Patrick Collison
Co-founder & CEO, Stripe · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
27statements → 8claims → 0claims resolved → 3.7/5average certainty → 1.85/5average debate potential → 43said about them ↓
8 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
8 assertions · 2 opinions · 14 insights · 2 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 8 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
Everything Patrick Collison said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Collison: Quantitative metrics are actively unhelpful before achieving product-market fit
“Generally speaking, I think that sort of pre product market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful. I think you sort of, you really want to bias very strongly towards kind of as much sort of inspection and kind of high throughput qualitative feedback as…”
Collison: Startup culture's 'never quit' dogma is wrong; sometimes you should
“In, in startup time we really extol and sort of uphold the virtues of, sort of, you know, determination at all costs, you know, never quit and so on. And, you know, that's clearly not the right answer in that, like, sometimes you should quit.”
Collison: Startup growth curves are under founder control, not cosmic trajectories
“And the, kind of, the growth curve or adoption curve is just, kind of, a function of that go to market apparatus. But basically, it's not some, kind of, cosmic trajectory. It's something, kind of, very much of your creation and under your control.”
Collison: Optimal pre-product-market fit team size is between 2 and 10
“As an empirical matter, it seems that somewhere between kind of, you know, two and 10 depending on exactly what you're building is kind of the optimally responsive size.”
Collison: Startups hitting 10 employees must adopt non-consensus, hierarchical decision-making
“When you hit a certain size, again, maybe, I'm just gonna say 10 people for the sake of simplicity, Maybe it's a bit before, maybe it's a bit after. I think you need to kind of adjust more, more deliberately to this kind of explicit communication model of sort…”
Collison: In-person user onboarding creates 'why now' urgency in early sales
“Us going and sort of accosting them in person sort of helped, you know you know, people talk about in sales, it's always like a, you know, a why you, and a why this, and a why now, and these kinds of questions and going in person kind of created a why now mome…”
Collison: Product-market fit is when you bottleneck on serving demand
“And when we launched we were basically immediately bottlenecked on sort of being able to serve user demand rather than generating user demand. And I think sort of directionally that's kind of the sort of the inversion that happens where sort of, you know, in t…”
Collison: Lack of iteration speed is the primary pre-PMF startup failure
“The main thing that I think companies screw up at the pre-product market fit stage is sort of speed of iteration.”
Patrick Collison: Waiting Two Years to Launch Is Not a Good Idea
“It was, I think one year and 11 months from sort of first line of code to public launch. Which to be clear, I don't recommend, ah, that is not a good idea, ah, it's just we had to, because we had to kind of get all these other things in place”
Collison: Stripe founders never showed up unannounced for early API installs
“I don't think we ever actually just showed up. Although, you know, perhaps we should have, but no, we tried to be kind of at least semi invited.”
Collison: Stripe Dispute Resolution Is Based on Who Cares More, Not Titles
“Sort of our kind of dispute resolution framework is kind of much more around which of us cares more than kind of which of us holds this title or that.”
Collison: Most Successful Co-Founding Teams Disagree With Dispassion
“I think that you know, something that we're kind of lucky about that I think is very, well, exactly to your point, I think he's definitely present in sort of the most successful co-founding relationships that I've seen is some degree of sort of dispassion in d…”
Collison: Fulfillment is a better optimization metric for founders than happiness
“And so I think, and you know, language is squishy and it's not, you know, completely specifically defined, but I think kind of generally speaking, kind of a better utility function and kind of gradient to try to climb is that of fulfillment.”
YC's Geoff Ralston offered to personally cover Stripe's first business hire
“And so, Jeff told us that we should hire Billy, and if it didn't work, Or for the first few months or whatever, that if it didn't work out, Jeff would sort of go back and pay his salary, so it was kind of a zero risk move for us.”
Collison: Repeat founders build organizations ahead of current demand post-PMF
“You see that kind of when repeat founders go and start companies, they almost invariably are willing to kind of build the organization You know, post product market fit, though it's invariably willing to kind of build the organization ahead of where things are…”
Collison: B2B software is far more predictable to build than consumer software
“I still remember, kind of, sitting in our front room telling us how much better it was to be building B to B software than consumer software for this reason, ah, where, sort of, consumer software, it's so hard to predict, sort of, What people want. They don't …”
Collison: Certainty on complex questions signals a lack of intellectual honesty
“It's oddly hard to fake being intellectually honest and sort of the characteristic of kind of being able to see multiple sides of a debate or an argument. Like, there are so many kind of complicated questions where sort of the only thing that I'm really skepti…”
Collison: Stripe was too consensus-oriented between 5 and 50 employees
“Between say, five and 50 people. I think we are much too consensus-oriented. We, of course, weren't completely consensus-oriented. I mean, we couldn't have gotten anything done if we were, but I think we kind of biased too much in that direction. And again, I …”
Collison: Requiring ideas be 'probably bad' overcomes organizational self-censorship
“And so, people, like, really self-censor a lot in most organizations because they don't want to look stupid, and they don't want to be sort of associated with just having all these, like, wacky, bad ideas and so on, and so we try to be fairly firm that if you …”
Collison in 2018: Over 80% of US adults bought from Stripe merchants
“So in the last 12 months more than 80% of American adults have bought something from a Stripe business. At least one thing from a Stripe business. Which is cool, and you know, it's not just the case in the US, like in Singapore, where it was last week, you kno…”
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 34 times in 16 episodes on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast. 9 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Katie Dill 8Sam Altman 6Mathilde Collin 4Courtland Allen 3Chas Englander 3Harj Taggar 2Paul Buchheit 1Josh Reeves 1
Statements about Patrick Collison, by other people (9)
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.”
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…”
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.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2026 9 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
2025 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- 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 3 mentions in 1 episode
2016 7 mentions in 1 episode
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Running Your Company by Patrick Collison · Y Combinator | Oct 3, 2018 | 43m |