Patrick Collison on learning and careers
Collison advises young people to seek the steepest learning curve and the environments where the highest standards live, rather than the most credentialed or fashionable path. He worries that San Francisco's culture steers talented people away from deep expertise and that few great founders now emerge in their twenties. He recommends choosing your peer group deliberately, following what the people you admire admired, and cold-contacting those whose work you value.
9 points · 3 appearances · 2022–2025
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2015–2026 · changed view
“Something we learned from YC was the importance of focusing on very concrete, easy to explain customer problems. Like it's very easy to hallucinate or to imagine some customer problem that's not actually something viscerally felt by a person who would pay money. And so over the course of, in part working on Octomattic together We encountered this issue of it being really annoying to deal with the movement of money or payments, whatever, on the Internet. And on the one hand, it seemed like an obviously good idea in the sense that nobody liked the existing ways of doing so, and they were broadly extremely unpopular and kind of antiquated and legacy. And yet to, like, fill out this paperwork and go to the bank in person and the paperwork was in Latin and just like, it was all bad. But then the flip side is it just seems kind of ridiculous the two kids would start a financial services business and Fintech didn't exist as a sector at the time. Like, the word literally didn't exist. And so it's just kind of, you know, we felt like the proverbial squirrels in a trench coat trying to masquerade as a sort of a real business or as serious adults, but obviously knowing nothing coming in about the space. And certainly a lot of people we met and pitched or banks or partners or whatever that we talked to, I mean, they didn't literally laugh us out of the room, but you kind of see them looking for the button to call security under the desk and have them haul us out, because it just seems so improbable. So anyway, I think it both seemed like an obviously good idea in that people. People really wanted this, but also a bad idea that nobody took it seriously. But I think the fact that it was ultimately, the fact that it was grounded in such a concrete, actual real user problem saved us.”
2019–2026 · changed view
“Since I was born for example global life expectancy has increased by about six years and infant mortality has fallen by more than 50% again I mentioned the statistic you know the number of people who have left extreme poverty this is incredibly important right and so I think there's a you know we're not the first people to say it but there is a moral imperative to this kind of progress and we shouldn't lose sight of that fact.”
2019–2024
“Part of our hope you know it's not to kind of promote any specific solution any specific I don't know aspect of it but rather that you know even though this is not what's kind of focally central in the headlines today it should be and as we think of what the world is going to look like in 50 years or 100 years it plausibly more than anything else is going to determine the shape of that.”
2024–2026
“Looking at the stripe data, one thing I will say that I think is germane to people here. There are many more businesses getting started now than there were a year ago. Like as little as a year ago. Way, way more than we're getting started five years ago. And actually the relative change between last year and this year is pretty much the largest relative change we've seen in any given year. So for example, from 19, from 2019 to 2020, we saw a big jump, you know, understandable during COVID so February to April of 2020 or whatever, you know, I think the growth rate inflected to maybe 50% or thereabouts year over year. In terms of new businesses getting started. As I speak, the number of new business starting on stripe is up around, it's a bit under, but around 2x year over year, which again is the largest relative jump we've seen.”