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.
Collison: Scaling a business is straightforward yet extremely hard
“Scaling a business is both relatively straightforward and extremely hard. I mean, it's relatively straightforward in the sense that it's usually not that difficult to see what the problems are.”
Collison: Stripe invests roughly 70-80% on core optimization and 20% on speculative bets
“Roughly speaking, we invest most of our effort, we don't have a precise number on it, but let's just say 70 or 80% in optimizing that which we already have, that which we already know is producing, which Turns that which there's a sort of roughly clear line of…”
Collison: Differing organizational time horizons cause a fundamental collaboration mismatch
“If an organization with a really long time horizon is working with one that's sort of rapidly updating and sort of rethinking there's just like a fundamental kind of impedance mismatch.”
Collison: Sociological Mindsets Impede Big Bets More Than Downside Costs
“It feels to me that actually the reasons that organizations don't take, don't tend to make more of these or make more good ones is It's more kind of sociological, more institutional, and less that it's fundamentally too costly, because in most cases, the downs…”
Collison: Rigorous thinking requires enjoying finding where one's beliefs fail
“I think that sort of getting that kind of rigor and clarity of thought requires sort of a joy of discovery at like, ah, this thing I believe, this rule that I thought existed, like it's actually not good in this place. And having that be an enjoyable discovery…”
Collison: Organizations should optimize feedback loops over binary decisions
“I think the things to optimize are the incentive structures and the,
Mindsets, and the definitions of the goals, and the feedback mechanisms from the outcomes to the inputs, and the work, and the operations themselves, and all of those things, and less the bin…”
Collison: Koch Industries scaled from $20M to $100B without a single breakthrough driver
“Coke Industries in that, you know, Charles is, of course, or Charles and David are most famous for their political activities, but if you just look at the company that has kind of compounded from twenty million in annual revenue to now, according to public est…”
Collison: Life is too short to read un-enjoyable books
“There's a set of great books that are really worth reading, right? And there's a subset of those books that that are really enjoyable to read. Maybe it's like 10 or 20% of them, say. And the subset, the intersection of really worth reading and really enjoyable…”
Collison: Always discard your current book for a better one
“At every moment you should be reading the best book you know of in the world. I mean, I don't mean kind of the absolute best for everyone, but sort of The best book for you. But like as soon as you discover something that that seems more interesting or more im…”
Collison: Most Causally Influential Books Are Often Not the Best Ones
“What I've often found is I think the books that perhaps did in fact influence me the most in a causal sense are often not necessarily that good, right? And that maybe I'll read a book that sort of triggers a realization or some idea or something, and that, tha…”
Collison: Over 90% of Brazilian Credit Cards Fail Outside Brazil
“We have had commerce in the internet for decades at this point, but it's still like, 90 plus percent of Brazilian credit cards do not work online outside of Brazil.”
Collison: San Francisco has one-third the density of Greenwich Village
“San Francisco of today, recognizing that it is of approximately a third of the density of even just Greenwich Village in New York, right? We're not you know, the sort of, the other extreme is not Hong Kong. You can triple San Francisco and get to Greenwich.”
Collison: Median clinical trial enrollment costs $40,000 per patient
“The median clinical trial enrollee, it now costs 40,000 dollars.”
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”
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.”
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.”
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: Early investors rejected Stripe's business model, not its team
“Most investors said no, but the reason was much more, or reasons were much more because they just thought it was a bad idea rather than the kind of bad people to execute it.”
Patrick Collison: Developers consistently integrated Stripe in an afternoon and launched next day
“We had lots of stories of people integrating payments in an afternoon or an evening, and then launching their business the next day. And that just worked consistently. That was a big break from what had prevailed before.”
Collison: Stripe Co-Developed Payout Tech to Help Lyft Pay Drivers
“So in Lyft's case, for example, they wanted to not just charge their customers, but they wanted to pay their drivers and there was no product that enabled a really good driver payment experience, and so we've kind of co-evolved with them to enable the best End…”
Patrick Collison: Stripe Had Around 100 Users Before Publicly Launching
“We got our first user, like first production user, just kind of three months in, ah, and then kind of every month we tried to add at least kind of a handful of users, ah, and so by the time we publicly launched, ah, we did have, You know, about a hundred users…”
Collison: Stripe rebuilt its dashboard three times and API multiple times before public launch
“When we launched publicly in September of 2011 you know, we kind of rebuilt significant components of Stripe kind of multiple times in response to user feedback, like we're kind of on the third version of our dashboard, and the second or third account major ve…”
Collison: Stripe handled 22 payments in an hour on launch day
“On the day we launched, we handled sort of, 22 payments in the previous hour, which again sort of seemed huge to us back then.”
Collison: Hiring Billy Alvarado for banking partnerships changed Stripe's trajectory
“We hired Billy and that was sort of an immediately trajectory changing event where, you know, previously when we'd gone and talked to a bank, I mean, I don't know if they were literally doing this, but it certainly felt They were kind of pushing the security b…”
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 → |