Optimal middle at this altitude. I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking another organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
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Why hello my beautiful little munchkins. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job each episode to tease out the habits routines favorite books life lessons, and so on of world-class performers across every possible discipline and my guest today is Patrick Collison. Co LL is o n at Patrick see on Twitter Patrik. Karlson.com stripe.com Patrick is CEO and co-founder of stripe a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet will explain what that means in this episode After experiencing firsthand how difficult it was to set up an online business Patrick and his brother John started stripe in 2010. Their goal was to make accepting payments on the internet simpler and more inclusive and the story is fascinating because in part there were many incumbents people thought stripe had no chance. It was not intrinsically interesting to a lot of the people who might have assess it and yet today stripe powers.
Of online businesses around the world and is worth roughly twenty billion dollars making the brothers two of the youngest multi-billionaires on the planet prior to stripe Patrick co-founded OCTA Matic which was acquired by live current media for 5 million in March 2008 in 2016. He was named a presidential Ambassador for Global entrepreneurship by President Obama originally from Limerick, Ireland Patrick now lives in San Francisco where stripe is headquartered and I thought I'd mention just a few of his favorite books because he is one of the best red humans I've ever encountered and that's saying a lot he is red. I would have to imagine thousands of books and I did some filtering and searching and found a number of them that he considers particularly great in his words and I'm going to just list a few and then I will put these in the show notes at Tim da blog forward slash podcast. The first is the rise and fall of American growth and that's my dog whining the background the second.
The novel mind-body problem. That's a - mind-body problem poor Charlie's Almanac which is come up a lot in this podcast by Charlie Munger and something incredibly wonderful happens subtitle Frank Oppenheimer and the world he made up there are many many more. I'm going to put those in the show notes for you guys and filter them for only the particularly great and you can find those at Tim Doyle blog forward slash podcast and just search Patrick and it'll pop right up. So without further Ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Patrick Collison.
Patrick welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to connect to finally have this long form conversation and I thought a good place to start might be by quoting from a text exchange or rather. One of the first text that I got from our mutual friend. Chris sacca has also been on the podcast for those who don't know him extremely Adept investor and all around hilarious guy his men. He said he's a real character. He's real character. It's managed to make one or two or however many billions of dollars, which is amazing because I got to see him from the early days when you probably first met him, I guess maybe a year or two later in any case Chris is a character and he very rarely makes introductions. He very rarely proposes introductions. So I pay attention when he does and he sent me as context of I've of course. I was familiar with stripe. I had heard your name before we
I think even exchanged potentially a couple of DM's on Twitter, right? But he said and I'm going to edit here for length a little bit. But Patrick is quite literally one of the smartest people I've ever known like he puts Larry Page on his heels smart. I don't know anyone who has one read more books and to has in your photographic memory for what he has read his thoughts are provocative and challenge the status quo. His success is no accident and then you can fact check this when we when we get into more of a conversation here, but plus his origin story is great as I recall: grew up in rural Ireland took his first communion money and bought a computer created his own operating system while coding over a dial-up Line Paul Graham for those people who don't know the name basically the Yoda of something called Y combinator come back to that Paul Graham noticed him and invited him to the US. I met him when he was 15 and PG. That's Paul Graham brought him by the Google offices pretty sure he dropped out of Harvard or MIT, etc. Etc. He's also a pilot who when Obama made the trip to Cuba invited along a few top entrepreneurs like the air B&B Founders Patrick said he
Meet them there and rented a small plane to fly himself from Florida. Okay pause now Chris and I were also exchanging text messages earlier today because I wanted to ask his permission to to read that and there are two more things. I'll add as background color and then we can we can get amongst it. So the first he says quick story OCTA mattock and we can get into that but this is this is one of your previous companies was a front end on eBay that allowed sellers to upload a bunch of products at once and scale their operations one night someone from the Netherlands wrote them an email that automatic didn't support Dutch literally in the middle of the night. They wrote back something like 15 or 30 minutes later saying quote. It does now and quote and then this is a very Sucka ask expression fucking Legends period and then he said also when we sold their first company, I held a little closing celebration at that bar below my house is then placed districts is in San Francisco. Well, they're both under age, but Patrick's brother John got an egg from the bar literally could not get in.
His own celebration for selling a company becoming a millionaire. I'll never forget that moment. It crystallized quote what's happening out here is different. There's no hierarchy predicated on seniority smart young people who bust their asses don't have to quote work their way up and quote. So that is all by means of of introduction. Yeah. I think we should probably just end the podcast right now because any possible way that any human alive today or who's ever existed in human history could possibly live up to that. Yeah. Let's just say no pressure nothing to live up to now, but I think we can we can start with very comfortable ground and then it's books Let's talk about books. You have many books. I want to say 600 or more in the recommended reading section on your website. Maybe I'm getting a wrong. Maybe it's been changed and you've categorized them. You have some in above average you have others as labeled.
Great and those range this is from a quoting from wired article in the UK, but they range from imperialism to engineering democracy it on and on and on what makes a book particularly great. And which of those do you end up recommending the most or gifting the most other people? Hmm, I think well, I find personally actually that it really matters a lot sort of when I read a book instead of the frame of mind that I meant at the time sort of when I stumble across it and off and I'll kind of start a book at some point and maybe Revisited sort of months or in some cases even years later and find that it has kind of a completely sort of renewed resonance or significant or something. And so I think those kind of Chris and Marc Andreessen others talked about this idea. And of course many people at this point talk about sort of product Market fit and founder Mauricio.
First I think with books there's really something around sort of Reader book fit and the kind of particulars of that moment. And so in just by way of example, I've been thinking a whole lot of late about sort of the importance of kind of cultural capital and how it is that people choose what to do and to Aspire to and focus on and try to make happen in the world and the degree to which they're willing to take risks and the importance of visions and the importance of mentors and people to look up to and all that anyway and kind of specifically the idea that you know, perhaps in the kind of first half of the 20th century or made the first two-thirds of the 20th century. We're kind of lots of examples of that and perhaps and I'm not sure whether this is the case or not, but maybe perhaps through a few of those today. Anyway think about this of late and of course, you know, I'm not the first to kind of point this out or raised as an issue, but I stumbled upon just a couple of days ago.
A book published by probably get the name wrong. But the there's a center at ASU. It's like the the Center for Science & possibility or something like that. I'm pretty sure I'm getting that name wrong. But it but it's along those lines and they actually published a book of Science Fiction written by well, I guess a whole host of others with a forward from from Neal Stephenson about exactly this idea the importance of optimistic visions and kind of Science Fiction as sort of flagging points on the horizon that might be interesting directions to sort of try to paddle towards. So anyway, I think that for books I mean the this kind of
Matching a kind of your mindset and kind of what's important to you at the particular moment with the kind of content itself sort of really matters. I think corollary of that is that it's actually valuable to sort of to or I actually found a useful to sort of to buy a lot of books that sort of seemed interested in high quality. But before I'm necessarily ready to read them at that moment and maybe I'll kind of read the beginning or a couple chapters or something but, you know, not really kind of commit to finishing it and you know, I but I'll leave it out around the house. Like there's books on the bookshelves as books on the kitchen table those books, you know, beside the couch. This books in my bedroom. There's usually books on my bed and so on and you know, it's kind of in your mental landscape and I often find I guess that kind of six months later or 18 months later something happens something you're reminded of something and you realize oh man, I really should get back to whatever book it is.
