Patrick Collison
Co-founder & CEO, Stripe. On 7 shows, 10 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@patrickc ↗patrickcollison.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
Patrick Collison co-founded Stripe with his brother John Collison in 2010, developing it into one of the world’s leading digital payments and financial infrastructure platforms. He also co-founded the Arc Institute and previously sold his first startup, Auctomatic, in 2008.
7shows
10appearances
108statements
22resolved
13supported
2contradicted
59%fully supported
147said about them ↓ Everything Patrick Collison said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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…”
Peter Thiel invested $200,000 in Stripe on the spot
“But Peter being such a, sort of, you know, an inveterate contrarian was quite sympathetic to this case, and decided on the spot to make, you know, a fairly material investment of 200,000 dollars.”
Patrick Collison: Google had every advantage over Facebook and still lost
“Google should have beaten Facebook. Google had every advantage against Facebook. They had you know, more people, more money, more distribution, more brand recognition, more of kind of any of the obvious inputs, and yet somehow there was something missing.”
Patrick Collison: Scaling a startup never gets easier, challenges just change form
“And it kind of feels like that in the startup, where every day now, the problems and challenges are, and, you know, visceral pain is just as acute as when we were starting out. The problem is just of a different form.”
Collison: Advertising will remain a small fraction of the overall economy
“I think advertising will remain not only a large, but even sort of an increasingly large industry. But in the scheme of things, it'll be a small fraction of the economy.”
Collison: Lyft drivers use Stripe Express Pay for instant debit payouts
“We worked with Lyft back a couple months ago to roll at Express Pay, where rather than just kind of sending money to their drivers via bank transfer, they can send it instantaneously to their drivers kind of directly over debit card rails, and now almost half …”
Collison: Single physical retail stores will look anachronistic in 50 years
“And just how anachronistic is the whole notion of a single store going to look in, in 50 years? Maybe you go, maybe it already knows what you're going to Order. Maybe you have already ordered.”
Collison: Reputation systems turn local services into online marketplace problems
“The problem of pest control is, is, is being turned into a marketplace problem or the problem of childcare. All these things that kind of, when you zoom out involve a significant coordination problem or sort of information asymmetry where reputation systems ca…”
Collison: China's Great Leap Forward ended via coordination changes, not tech
“Part of what ended the Great Leap Forward in China, you know, it wasn't sort of a technological innovation. It was a change in the coordination model where people got to farm their own plots.”
Patrick Collison: Waiting Two Years to Launch Is Not a Good Idea
“It was, I think one year and 11 months from sort of first line of code to public launch. Which to be clear, I don't recommend, ah, that is not a good idea, ah, it's just we had to, because we had to kind of get all these other things in place”
Collison: Stripe founders never showed up unannounced for early API installs
“I don't think we ever actually just showed up. Although, you know, perhaps we should have, but no, we tried to be kind of at least semi invited.”
Collison: Stripe Dispute Resolution Is Based on Who Cares More, Not Titles
“Sort of our kind of dispute resolution framework is kind of much more around which of us cares more than kind of which of us holds this title or that.”
Collison: Most Successful Co-Founding Teams Disagree With Dispassion
“I think that you know, something that we're kind of lucky about that I think is very, well, exactly to your point, I think he's definitely present in sort of the most successful co-founding relationships that I've seen is some degree of sort of dispassion in d…”
Collison: Fulfillment is a better optimization metric for founders than happiness
“And so I think, and you know, language is squishy and it's not, you know, completely specifically defined, but I think kind of generally speaking, kind of a better utility function and kind of gradient to try to climb is that of fulfillment.”
YC's Geoff Ralston offered to personally cover Stripe's first business hire
“And so, Jeff told us that we should hire Billy, and if it didn't work, Or for the first few months or whatever, that if it didn't work out, Jeff would sort of go back and pay his salary, so it was kind of a zero risk move for us.”
Collison: Repeat founders build organizations ahead of current demand post-PMF
“You see that kind of when repeat founders go and start companies, they almost invariably are willing to kind of build the organization You know, post product market fit, though it's invariably willing to kind of build the organization ahead of where things are…”
Collison: B2B software is far more predictable to build than consumer software
“I still remember, kind of, sitting in our front room telling us how much better it was to be building B to B software than consumer software for this reason, ah, where, sort of, consumer software, it's so hard to predict, sort of, What people want. They don't …”
Collison: Certainty on complex questions signals a lack of intellectual honesty
“It's oddly hard to fake being intellectually honest and sort of the characteristic of kind of being able to see multiple sides of a debate or an argument. Like, there are so many kind of complicated questions where sort of the only thing that I'm really skepti…”
Collison: Stripe was too consensus-oriented between 5 and 50 employees
“Between say, five and 50 people. I think we are much too consensus-oriented. We, of course, weren't completely consensus-oriented. I mean, we couldn't have gotten anything done if we were, but I think we kind of biased too much in that direction. And again, I …”
Collison: Requiring ideas be 'probably bad' overcomes organizational self-censorship
“And so, people, like, really self-censor a lot in most organizations because they don't want to look stupid, and they don't want to be sort of associated with just having all these, like, wacky, bad ideas and so on, and so we try to be fairly firm that if you …”
Collison in 2018: Over 80% of US adults bought from Stripe merchants
“So in the last 12 months more than 80% of American adults have bought something from a Stripe business. At least one thing from a Stripe business. Which is cool, and you know, it's not just the case in the US, like in Singapore, where it was last week, you kno…”
Collison: China's Special Economic Zones Were Inspired by Western Ireland
“One of the world's first special economic zones was created in Shannon, which was very close to, you know, maybe 10, 15 miles from where I was born. Deng Xiaoping visited it and found this quite inspiring, and so decided to set up special economic zones in Chi…”
Collison: A startup's default outcome is non-existence and survival is unnatural
“Especially for a startup, like the default outcome is your relatively near term non-existence. Like the default outcome is that you do not survive to survive over the medium or, you know, even with even more difficulty over the long term. That is, that's like …”
Collison: OCC stopped issuing new banking charters post-financial crisis
“And the second reason is, ah, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is the entity that, ah, sort of issues federal banking charters, ah, had, had basically stopped issuing new banking charters post-financial crisis.”
