Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison explains the gap in online payment infrastructure that Stripe was created to solve.
Insight
Patrick Collison: Tech hubris fails; financial infrastructure requires traditional banking partnerships
“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 …”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Open · timeframe Mar 2020
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.”
Opinion
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.”