I was just going to say if it's helpful. I was going to ask about the dream machine. Hmm. Yes and maybe that illustrates how you vet books or right? Hold on to books that are particularly valuable because at any given point in time, even if you have six to eight books around your house, there are hundreds of thousands of books published every year, right? So there's this there's this election challenge. Yes. Okay. Well, so first off, I think you should mostly ignore the books that are published every year and take advantage of the fact that you know, quite a lot of books have been published say, you know up to 10 years ago, but the books published up to 10 years ago people have had a lot of time to kind of filter through them and sort of try to select the the real gem is there and of course they're all the false negatives like her a lot of great books that just never for whatever reason got the attention they kind of deserved or maybe that sort of they don't have the salience that they ought to have for you, but I really think people
Kind of much more biased towards older books than they are think the dream machine is a good example of this and I think there are kind of two things. I guess that stand out in the dream machine. The first is Mitchell Waldrop the author he really spent the time. Well, I guess I should describe it is it is a book about the history while it is nominally a biography of jcr licklider and you know many people were responsible for the creation of the internet but I think lickliter has more claim than any other single person to being the individual kind of causal irresponsible for his creation. He funded a lot of the early researchers. He should have tried to bring the community together and he really kind of instigated a much of the movement that led to arpanet and the internet and so on and it's at this amazing book about obviously one of the most important inventions in the history of humanity and Mitchell Waldrop spent the time to sort of real I mean years
To really understand in depth not just kind of the specific sequence of events that led to this happening but they kind of milieu and sort of intellectual environment and thinking and Landscape that it all came from and so the book starts way before lickliter, we're doing anything because they're kind of all these different kind of fields and disciplines and sort of strains of thinking that lickliter built on. I think it's a, you know, pretty rare that an author either takes the time or has the time to kind of really go deep in that matter and it's striking that if you look at sort of how the dream machine came to be he was he was funded by a grant as I recall. It was the Sloan Foundation I could be wrong on that but I believe of the Sloan Foundation, you know, they thought this was I mean obviously kind of a super important period in history, but sort of you know Waldrop was not on sort of toiling.
The clock to get a book out by Christmas. He you know, he was really trying to set of to capture an important series of events in the Arc of technology. So that's really what stands out about that. Book. How did you come across that book? Because was it in print or out of print at the time that you came across it? It was it was out of print. There were a couple of copies on Amazon and I after I finished it I was so excited about it that I went and bought a whole bunch of them to give away to people at stripe to give way to my friends and you know fairly quickly we exhausted Amazon's pretty limited Supply. I think I first heard about it from I think some combination of Brett Victor and Alan Kay Alan Kay many of your listeners will already know about for anyone who doesn't he was a researcher.
Who worked at these kind of best known for working at Xerox Parc, which is this amazing industrial research lab that was kind of played a set of formative role in the creation of the GUI the graphical user interface and ether Nash the kind of one of the main networking Technologies and object-oriented programming which is kind of the main programming Paradigm that use today and so they were just like really critical and kind of a history of what we consider modern technology but in software. Hey, Alan Kay worked there and was one of the kind of leading researchers there and then bread Victor is one of the most interesting kind of researchers software don't know a creatives working today and and remember Alan saying that the dream machine is the kind of is semi unique among kind of computer history and Technology history books in the really kind of gets it right and also, you know, we're pretty young field and so there hasn't been
A whole lot of kind of research and deep scholarly scrutiny at least the extent that there might be for. I don't know math or physics or something. But but this book I really stood out and you know, the technology industry is not an industry that's of spends a lot of time looking to its past in a way that I think is really both a strength and a weakness in that, you know, people are always trying ideas that have failed kind of tons of times before and they have a booty is to the fact they failed tens of times before and that really is kind of a good thing because sometimes the fact that it is failed five times before it is not being that it's going to fail the sixth time, but it can of course also in some ways you weakness we're going to build an ideas that beat us Allen case line about this is computer science is a kind of Pop Culture where it's sort of this kind of Brownian motion rather than kind of really building layer by layer and so in that broader culture, I think the dream machine is kind of an outlier and you mentioned Alan
I should I should I will just mention a quote that perhaps people have heard which is often misattributed. But it is I think correctly attributed to Allen which is the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Yes, that may be a quote that that people recognize but perhaps not in association with the name. Yeah. Yeah. I'll and I would say is I mean kind of quite widely recognized as as a genius, but come despite that I think he is still kind of underrated. I think he I think he will be even more highly regarded in 50 years or in a hundred years than he is today. You are you're a young guy. What is your age? Currently? I am 30 30. Wow time time time time to order a walker on Amazon Prime. You are a student of History. You mentioned something in relation to assessing books that has popped up in my homework.
See research rather for this conversation and that is that perhaps one shouldn't overweight with a recency bias. The books published in the last year. I you should give books a chance to fail or persist in a sense and feel free to correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but I've also read that you've talked about how it is risky for people to emulate the so companies De Jour those startups companies around them that are contemporaries that are doing well and that it seems like you have made more of a study of the great in the earlier days of the valley or by extension companies like Microsoft where the outcomes are more known. Could you talk about that about that a bit and may perhaps some of the things that you've gleaned or any lessons that have stuck with you and I'd love to dig into perhaps
The conclusions you came to even if temporarily after studying these grates and one example, which may or may not be a good example, but what came up in doing some reading for this is that you observed that Google Facebook Amazon were created with conventional org charts in in some respects. So y so you question to the value, please correct me or elaborate on this the value of innovating in that particular capacity because they're which and that now I'm laying on my interpretation of that which is how there are potential unknown risks in doing so and yep the rights of questionable upside in throwing more unknown variables into something like that versus other places where you could focus. So could you could you could you expect maybe expand on that and then right share any
Their conclusions or lessons that you that you came to well, I think the kind of general idea here behind this is I think people often conflate the question of sort of what it would be good to see others do versus what you should do yourself and kind of what I specifically mean is people have tried a lot of different kind of organizational structures and methodologies overtime. Right? And and of course while in Broad Strokes many things have remained the same in terms of maybe some of the characteristics required for leadership or the importance or you know, - which makes kind of a human satisfied in the work around sort of having kind of the opportunity to have autonomy and to kind of build Mastery and and having a commission they believe in so on so the lots of things remain the same there has been kind of some Eeveelution and that you know organizations Google today say does not look especially like
Maybe IBM of 1950, you know this parallels but you know, very material differences. However, I think that you know, most of the experiments have failed most efforts to do something that's kind of substantially different to the kind of best practice of the day most of those efforts fail. And so I think when you're designing a particular organization doing something that's like truly might kill it is just like a pretty risky thing to do and evidently the way Google Facebook Microsoft and others are organized Amazon, but I view you know, I'm certain it's not perfect. I'm certain that. Not only can you do better but you can do substantially better. I really believe that but at the same time it's going to be empirically adequate to be Google Facebook apple or Amazon and I think doing better is
Is just really pretty difficult. And so I actually love the fact that people are experimenting here that the rise of remote organizations that have no physical headquarters or you know attempts to have a buffer has been trying sort of this kind of radical transparency down to kind of compensation some of our organizations like medium and Zappos tried or are trying holacracy. And so I love the fact that all these experiments are happening and can you define holacracy for a second? Well, I don't deeply understand it. But I think it is. I think I believe as I understand it. The core idea is having kind of differing kind of decision making bodies like groups of people that are responsible for major areas of the company rather than having a kind of more traditional hierarchy and so perhaps again, this is my superficial understanding but
Perhaps you might have some set of people who are responsible for making compensation decisions some other set of people who were responsible for deciding. You know, what the product strategy should be for next year and some other type of people who are responsible for figuring out how how the office should be decorated but the kind of those sets of people don't need to kind of map onto, you know, some traditional hierarchy and peeking out of the can be partly overlapping or you know bigger or smaller or whatever and you know, that that's you know, when wouldn't describes that. I don't think that's, you know, a priori a ludicrous idea, you know, maybe that's a work but I think it kind of the the the sort of the bias should be that for any radical departure from the kind of prevailing status quo. It's probably not going to work. I think there's probably a 90% chance maybe maybe higher the kind of any any meaningful deviation is a bad idea. And so again to kind of return to process of getting
Beginning I think we should celebrate the fact that all these experiments are happening and should really cheer them on and you really hope that they succeed and can we ourselves should choose maybe some small number of experiments. We really believe into it, you know to engage in but I think for these kind of you know, really high important High importance really hard to change sort of Trapped or decisions, like what kind of organizational structure you're going to have? I think you actually want to bias towards being relatively conservative. You don't you might be supportive of monkeys being shot into space but you don't necessarily want to be one of the first ten that that that's exactly right, but I really think like one of the strangest things to me in the world, you know, as I look out is that people kind of don't celebrate this experimentation enough sort of like if it doesn't seem to them like the right thing to do they are kind of offended by it or it's, you know, it seems to the some kind of emotional response to it.
