time people become famous because the thing they worked on succeeded, they tend to be older. But that means the mental image we have of people who do successful things is like 10 to 20 years, maybe even more, older than the ages at which they tend to ha…”