The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 12 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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 …”
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.”
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.”
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…”