I think at least the response I try to kind of cultivating myself is I think that's a bad idea. It does not make sense given my model of the world and I'm delighted it's happening. Like that's so great. And if it fails, well, you know, that's unfortunate and if it succeeds, you know, we all get to learn something that's kind of that's what so great about their the transmission of knowledge that if it works it only one particular small instance everyone gets to benefit from it. That's so cool and yet when people try kind of, you know, strange things that don't kind of match our kind of again pre-existing comprehensions, you know, there's some combination of mockery or or dismissiveness or again kind of emotional objection at words. I really think we should be encouraging and celebrating them and the weirder the effort is that the more they deserve our support, so I want to talk about what may be
Of the things you did differently but not not only what you did differently because that's sort of a in some respects a causal Factor. But in some respects a a downstream effect of thinking differently or seeing things differently. So what did you guys know that other people didn't because I've heard multiple people comment on the early conception of striper considering entering a crowded Market with ton of existing incumbents with regulatory and institutional barriers to entry all of these types of factors. Why did you decide to pursue that what did you see that other people did not see in that case. Well who this two different kinds of knowing right this kind of conscious explicit knowing where you know, you see that those kind of a prevailing belief or something and you understand why it's wrong and you have some kind of proprietary Insight that Evernote doesn't
I think there's another kind of sort of quote unquote knowing which is just you you have a belief or a model of the world and you don't even realize that it's different to others you it's just it's kind of some deeply internalized thing that just for whatever circumstance would reasons you happen to have ended up with and I think for us it actually wasn't so much that we had a in the beginning this kind of comprehensive deep understanding the space and realized however Nellis was mistaken. We just had like a particular perspective, you know, because of how we where we came from and how we got started that and we were lucky we turned out the kind of that model we had and that I would look kind of matched the world at that time. But I really I think it's very important that you know, we don't can drink our own Kool-Aid here and over read into our sort of supposed Insight. I really think you know, it was it was
It was really just a lot of circumstance and good fortune. But I would say that kind of particular things that differed about stripe and kind of our Outlook where we just didn't think that the kind of regulatory and kind of Partnerships large banking barriers were actually that bad, you know, they kind of sound intimidating and obviously you've to kind of do a lot of work there that maybe a lot of other software companies don't have to do but you know, it's fundamentally feasible. I mean ultimately regulators and Banks and so on are comprised of good people who want to do the right thing and they speak a different language or whatever but are you know, they're the reasonable and I guess the other thing is we really had this mindset because of guess where we re came from that kind of developers and makers and software were just going to continue to become increasingly important and it's really amazing work and when we started out we kind of already
Was that developers were just like we built a good product and developers would start using mesh and that that would be the story and we didn't even know that was such a kind of a stupid distribution strategy and go to market mechanism. We didn't even know how much Enterprise marketing and Enterprise sales motion and all the rest were kind of skipping over. We just can't have this very naive understanding of the world. However, we're lucky where the world really I think started to change around 2010 2011 where companies around the world and especially in kind of the US and Europe really got the memo like big traditional companies that they would have to take advantage of what software is making possible and really transform themselves if they wanted to kind of survive and and and prosper and so, you know fast forward kind of five or six years later even the kind of more traditional kind of
Stodgy are companies that would have needed this kind of super complex Enterprise field team to kind of engage with they were actually now starting to listen to their own developers. And when the CTO said hey, I really think we should be using this kind of much more straightforward or sort of much more powerful technology unlike a decade before they were actually being listened to and so again, this isn't something we knew and in the way that we could have, you know argued for us and in 2010, but it was a thing we kind of was somehow in our bones. And again, we were just lucky where we started right around when the world started to transform in this regard. Actually. We did this we did this survey earlier this year. We kind of surveyed a whole bunch of you know, I don't take untraditional but sort of not software companies. We sort of surveyed companies, you know, fairly broadly across multiple.
Mysteries and we just ask them kind of what what's holding them back. And you know, that's a very imperfect methodology. Of course because you know, it's hard to know what the kind of candidate answers there should be and maybe this questions or do they all interpreted the same way and so on but the kind of very high level thing that sort of came back was that companies across the board report kind of availability of software engineers and just like ability to kind of do things with software as being as big or even bigger a constraint on their progress as access to Capital and it's just such an amazing fact right in that sort of, you know economics for for for its history basically has been sort of a science of in some sense, you know access to and kind of distribution of capital and we just got this kind of moment of transformation where I mean on some level you can exchange, you know capital for software.
Talent and output and so on but actually really hard to do and I think companies globally really struggling with figuring out how to make that happen. And so anyway, we just had the Good Fortune of getting started right when that came to be the case. So there are definitely shouldn't say synchronicities, but sort of fortuitous timing aspects to it and I think that of course Lady Lady Fortune good luck or bad luck is always a factor but it's it's in a case like this necessary and not sufficient right? There are certain things within your control assuming we don't get into a really long confusing discussion of a free-will. Let's just assume there are certain things that depend on you making very specific decisions. There are these these Forks in the road and I'd love to talk about some of the things that you feel like you did right or small things that turned into big things and I'll read I want to read just a very brief paragraph.
The Yoda mentioned earlier Paul Graham and people are interested in learning more about y combinator we can talk about it, but it's and this is going to be vastly simplified. But for people who have never heard this before y combinator often abbreviated to YC is the Seal Team 6 Harvard of and let's just called startup incubators of sorts think they accept a class. It is a very small percentage. I want to say single digits at this point. It would have to be in terms of the number of applicants and there are many many well-known companies that have come out of Y combinator and Paul has many Fantastic essays online which people should read YC is one of the most amazing inventions of the past 20 years and I think pgs essays are still a gold mine that sort of like Alan Kay I think are still like people to know
Race, but I think they're even better than people appreciate but for sure and a lot and many of them. I've also read his book many of them are they are not timely in the best possible sense. They are there. They're based on first principles and an example of that. I'm always mess up the headline, but I think it's the makers schedule versus the manager schedule something along those lines people can find it. I'll put it in the show notes, but this particular essay talks a bit about stripe and it's a strike quote stripe is one of the most successful startups we funded and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone would have sat back and waited for users or could have sat back and waited for users. It was striped. But in fact, they're famous within yc4 aggressive early user acquisition startups building things for other startups have a big pool of potential users in the in the other companies we funded and none took better advantage of it than stripe and YC we use the term quote Collison installation and quote for the technique.
Invented more diffident Founders asked will you try our beta and for people who don't know that terminology just means effectively a rough draft of a product. Well, you try our Beta And if the answer is yes, they say great will send you a link but the calls and brothers weren't going to wait when anyone agreed to try stripe, they'd say right then give me your laptop and set them up on the spot. So that seems like a small thing but it doesn't strike me that if that's the beginning of certain types of snowballs and user acquisition. That is a really important could be a really important differentiator. This is what are some of the fair to take this in any direction, but some of the other thing is that you guys got right and I do remember even in Silicon Valley which of course is a can be an echo chamber of sorts, but there was a lot of talk even it at the periphery of my circles and I am non-technical
Not a developer about how easy stripe was to implement right seven lines of code or X number of lines of code and your setup and I'm sure that I'm sure on some level was a very conscious decision not only in terms of product but also in terms of positioning so keep you talk about some of the early decisions that yeah in retrospect were really important. So I think there are two that really jumped out to me where you know, I think they were actually kind of somewhat deliberate. Well, well, I'll give two and we all think of more and so one is we had sort of grown up reading slashdot in this early kind of tech News website, but it's kind of crowd sourced and Hacker News and Twitter and blogs and all these kinds of services.
