Insight
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.”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Supported
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Partly supported
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.”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Disclosure
Collison: Stripe prioritizes rigor, determination, and warmth when hiring
“I think the three that kind of really stand out to me are this kind of rigor and clarity of thought, this sort of hunger, appetite, willfulness, determination and this, again, Warmth and desire to make people around them better off.”
Assertion Supported
Collison: Checking versus savings account friction is legally mandated
“And so, for example, the difference between a checking account and a savings account, which might seem sort of quite unfriendly from a consumer's standpoint, that's actually kind of essentially mandated by law, and so it's kind of not
[1211] Patrick Collison: …”
Assertion Supported
Collison: Only ~2% of global consumer spending was online when Stripe began
“And when we thought about it and just like looked at the kind of macro figures, we saw that, you know, about at the time, two percent of all consumer spending in the world happened on the internet.”
Disclosure
Collison: I finish one to two books each week
“I maybe You know, start half the books I get, and I probably finish a third of the books I start and that works out to you know, finishing one to two books a week”
Disclosure
Collison: Hosted a 2011 Bitcoin meetup but bought no Bitcoin
“I actually invited him to a Bitcoin meetup that I held in 2011. And I did not, however, buy any Bitcoin, but I invited him to that meetup and he replied and, you know, apologized that he couldn't make it.”
Insight
Collison: Cold outreach to admired thinkers is highly asymmetric
“And, you know, when you reach out to these people, yeah, half the time they don't respond but, you know, half the time they do, and, you know, it's asymmetric. It doesn't really cost you much when they don't, and it can be incredibly rewarding when they do.”
Assertion Supported
Patrick Collison: I formally graduated from high school rather than dropping out
“Well, I didn't technically speaking drop out, although I sort of practically speaking did. But you know, given my lack of education credentials elsewhere, I do I should, for the sake of my parents insist that I do in fact, or did in fact formally speaking grad…”
Disclosure
Patrick Collison: I self-studied British exams to enter MIT early
“I decided to see if there was some way that I could just go to college in the U.S. The subsequent year, and it was sort of a long story, but I eventually figured out that I could not do it if I did the standard Irish, kind of followed the standard Irish educat…”
Patrick Collison