Stripe CEO Patrick Collison pushes back on the common startup mental model that founders merely nudge an underlying, uncontrollable growth curve.
Insight
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…”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”