and I guess we just sort of had a belief that help your found out about things in the world had changed and in particular the kind of Market was getting more efficient and by efficient, I mean that it was becoming more likely that people would come to discover the kind of quote unquote correct thing at the maybe kind of 30 years ago or something because they were sort of much slower or fewer kind of distribution channels that who won and what got used to be kind of determined more by marketing budgets or by sales tax or whatever, but that there was a and you kind of sort of transparency and kind of efficacy and information dissemination that the internet now made possible that shifted the way that sort of a product could really get adopted and so just very concretely our sales and marketing strategy for a very long time was was writing blog posts that we just
Were good and interesting artists, we hoped were and building a good product and hoping that people would tell others about it. And I really don't think that that would have worked 10 years previously. It was kind of the international changed but we just have made a very deliberate bet on on these kind of Superior Distribution channels. And I think that actually really helped us in two big ways one is its kind of obviously cheaper and so you look at a lot of other companies, especially companies selling to businesses and they spend vast gargantuan amount of money on the kind of sales and marketing strategies and severely on we just we didn't have to do that. And so it was kind of transformative Lee impactful in that sense. Maybe if we'd had to kind of, you know, spend a lot of undone sort of getting started. It perhaps would have been you know, that that could have been a severe enough barrier that we wouldn't have gotten over it at all. Maybe a company would
Happened. So first the second is I pause for one second. Yeah. Sure. Do you recall any of the blog posts that if you were to do kind of an 80/20 analysis and look at those that really move the needle do you recall any of the topics or just your basic approach? Well, I remember a guy who worked at stripe and who still works. It's dry up. His name is Evan. He wrote a blog post about how to debug python which is a programming language with GDB, which is a debugger. It didn't really have much to do with stripe. There's actually was really good blog post and this is probably back in 2012 and it's very like that got a whole bunch of traffic and it as a consequence people kind of found out about stripe and maybe you kind of realize that we knew something of what we were talking about from a technical standpoint and and it moved the needle for us back at a time. We're really nobody had heard of us. It's also if I may
I'm caffeinated enough now to feel the need to jump in and and commentate but the it's also really good example of an editorial honey pot that will attract the types of people who are technically probably in positions to given that sort of point in time that you discussed earlier where CEOs are listening more to see ctOS and ctOS are listening to the actual on the front line. That's coders. It was it's a very smart way of talking around the product in a sense that a lot of those technical folks in my experience are also semi allergic or very highly allergic to what they perceive as anything salesy. So you're able to bring them into the fold without directly explicitly selling anything. Yes. Well this actually brings me to count the second thing that I was going to mention in terms of the other kind of helpful consequence of kind of marketing ourselves this way, which is it actually kind of created better and
Sentence for us because if you think that sort of more traditional marketing and by the way to beat here, I'm not dismissing in any way contradict themselves in marketing. I mean stripe has sales people and marketing people and they they're immensely important in sort of in the organization. We're not building today. And so I'm kind of specifically talk my kind of strategies to kind of get started in the early days and to kind of get some initial traction. Anyway, that's it and the super valuable thing about sort of pursuing these kind of non-traditional channels is if you think that a traditional marketing organization and kind of what it's or digital marketing in general and of what the incentives are the incentives are too kind of talk up the product or to kind of pre-announce things ahead of when they're actually ready because if you're sort of talking at people and you know showing these fancy presentations or whatever, but then actually using the product directly, you know, if they find out through a year later that it sucks. Well, you know, that's kind of fine or at least it's fine the short term because you know, you've already got the revenue for the sale or something.
Whereas if you have to compete on the merits of the product and just going to rely on people kind of being honest about how well it works or doesn't that kind of forces you to just build a kind of product development organization that can compete and so may be harder to kind of get that initial traction. But if you can get there you actually really have kind of an upper hand relative to kind of more traditionally incentivize companies because they've probably gotten a bit lazy and it'll ossified and it just a bit less competitive on this axis. And once you can make the battle about the quality of your product in the quality of your product development, you know, if you can get the the battlefields to be sort of on that axis, you really have a huge advantage and our experience was the incumbent just couldn't react and they kind of realized that stripe was going to getting some traction and starting to get some mindshare and developers and startups are starting to use it and what's really amazing to me is kind of how little happened.
And I think it's not because I mean obviously for a while it just kind of dismissed us but even after they stopped dismissing us it you can't just kind of Click your fingers. We're like, okay now we're gonna start creating good products. It's such a deep cultural and organizational thing that it's it's very difficult for competitors or potential competitors to shift their whereas if you just have better marketing campaign that's super easy to copy anyone else. Can you buy a competing billboard or pay more for the Google ads or whatever? And so again, we didn't kind of realize all this in advance, but I think that ended up I really helping us. Yeah, I want to underscore something you just mentioned briefly, which is Google at this is what two things. Number one is that if I look back at the however many at this point 70 plus startups in my own investment experience the vast majority of over performers.
Focused almost to the exclusion of PR and marketing on product in the early days. And number two is if I look at the bottom performing say decile of companies, they almost all got very distracted by PR and marketing particularly in the first year or two generally first year of existence, especially if they were blessed in other words cursed with a lot of High Praise from outlets in one or two pieces. It's very seductive as a Cyril a song. Absolutely and the the last thing I wanted to say just to underscore something that you mentioned which is really important is if your customer acquisition is predicated on paid acquisition. Yes that makes you a vet just a Sitting Duck for incumbents exactly who have larger budgets.
Yes, and they can just decide to bleed chips for a period of time until you run out of chips. Yes. This is a yeah, it's really really important. So I'm glad you mentioned it. There's always a kind of seductive psychological Temptation where something is in growing to tell yourself that it's because well, you know, I haven't invested enough in distribution. It's kind of harder to sort of come to realize or tell yourself that well, you know, maybe our baby is just a bit too ugly. And so I think some people are just very psychologically biased towards sort of blaming anything that growth on on things that sound like sales or marketing and then the I mean kind of related to what you just said one of the just really strange facts about the world and I don't kind of fully understand why this is the case is how hard it is for organizations to build good so
And you know, I know that sounds strange in that. I mean lots of organizations both some software but like it is just really weird, right, you know, if you think about sort of what a what a really good website or iOS application or whatever kind of is and feels like it's really strange. I mean, it's not easy to build a really good website or IOS app or whatever but it's not rocket science and given that it's not rocket science. Why are there so few of them? Like just think of kind of any big major company and think of their website or app like it's probably pretty bad. It kind of janky. It looks old like the animations where he worked right? It's kind of its laggy all the stuff right, but that's weird. They probably have deprived a nice building and I'd headquarters and if they like there are many things they can decide to do and just like do it pretty competent.
They can kind of turn their Capital Advantage into a into a sort of an advantage in some other area. Like if they don't know if they want to if they want to have a great fleet of cars, you know, they can very reliably turn Capital into a great fleet of cars, but for some reason they can't seem to turn and in fact, they can probably even turn Capital into like a cool advertising campaign, you know, there's enough good agencies, but for whatever reason they can't turn Capital into good software and you know, it would be immensely valuable for them if they could but they can't or at least they don't and I don't think it's for lack of trying or lack of kind of realizing this and so I think actually small companies don't realize how much of an upper hand they have here where if they can create a product that is
Kind of so much better than the status quo that they start to get sort of organic traction. Once you attach a real sales and marketing engine to that. It's going to be really freaking hard for a big company to effectively compete because again this kind of organizational transformation into being good at software is just is just so profoundly hard another place that I've seen a lot of would-be entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs spend a lot of time on company name and brand. Okay. So it was joking with I was joking with Chris soccer earlier via text and I was just saying I'm really impressed with the phenomenal outcomes and very Rocky Beginnings with it like difficult names that you guys have had with companies of God. So you have octo Matic right which which I'm sure was not always spelled correctly by people not not uniformly now and stri stripe.
Keep what the could you just give us a brief description of the original name of what would later become stripe and just like walk us through some early iterations because I want sure what I'm hoping to do here and I don't want to make this two leading of an introduction to what you're going to say, but is that you're like the future of your company is probably not going to hinge entirely on the first name that you give it is where I'm trying to go with this and the product the so so maybe you could just tell a bit of the story. We are definitely a powerful example of that that as you say, it is not and so stripe was originally incorporated as slash Dev slash Finance ink spelled as is hgvs is H Etc like the it was the slash is actually spelled out. And the reason for that is, you know, we well it's a long story I won't bore you with it.
