Patrick Collison: Tech hubris fails; financial infrastructure requires traditional banking partnerships
Patrick Collison · Stripe: Patrick and John Collison (2018) · Mar 9, 2020 · at 27:45
Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison discusses the company's strategy of collaborating with established financial institutions rather than attempting to circumvent them.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Technology companies, I think, often have a sort of go it alone mentality. We'll build it all in-house. We'll do it all ourselves. We can do things better than ever in the outside world. Whereas we thought that Stripe would only be possible, and it would only be possible to do it well. If we partnered closely with people who had deep expertise and experience in industries that we ourselves were less familiar with.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Patrick Collison
Patrick Collison: Money cannot be mechanically turned into great software products
“And this is one of the great facts about our industry is that you cannot turn Money into great products as a kind of mechanical operation. If it were possible, there would be many more great iPhone competitors. Facebook would have been long since eclipsed by M…”
Patrick Collison: Tech startups avoid hard problems spanning multiple domains
“Technology companies, startups tended, and still tend, I mean, for understandable reasons, to kind of shy away from things, from problems that sort of, ah, where you have to solve a lot of hard problems in multiple domains.”
Patrick Collison: PayPal was designed for consumers, not internet businesses
“So the basic issue with PayPal was that it's designed for consumers, not for businesses. And so if you're building an app, if you're building, you know, a website, if you're building a new marketplace, something like this, PayPal works okay for sending, you kn…”
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.”