Patrick Collison
Patrick Collison is an Irish billionaire entrepreneur, born on September 9, 1988, in Dromineer, County Tipperary, Ireland. He is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, an online payments company that lets businesses and individuals accept payments over the internet. He started Stripe with his younger brother, John, in 2010, after dropping out of college. Patrick Collison won the 41st Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005 at the age of sixteen.
37 Quotes
"Make friends over the internet with people who are great at things you're interested in. The internet is one of the biggest advantages you have over prior generations. Leverage it."
— Patrick Collison
Advice · Patrick Collison"To the extent that you enjoy working hard, do. Subject to that constraint, it's not clear that the returns to effort ever diminish substantially."
— Patrick Collison
Advice · Patrick Collison"One of the main things you should try to achieve by age 20 is some sense for which kinds of things you enjoy doing. This probably won't change a lot throughout your life"
— Patrick Collison
Advice · Patrick Collison"don't make the mistake of judging your success based on your current peer group."
— Patrick Collison
Advice · Patrick Collison"Get good at making a good first impression, being funny (if possible... this author still working on it...), speaking publicly."
— Patrick Collison
Advice · Patrick Collison"A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview."
— Patrick Collison
Advice · Patrick Collison"Heuristic: do your friends at school think your path is a bit strange? If not, maybe it's too normal."
— Patrick Collison
Advice · Patrick Collison"here's the advice I'd give past me. If you're 10–20: These are prime years!"
— Patrick Collison
Advice · Patrick Collison"Figure out a way to travel to San Francisco and to meet other people who've moved there to pursue their dreams. Why San Francisco? San Francisco is the Schelling point for high-openness, smart, energetic, optimistic people."
— Patrick Collison
Advice · Patrick Collison"We spend a lot of time getting to know which customers have good judgements about our product."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"It’s a common case with high growth startups where the co-founding team breaks up — generally it's hard to get the team to persist. It’s easy to stick with it when you have known the person for decades either as a friend or family."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"At the time there was this company called Slicehost which was the first really good virtual hosting provider — it made getting a server very straightforward. Our original idea was why don’t we build Slicehost for payments."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"In 2010, we built and released the first version of Stripe — actually, back then it was named /dev/payments"
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"We launched it to a few friends to get enough of a sense for the basic experience of charging for credit cards. We just put up a wait list on our site and demand took off, over a couple months we had a huge wait list."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"We got into YCombinator and built this payment API for developers — many of our friends were doing startups so we had a strong sense on what the community wanted."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"All of our first 20–30 users came from YC companies or friends we knew. From there people talked to each other about it — payments were a big pain point."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"It’s inevitable that tough situations will come up, but it’s how you react that is the challenge."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"Sure we have solved all kinds of scaling issues, deployments, technology — but the core problems of helping people work together were thought about more back then"
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"So much of software today is either about 1) basic utility or 2) entertainment vs. the enabling of people."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"even Google has learned that there is no correlation between GPA and performance at the company. Algorithmic style coding interviews using whiteboards don’t work — and even then no one does anything different — this is crazy."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"The biggest thing for us was being ok with taking a really long time to hire great people. It took us 6 months to hire the first 2 people at Stripe. The next 6 months after that we hired 3–4 people. We did week long trials with many people and many people didn’t want to join after that."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"Find great people and then convert them to expressed interest."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"The idea of taking 3+ years to hire someone is crazy, our biggest thing was being way more persistent than others and being ok with taking longer than any reasonable person would."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"in the early days we were processing many of the payments by hand manually"
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"Customers typically don’t know what they want and it’s difficult the find the answers through analysis."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"“What’s optional for a 1 year time horizon, might not be good for a 5 year time horizon.”"
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"I’d say about 70% of our new product ideas comes from listening to customers with good judgement and 30% are doing things which ought to be big but aren’t being asked for."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"When you are looking to scale and innovate — this requires hiring many people, training lots of people, having them learn in this emergent process, figuring out how to coordinate together, etc. The net effect is product advances slower"
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"Past 150 has been a big change for us. The biggest is a need for formal explicit communication — specifically broadcast community."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"I don't want the organization to do everything I want to do — I want them to do the right things."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"Speaking can only happen once but writing can persist through time, be revised, be updated, and help in clarity."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"written word was more concrete and rigid"
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"Basically the CEO’s job can be reduced to three things"
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183C"Strategy Culture (No other person besides the founder/CEO can affect culture to the same degree) Selecting senior management of the company (hard for anyone else to do this job) — these people will be the domain experts of their function who are better than you. Optional is the product — the CEO can be the head of product or lead some specific function of the product."
— Patrick Collison
Scaling Stripe with Patrick Collison — Class 11 Notes of Stanford University’s CS183CExplore More Quotes 📚
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