Is like a programming joke, but you know, we thought it was funny. I think it was the rest of the world, you know to are shocked and surprised and not quite find it as funny as we did. And and the the first name of the product was Slash Dev slash payments because you know, we sort of wanted a slightly broader company name then product name and I'm extremely confusingly while the company had it all this SLA sh sub spelled out the product was just deev payments.com. And so kind of the the naming schema is didn't even really match and so we would have these meetings and we describe we do and we're already fighting an uphill battle here. I mean, you know, we were as John says sort of Three Squirrels in a trench coat instead of trying to masquerade as like a real thing like evading all these questions about you know, where exactly is your headquarters and you know, how do we say, how do we not say our bedroom in a way? That's not a lie.
And or how do we say we have an open floor plan? Exactly. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. We really Embrace remote work. So we're already finding a bit of an uphill battle and you know, then at the end of the meeting or something, you know, they'd ask us our name or for business card or something. We have to hand over this thing that you know doesn't even look like a company named they looked at as like oh, but you know, what's the company name called? Like actually sorry sir. It's this thing I so it was just it was all bad and not only did people often miss bellush, but it was kind of a moment of Celebration if anyone ever correctly spelled it and so we kind of came to accept the need for for a name change and naming things as I'm sure you know is pretty hard. And so I remember I think it was the winter of 2010 which was a very wet winter out in California unusually, and I just remember all these kind of dark evenings at the office for soon as you can see kind of got
Talk with your code or with some problem or something. We would have some little discussion about what we named this company and we had all these books around the office. I mean just all sorts of random stuff as you just page through them and like come up with a word and you know, toss it out to the group. We like well should we color cut their our company this and so remember John was trying to learn how to ride a motorcycle and we had a motorcycle repair manual and so we lot of motorcycle words. Should we call the company carburetor which fortunately did not make the cut and so it was not going well as you're hearing a we eventually decide to write a little script to just like company kind of random potential names and actually to kind of check whether the relevant domain names were available have because you know, it was important for an online company that we can I have the.com domain and I can't get over how but stripe is one of the words that ended up sort of on our list of names to check. I think we're just at some point trying to think up going to single monosyllabic.
English words didn't have some kind of strong pre-existing Association and stripe. It turns out was available, you know relatively cheaply it was it was thinking ten or twenty thousand dollars which you know, that's not cheap in some sense but compared to the costs. We were living having a terrible name. It seemed like a good deal. That's that's the way what year was this. This is like 2010. So that's astonishing to me. That's actually I mean for a dictionary word that is a noun that recognizable. That's astonishing. Did you did you negotiate or have someone negotiate on your behalf or was that the opening offer? They made to sell Oz God I'd have to go back to check the details. But but they're what there wasn't a big lengthy negotiation and those around this back and forth. Yeah. I know. We we really lucked out. I mean what helped us of course is we weren't wet at any of these names right? You know if
The guy had said, you know, it's $200,000. Well, you know that would have been exactly two seconds of thought we'd have moved on to something else only upon the carburetor dot Coda you get exactly exactly as it really helps that you know, we're happy to entertain anything at all. And and the last thing worth mentioning there is you know, we okay we bought the domain and start Audrina rename all our code and the website and everything and then one day in early January. We kind of flip the switch and everything became stripe. We somehow the checklist of all the things to change and do we neglected to add an entry for tell our customers. And so no people woke up in the morning to go to Dev payments that calm and check their sales and whatever and you know, they get redirected to stripe that calm and so we got a lot of sort of confused customers. We like are you guys hacked? Have you been fished and what's going on here fortunately back in January 2011. We had very few customers. And so when I say we got these emails from customers, I mean probably
All five of our customers emailed us. So it was not a huge customer support burden what I do want to talk about perhaps some inflection points for the company, since you certainly have more than five customers now, I mean you have what is it 80 percent of American adults have purchased something from a business powered by stripe. Now, I know that doesn't mean that there are 80 percent of American adults are stripe customers per say. Yeah, but that's you now have millions of businesses and a hundred thirty plus countries. So something happened between those two points in time. Yes, but so be easy to talk about a lot of the highlights a lot of the inflection points and we will do that but lest this appear like it has been home run after home run every time you've stepped up to bat, but I'd love to talk about if you're willing are some of the harder periods may be near death experiences moments of doubt and to make it as personal as possible, right? So not necessarily in abstract about
Company going through a tough time, but periods when you have struggled and to give us one or two examples of that and then how you kind of found your way out of that period would be I think certainly of interest in me and hopefully would help humanize the otherwise seemingly superhuman Patrick Collison. This could also be a personal period could be Club in high school college a difficult family situation could be anything. I will I'll give him this diversion person version. So so kind with those caveats on the of the stripes, I'd just the thing that I think is kind of important to communicate is despite things having been relatively smooth and that macro sense it often is just extremely hard and I remember sort of early on after I'm after one particular meeting back in
I don't know 2011-2012 like just after the meeting the API broke and so the API application programming interface. Could you just yeah, it's all right, the course try payments engine broke and so our customers just couldn't get paid and couldn't accept hymns from their customers and you know, we didn't have many customers back then. Maybe there were a hundred or something. But but yeah, there was still a hundred businesses. It felt like a huge deal and and you know, we fixed it. It was only down for me 30 minutes or something. But I remember feeling really bad about that. And then I just remember kind of wasn't like it was something had a particularly special at that day. But remember just kind of I guess reflecting on the sort of enormity of the challenges that you know, we would face in the future and all the work. We still have to do and all the stuff that was still broken and all the people we had to hire and all the customers we have to
It's to use us that we had not yet convinced and I was just going this moment to vertigo. And I mean, I just remember being kind of immensely dispirited and kind of talking to John about well, it was the really actually any point during this and again, what's kind of important to me about that moment is not the kind of things were actually all that bad but kind of the opposite objectively they were fine that day wasn't really much worse than the previous day. But I think the kind of this kind of inevitable thing when you're creating something where on the one hand you have to be kind of very optimistic because if you weren't optimistic, he wouldn't bother doing this especially in the face of such hardship and uncertainty. You also have two very pessimistic because you have to I mean, there are tons of problems and you have to be kind of very kind of tuned to spotting them so you can go fix them. And so you kind of exist in this kind of superposition this juxtaposition of kind of pessimism and optimism
You're kind of an extreme and both axes and that's just like a weird psychological State and to remain in it. As you must for kind of many years is it's just not normal and you're kind of you're always have necessarily over extrapolating from limited data because again you kind of should be and that like, you know, one particular customer decides not to use you or one particular person leaves the company or just like some small thing happens, but you kind of have to be really asking yourself. Well, is this a trend is there has something changed is something systemically broken whatever and because you're kind of always extrapolating from from these bad things while maintaining this kind of long-term optimism, I think that is just a recipe for for real, you know psychological hardship and you know, I don't overstate it and that the kind of all the obvious sort of them.
Acknowledgements about you know were immensely lucky among the lucky people in history to have you know food and shelter and health and all these things but you know humans hedonic Lee does the hedonic treadmill is very powerful and we rapidly adapt to kind of take all those for granted and so the fact that maybe in the scheme of things we should feel very grateful and lucky and you can kind of tell yourself this narrative to try to keep things in perspective. The reality is that it is just kind of pretty pummeling on an ongoing basis, even for stripe which perhaps from the outside might look like this kind of really neat little story there weren't too many such moments for it just seems hard that what did the conversation look like with John that day. I do you need you recall any of the specifics. I mean was it was it more commiseration so you could get out of your system where you actually talking to him to determine if I should proceed or not. What was what
Had that look like it was more of the the former like more this just sort of General dejection. We didn't seriously think about stopping I think both of us are it's less. I think we're both really determined and more. I think we're just stubborn and so the idea of stopping just it didn't seem like a just I guess I didn't feel like an option for us. I know did it determination sounds glamorous to me and I'm not sure we we have that but I think we're just dogged but but yeah, it's more like, you know, people have different kind of emotional sort of cycles and kind of his sine wave was kind of displaced from mine and so fortunately and you know, he's a pretty cheery guy that day when I was super dejected he was a in his chipper way. He was he was telling me that'll be fine. And yeah, you give it another 24 hours or something and you know, the world looks a bit different this this something you mentioned just a few moments.