The other half of the tape: Patrick Collison's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 129 times in 50 episodes across the shows. 18 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Guy Raz 28Shane Parrish 8Katie Dill 8John Collison 8Alex Rampell 8Michael Ovitz 7Sam Altman 6Chamath Palihapitiya 6
Statements about Patrick Collison, by other people (18)
Friedberg predicts Stripe will become the most valuable private company
“That's gonna be the most valuable, valuable company. That's private right now.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
John Collison admits Stripe was much more Patrick's idea than his own
“Stripe was much more his idea than mine.”
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…”
Early startup hires replicate themselves and should meet the co-founder bar
“When you hire your first employees, you should think about every person that you bring with a bar that's as high as, could this person be my co-founder?... When you hire someone, you should wonder whether you want 10 persons like this in your company. Because …”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
Buchheit: Patrick Collison personally integrated Stripe code for early customers
“So, like, that was how, like, the very early Stripe installs, Patrick Collison would show up and integrate Stripe into your code.
Right?
He would just show up and do the work.”
Collison: Selling Auctomatic early spared him the standard career treadmill
“Had we been, or had I been kind of on just the treadmill of, you know, you go to college, and you get your degree, and then it's your first job, and so on, such that, you know, I can certainly imagine sort of a different version of, you know, my life or my car…”
Livingston: YC Met Patrick Collison at 16 Over Dinner Before Stripe
“Well, I have to admit, we met Patrick years earlier, when he was 16 or 17, still living in Ireland, because he looked up Paul, and we had him over for dinner. So, it wasn't like we first met them At a YC interview.”
Collison brothers convinced banking executives to partner when they were teenagers
“The head of a bank is going to take a nineteen-year-old startup founder seriously? It seems pretty implausible, right? But they were good enough that they were able to convince these banks to work with them.”
Raz: Patrick and John Collison were 23 and 21 when Stripe launched
“When Stripe launched seven years ago, Patrick and John Collison were just 23 and 21 years old.”
John Collison: Patrick Collison hacked his first website to teach security
“After I'd built it, Patrick taught me a lesson in in security. You know, I was probably 14 at the time, and I cobbled together this website, and there were vulnerabilities and issues and stuff that Patrick then hacked the site just to teach me a lesson on that…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 34
How I Built This 30
the a16z Podcast 20
the Knowledge Project 17
Cheeky Pint 15
All-In 13
2026 29 mentions in 14 episodes 2 per episode
- How Stripe Built Their New Website · Y Combinator
- Michael Ovitz: The Psychology of Power
- Ai Goes Parabolic | OpenAI Co-Founder Greg Brockman
- Bret Taylor of Sierra on AI agents, outcome-based pricing, and the OpenAI board
- Why Top Founders Are Racing Into AI Infrastructure
- How AI Changes the Economics of Innovation
- Garry Tan: New Rules for Founders
- Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity” · Y Combinator
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 26 mentions in 14 episodes 2 per episode
- Casey Handmer of Terraform Industries on solar maximalism, hard tech, and reclaiming the Salton Sea
- Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World
- The Finance Startup Bringing Agentic AI to Wall Street · Y Combinator
- A Cheeky Pint with serial entrepreneur Pieter Levels (@levelsio)
- Stablecoin special: Zach Abrams (Bridge) and Henri Stern (Privy)
- Software Finally Eats Services - Aaron Levie
- Tobi Lütke is still captivated by internet commerce, 20 years later
- The FDE Playbook for AI Startups with Bob McGrew · Y Combinator
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 6 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- DOGE kills its first bill, Zuck vs OpenAI, Google's AI comeback
- Why Design Matters: Lessons from Stripe, Lyft and Airbnb · Y Combinator
- Bryan Johnson: Five Habits for Longer Living
- Fixing Higher Education & New Startup Opportunities
- Crisis in Higher Ed & Why Universities Still Matter
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2022 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- The Network State with Balaji Srinivasan
- E75: Fast shuts down, board culpability, Elon buys 9% of Twitter, deplatforming's evolution & more
- Why Investors Can’t Fix Your Company – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel · Y Combinator
- E65: VC markup dynamics, Russia/US tensions over Ukraine, Altos Labs raises $3B, Stripe mafia & more
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 4 mentions in 1 episode
2019 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2018 36 mentions in 5 episodes 7 per episode
- Stripe: Patrick and John Collison
- After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin · Y Combinator
- Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front · Y Combinator
- The Path to $100B by Paul Buchheit · Y Combinator
- Fermat's Library Cofounders João Batalha and Luís Batalha · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
2016 7 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Patrick's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Stripe | 2 | 42 | 78% 7/9 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
| Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Stripe | 1 | 27 | — | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |
| ALL-INLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Stripe | 1 | 14 | 33% 3/9 | full record on All-In → |
| HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Stripe | 1 | 12 | 100% 1/1 | full record on How I Built This → |
| a16zLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Stripe | 1 | 6 | 0% 0/1 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| CHEEKY PINTLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Stripe | 3 | 6 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Cheeky Pint → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Stripe | 1 | 1 | — | full record on Masters of Scale → |