I think is worth trying to reiterate to make sure I understand it which is the importance. I mean the existential importance in the case of a lot of startups of being able to remain consistently optimistic enough that you can summon the energy and doggedness to continue while also being very good at envisioning problems and worst-case scenarios and bad outcomes that you can avert them. And and yes It's Tricky. It's really tricky lutie. It's true also for yeah, go ahead. Well, I extended it's freaking it's kind of not natural and it's it's not a kind of mindset that I think most normal situations in the world kind of train you to have yeah and it can be really really stressful. This is something I've observed not only in Founders, but also in a lot of investors particularly those who can make money
By betting on in some fashion apocalyptic or Black Swan events that caused a lot of damage or that are very scary and people who are not just betting on the long side with betting on the short side. And I mean, of course we get into derivatives and stuff like that, but it's right. It's they're thinking about the edge cases that could really be. Yes catastrophic for for them and others right? Although you're saying accompany you sort of have to be kind of both the sort of super long optimistic. You know, I'm just going to buy this stock and hold it for decades traitor and you can I have to be the sort of the the catastrophic, you know, Talib style, you know, the world is going to hell in a handbasket sort of catastrophe Trader and your you kind of have to be both and that's just weird. I had I guess the thing that I think is maybe important to understand folks is it's kind of
You would have that if a company or a new effort of any sort is not going. Well. The things will feel hard and you often feel dejected and life at least insofar as work goes is not great. But the weird part is that even if things are going well and the effort or the company or whatever is succeeding things will still often not feel great. And no one's ever told me that before I started I sort of thought that well if the company succeeding then clearly it's going to be an unnecessarily fun. But at least so if it'll feel good day to day where is the actual reality is that you're always necessarily operating at the kind of outer edge of what you can handle because you know, if there was if you'd spare capacity, you just take out more and so you're kind of therefore inevitably always, you know on the cusp of feeling like you're sort of going to fall over and
Even as we record this podcast, I mean at this kind of moment, I feel sort of right on the edge of what I'm what I'm able to handle and on the one hand. I sort of I don't wish it were otherwise and that I should have enjoyed testing myself and kind of finding my limits and developing and stretching myself. But on the other hand when you stretch your muscles, that's painful. Well, it also makes me think of a conversation I had with Laird Hamilton his about one of the most legendary big-wave Surfers of all time and everywhere. I was chatting with him. He's got to be I don't know how old he is. He's one of those guys who sort of defeat defies any type of expectation of age affecting performance. I think he's in his early 50s, but still Ghost Hunt hunting for some of the biggest waves in the world. And I remember I was chatting with him at one point and he said he'd been tooling around on some easy waves earlier that day and I asked him roughly how big he thought they were.
The news guy, you know, 20 25 feet. He's like once again to 20 you can start to have fun and I'm paraphrasing here, but it's like once you get to 30s like you really like kind of want to watch yourself. It's like once you get to over 50, you're really not allowed to fall and it's when you are and I've never been in this position but having spent a lot of time around Founders and very fast growing companies, when you do have at least the perception and which I think is reflective of reality that you are effectively always on the edge of redlining because as you said if you have extra capacity you open the door to fill that capacity who are some of the people you've leaned on or who have been helpful alive or dead or otherwise, I'm not sure what otherwise would be in that case, but zombie to help you navigate this or learn how to surf that kind of wave because it is it is fucking unimaginable for most people. I've only seen it as a spectator really
What it takes to to kind of have your face pressed up against the windshield right in the in the Formula One car that is a stripe or an Uber or any of these companies. It's really hard to Fathom what it what it takes and how much resembles a professional sport. Right? So who or what has been helpful in learning to navigate that well met just before answering that to kind of add something too. We're just talking about the relates to what you just asked there's a period in my life where you know, I did feel a bit noisy lost but it certainly wasn't clear exactly what direction I was going in and so we sold our first company and I lived in Vancouver for a while. I worked for that company. I kind of
Storing some other stuff as well. This is the live good idea. Exactly. Yep, and then I moved to live with my then girlfriend in Zurich. And so I lived in Switzerland for a while and then and then I actually went back to college because I dropped out of college pretty early and when I went to school I should have thought well, maybe I want to become like a physicist or mathematician or something like that and you know, who knows how successful if at all I would have been maybe maybe I wouldn't even have made the cut but I kind of had that ambition aspiration and I sort of felt that it would start the company so early and it happened so quickly that I hadn't kind of really fully tested whether that was kind of a good idea or not. And so I went back to college for a second time to kind of do mostly math and physics and so did that and then while they're John was also in college at the same time, that's kind of when we went to start stripe, but if you'd look to that kind of two-year period it was
Drop out of college start this company moved to Vancouver moved to this other country go back to college then start another company and I can we started stripe. It did not seem very promising. I mean, it seemed like this, you know, silly little developer payments thing. And again, it was another two years before it even launched. And so maybe that whole kind of four year period I think too many people who knew me or just kind of were around like it. I'm sure it looks kind of pretty scattered kind of weirdly planned May misdirected and they wouldn't be entirely wrong. I mean I certainly was not kind of pursuing some some Grand Master Plan and I think I was actually really lucky where you know from sort of an early age. My parents were very okay with myself and John sort of charting their own course, and you know, you get these kind of real sort of Hothouse environments for there's a lot of pressure to go to the school go to this college to pursue this.
Your path whatever you really kind of feel like you're on these kind of narrow train tracks and out to the our upbringing was kind of the opposite. We're really our parents. Even when we wanted to make sort of very authentically kind of strange and surprising decisions our parents kind of supported us. And so when I was 15 year old and wanted to take a year off school to kind of just like program full-time my parents were supportive of that or when I wanted to sort of drop out of school to go take this, you know, totally different exam system. My parents were okay with that and so I we had this upbringing where our parents supported us in that way. And when in my kind of teens early 20s was kind of trying to figure out what the kind of right direction was. I wouldn't say that that was kind of a lost period but it was again it was definitely a highly exploratory one and then so just come to your question of periods of real hardship. I think a lot of people either don't get the
Fortuna T to sort of explore multiple directions like that - or the kind of either others don't give them the opportunity or they sort of they don't get to give themselves permission to just kind of have a few you know slightly last year's for the narrative isn't super clear. Those words can be hard because kind of by definition you're not exactly sure where they're going and it's very kind of disorienting to not know where your sailing and you can and do feel a bit of drift and so looking back on that. I actually feel like it was kind of really important in kind of giving me confidence in perspective. But at the time it definitely felt a bit on board. Well, I think that you I think this is really important for a number of reasons. The first is that and this is going to sound like a fortune cookie, but there is a quote. I can't I can't recall who it's attributed to I want to say Emerson but Emerson's kind of like Abraham Lincoln on the Internet. It's like everything gets a trigger. Yeah, but you know humor Oscar.
That's right. Right. So not not all not all who wander are lost. Right? So there's a difference between being lost which is you have a destination and you have gone off track or you are preoccupied with where you are currently located in don't know where you're located versus exploring and wandering the second which is I suppose more a follow-up question than a point is is this I'm very curious how your parents and maybe you could also just tell us a little bit about what your parents did professionally or how they spent their time. But how your parent what your parents did to cultivate Excellence or clear and or clear thinking without necessarily pigeonholing the direction of I that's those right is so if you if a biographer at some point is writing the story of your life, you give them unfettered access. How about they they answer that you know, what are the what are examples they might give things your parents said
Annual routines that you guys had or whatever anything that comes to mind. Well, I'm we were kind of we grew up in very rural Ireland right the kind of the middle of the countryside surrounded by a kind of farms and Fields and you know, we were kind of really we had to kind of figure out ourselves was going to be entertaining and interesting and fun. It wasn't just going to provided to us by the environment. And so we kind of grew up as these sort of free-range children and we're lucky where there were lots of books in the house and we read those pretty voraciously our parents. I guess I would say that the thing that our parents did is the there's a million things but the kind of the two that really three that stand out are they kind of showed us the world they
Took us to the library every day. They sort of took us traveling in the Summers. They if they were interesting guests coming over for dinner. We weren't kind of you know, despatched, you know upstairs or told to get an early dinner before the adults came. We were sort of thrust right into the middle so they can really took a serious and Shadows the world. The second thing is they they really give us kind of agency on autonomy and could have treated us as adults and you know those kind of went to ways and that on the one hand they give us a lot of freedom on the other hand. They kind of expected quite a lot of us. And so our youngest brother had to get some pretty major surgery in the u.s. Back when John and I were I don't know maybe 10 or 12 or thereabouts and so they were gone to the US for several weeks maybe more than a month and we were left mostly alone for for that month. We did a neighbor who checked in a nice everyday and you know made sure things were fine, but we spent most of the time of
When you were in school and you know, they from myself and John standpoint that was fantastic. You know, we really we loved the freedom. But of course, they reciprocally expected us, you know, not too kind of not to give them cause to regret it. And and then the third thing is whenever we can have expressed interest in something they they really sort of tried to find Opportunities to kind of you know, when there's a small shoot of Interest they look for opportunities to water it, but they never sort of thrust those opportunities on us right never felt that kind of or rather. There are thrust the interest on us. I never felt that I was sort of following a track laid down by somebody else and remember kind of randomly mentioning when I was 12 or 13 that learning. I don't remember why I felt this but the learning ancient Greek seemed interesting.
I think I just like read some Homer something. I mean a translation and and that under the language seems interesting and I was just you know saying that as some kind of random throwaway remark, I guess the way it kid does and sure enough my mom went and found somebody at like a literally a local Monastery who's willing to teach ancient Greek and and then she told me about this and so for two years, I went to that Monastery once a week after school and like learned ancient Greek and that interest never went super far. I haven't read much ancient Greek in the last 10 years immediately, but you know, yeah, but it was the kind of thing they did and you know, obviously some other interest like programming, you know, they kind of really took hold in a deeper way and so, you know, I don't have kids today, but I do kind of reflect a lot on the kind of childhood we had because it was pretty different in most
Regards to some of the childhoods of the people around us and like especially when I got to college in the u.s. It was sort of so far and for me the idea that like people were so Laden with extracurriculars and sort of Furnishing their college resumes, you know from age 12 or earlier and the kind of the period of sort of teenager hood and Adolescence was kind of so intense whereas for myself and John and really felt kind of exploratory and that we were given a that our parents were kind of life coaches or Senators while we were yeah exactly while we were roaming but the kind of all the yeah exactly. I think that they were playing a supporting role rather than you know, having us be kind of you know with these friends in college. I felt like they were kind of at the front of a locomotive and the locomotive is speeding along down the tracks and they're just kind of hanging on for dear life being, you know, pushed Along by
By the the little cattle protector when when you had these dinners, this is something that is that has popped up a few times in conversations with a number of folks on the podcast that parents had them included in specifically dinner discussions when interesting house guests would come over that's interesting. I never yeah, that's interesting that that's coming out if it's come up a few times not dozens of times but enough where it peaked my curiosity to dig into it a bit. Would your parents encourage you to ask questions with Jay it was there and actually just so people can paint a picture in their own minds what did both of your parents work one of them would they do professionally or how do they spend their time? Just so we have a little cognac
So both of them worked our dad was for childhood ran a small can Lakeside Hotel twenty four bedrooms. And so he was kind of it was a few miles from my house and he spent a lot of time there and of course for us as kids. I mean, it was super exciting. I mean this hotel was like this is this giant playground as far as we were concerned, you know, I think the staff didn't appreciate that but I'm we loved roaming around us and going and sliding around the, you know, polished function room floor and all the rest and our mom started to corporate training company back right around the time. I was born I think she she had left her previous job and then I was born and you know, I think after a couple weeks you decided. Oh, I don't know this kid, isn't that interesting and so from the house she decide to start this company that I would kind of provide them corporate quality management training and so he probably heard these acronyms like ISO 9000 these kind of certification programs that
Yeah, and so after all these American multinational setting up shop in Ireland and it's got a lot of appetite for making sure they were kind of doing things properly and well and so on and so she's so this business again providing this training and so they see all through my childhood. She was running this business well for much of it out of our house and then they kind of got it got a separate office, but sort of it was it was always part of the picture and so kind of from our standpoint starting a company was really not some kind of strange foreign thing. It was it was it was pretty normal. I think whatever your parents do is kind of almost from the child's perspective is just kind of is normal and I'm sure if our parents have been astronauts, you know being an astronaut would just seem like a totally normal career. And so so that's what they did it need mentioned travel you. Could you was it could is there a particular trip that comes to mind and I'd be cute there are many different ways to travel and they're just as there are many different ways to
Of and choose places to live and so on so we probably won't have time to get into how your parents ended up where you grew up if they were started there or ended up there which is a whole separate side of things. But yeah, could you describe perhaps a particularly memorable trip sure and how you traveled with your parents like what that looked like and yeah, so so we went almost every summer camping in Europe and so we'd take the ferry to Europe which from Ireland obviously isn't that far. I'm and we'd bring you know a some tensor little Caravan and we just go kind of driving around the continent staying at all these different campgrounds and Europe has turns out to kind of have all these really great nice campgrounds almost every town has one and so we stay a few days here maybe week there and so on and you'll be friends and
Germany and Austria and Hungary and Italy and whatever and I have these kind of incredibly fond memories of those strips and I mean, they'd be like a month-long and and they were great I guess because they're kind of long enough that you don't feel kind of pressed for time or like okay today. We got to go see, you know, this that and the other you kind of shifted into just kind of camping mode and and they're not changing scenery environment the Did you sort of just got to take a whole lot of different things in I mean, honestly the other thing that's great about them is even though being in Ireland there wasn't kind of a whole lot of distraction real to just kind of read a lot or kind of focus on a run things on these trips, you could focus and read even more and so honestly the most kind of vivid memories I have mostly of these trips. It's not sort of going to see the such and such or so and so it's like particular books that I read.
And I mean, I remember we can load up the car and the Caravan which is like heaps and heaps of books. And you know, you have these long drives like 8 hours 10 hours and just kind of reading in the car the whole way as I'm listening to your stories and more about your childhood and so on a lot of which is brand new to me. I'm simultaneously looking at a page on your website Patrick Collison.com forward slash advice and this this may not apply to everybody in my listenership. I think a lot of them do apply to many different age ranges, but it starts with if you're if you're 10 to 20, these are prime here. So a lot of folks will fall outside of that, but I wanted to touch on a few of these sure and one is
All right. So the these two kind of go together, but one is make things and then there's a line following it but then following up on that as more broadly. Nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself a large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken internalizing this and practice coming up with your own worldview. Yep, the correlation between it and those around you shouldn't be too strong unless you think you were especially Lucky in your initial conditions or this is my language. Now, you choose your environment like a place like San Francisco or whatever. It might be but the the I suppose even then if the correlation is too high, you should be careful Duty for start for sure. But the some Bank my question here is going to be a little Meandering so bear with me but okay, there are people who seem to not put not care what other people think and develop their own worldviews because they have a predisposition.
In that direction in the sense that you can have a very good basketball player. There are certain skills. You can work on to become better basketball player. But if they say you should try as hard as possible to be tall. It's going to be difficult to change that attribute. There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are somewhere on the Spectrum. Let's say and have may actually have diagnosable say Asperger's then which in some previous times could have been a very maladaptive trade. Yes, that would have been a selection criteria for removal from the gene pool that is now in this new context. In fact in some instances a competitive Advantage because they're sort of lack of absorbing World Views from others or feeling that pressure enables them to come up with their own perspective in orientation. So,
So if we filter those people out because they may be similarly difficult to imitate in a sense as a basketball player is to imitate in their height. How are there any books any documentaries any approaches or just any kind of mental models or anything at all that people can use to internalize thinking for themselves to to practice coming up with their own worldview? Like what is what are your thoughts? Well this kind of the this is the big question, right? And yeah, they're kind of two halfs about what a heuristic she should have and use for going to who and what to listen to and then secondly separately. How do you how do you think for yourself and I think okay. I'll start enumerating some
She eristic sort Rex. I'm not sure this is a complete answer but the first is when you see a smart person.
Holding a point of view and especially strongly holding a point of view this kind of difference to your own rather than trying to figure out how the wrong trying to I mean that's valuable but you'll inevitably do that. You're kind of your emotional brain will ensure you do trying to figure out how to write like what is a sensible worldview in which what they believe or what they're saying actually kind of does make sense and that's I mean the right but sort of trying to figure out like if they're not stupid, why would they believe this and so, you know, I I'm personally very in favor of kind of openness to immigration. I've obviously benefited from it myself. I think they should be more of it in the world, but I think we can just kind of dismiss people who oppose immigration as kind of nativist bigots. I think we got to have to ask the questions and just try to
Stand well, what could or would cause somebody to Harbor concerns there? Right so that that's why instead of trying to figure out what world view helps have you make sense a second one is and we kind of touched on this at the beginning of the conversation. Just exposing yourself to more World Views because I think a lot of people well everyone finds it more comfortable to be around kind of views that a chord with your own and models that Accord with your own and so there's a kind of deliberate seeking out of discomfort and you know, I do some of this myself in kind of who I follow on Twitter and what I read and even by some time with were sort of trying to make sure that like, I expose myself to people who have kind of smart thoughtful and really like pretty different perspectives on important matters. Can you have to pause because this just seems to fertile to let go quickly are there.
People on Twitter you can give us examples. You just said they're smart and thoughtful. So you're the it's not you know, you're already complimented that yeah, right. No, we can also bookmark and come back to it. If it's hard to come up with. Yeah. I mean, I've we can think of a few let me think that I can come back now and then but it's a good question and maybe the other one is you can General heuristic or habit here or something is just to not get mad and to not get offended in that, you know outrage and a fence and anger. Are there sometimes useful of course, but I think they're sort of useful they're less useful than
Well, they're over-utilized. They're not useful as often as they are invoked and and I think for whatever reason the kind of the ability to not take offense and to kind of to sort of inspect and to try to understand and even try to kind of really extrapolate from an idea or a set of ideas or a worldview without taking offense at us. That's not something that for whatever reason is kind of really valued in our culture. But I think it's actually super important. Can you as as has been said can you run an idea in emulation in your head like in in computers people talk about, you know running running the ends, right? I mean AWS you upload your software your code. They run it on their servers, but they run it in emulation and they kind of in a little sandbox to
Sure that it can kind of break out and affect other users applications as a kind of similarly. Can you run an idea and scrutinizes and inspectors and kind of follow its consequences and you know without it going to bleeding out into kind of the rest of your brain and sort of infecting your whole world view. I think the ability to do that without kind of getting angry or taking offense is really super powerful because if you can do that, you can then afford to kind of way you can be less careful about what ideas you you inspect and scrutinize and so you can just kind of you can be much more sort of far-reaching and kind of broadly ranging and then are there any people in your life or who you're aware of you particularly respect for being good at
Doing this doing this meaning being non emotionally reactive to opposing opposing viewpoints and I should say also I'm looking at your followers on Twitter which people can find at Patrick. See that's your account and I just want to give an example of to contrast see if one harsh sikka as ikka yes, bio applying biological constraints to building intelligent robust and generalizable systems at Harvard at Georgia Tech at UC San Diego right next to at reloj Almighty Almighty yellow and bio is Almighty reload The Hustler say hello to the bad guy this am a bad guy dot dot dot so those are a lot of a lot of professors a lot of researchers. Also, here's a friend of mine you follow Graham Duncan really interesting guy. I assure you these. Yeah, he's awesome. I made a list of some people I follow at Patrick Collison.com
/ people and I would say that all of them are excellent at this at sort of sort of not taking offense and I thought of trying to find the best in some particular idea. We're trying to find whatever truth is in it, but I would say as a general matter they are and why is it when I look at some of your posts? I also have a Twitter list called reading which is basically the the same list butts of an easy easy to follow format. And so, you know anyone can go follow that list and I think actually a reasonable ever people now do and you seem to whether it's reading or people have an intense interest in looking at your Patrick Collison.com for such people right now. Yeah, you do have some grape. John Arnold is definitely worth checking out for a lot of folks. You will not recognize that name, of course.
A brand a lot lots of lots of good people on this list. So encourage people to check this out but coming back to one name that popped up and I was looking on your Twitter account, which I think you also recently shared pseudo Erasmus to tourism is so economic history and development economics. This feed contains, no current events. No political news new culture and no capital letters history of economic thought why do you seem so interested in economics economic progress in some cases?
Economic history certainly, it can seem very Niche but I suspect there's a lot more to to that labor repression in the Endo. Japanese divergences the pin tweet by suit Erasmus lat why read so much of this type of stuff because it's so important in that the arguably the single most important thing kind of about our lives compared to other lives than lived in human history is that we of the immense Good Fortune to have been born in wealthy societies and that has had so many consequences in our lives. Right? I mean, it means that our you know, our parents are way more likely to be alive. Our siblings are far more likely to be alive we get to work on things. We finds it way more interesting than you tilling in the field or forging for bushes. It means we're sort of exposed to kind of the full or a more complete picture of
Kind of variety and complexity and Fascination fascinating material at the world. Hey, I don't need to obviously enumerate all of this but just like it's astounding compared to that of all humans who ever lived just how amazingly lucky we are. And again that luck is is we were born into a wealthy society. And so I think kind of one of the most urgent and important moral questions is why doesn't everyone get to do that and how can we change the world such that more people do last week. I was in Africa. I was in countries including Senegal and Ethiopia and Rwanda and those countries are obviously far less wealthy than the US and the people there have far less opportunity and their lives are far less comfortable. And and so I think there's a real moral question. What can
We do to put them on a on an equal footing with us and indeed. How can we raise the water line for all of us such that, you know, while our lives are amazing compared to the people who lived before us. There's still tons of terrible things that happen, you know, people die of cancer and people die of death caused by pollution and you know, while some people in society today get, you know, fantastic education's and have the Good Fortune to have, you know, great colleagues and meaningful work, you know, a lot of people don't etcetera etcetera. And so I see kind of economics and economic history as being really a kind of moral anthropology and sort of cultural analysis and structural analysis of well. How do we solve this centrally foundationally this question that the
Takes Primacy and if you if I want to thin slices a little bit and dig dig on this because it's it's something that I've thought a lot about without any concrete conclusions and I bounced around quite a bit and I'll explain what I mean by that. So the the question that I'll want to ask but I'll give some some background on my personal experience is if we are using a term like economic progress or economic Prosperity what the component pieces are of that that have the the greatest benefits and the fewest side effects. And the reason I
Phrase it that way is I've also spent some time in Africa not in not a certainly I would I would doubt in as many countries as you have but if time in Kenya and spent time in Ethiopia and in Ethiopia was mostly in the Tigre region in some very very poor areas and I was chatting with a lot of the folks we interacted with those whose those who spoke English or those with whom I could communicate through translator and something that's one thing that struck me in Ethiopia was how much people smiled right? That's now that doesn't mean they don't need clean drinking water does not mean they wouldn't benefit from Footwear in some instances. There are all sorts of they're all sorts of not just conference but necessities and infrastructure that would almost certainly have tremendous upside and benefits with
Very few downside. Yes possibilities and I was talking to some people who lived in today about how happy Ethiopian seem to be and I heard on several occasions. It wasn't just one. These are in different locations. People say, oh, yeah, people are really happy until they get TV and I asked them why that was and they said well once we get TV, we they didn't use these words exactly. But in effect once we can see the Kardashians and all of the amazing things and toys and cars and and fashion options that all these other people have we become dissatisfied with where we are and what we have so that kind of stuck with me and I didn't have a resolution to that necessarily but how do you how do you think about which components you're trying to solve for or to itemize?
So I think happiness is certainly kind of a tricky measure, right? And as you say this kind of this sort of sociological and kind of comparative version of it and you know, the phenomenon is seen we're kind of to some degree. I guess. It's another version or another way of saying what you just alluded to which is the kind of the happiness you have with your level of wealth is kind of a function of the wealth of those around you and so if you find out about more people who are above you and some income table that that might actually kind of depress your your happiness slightly. However, it's also kind of pretty robustly the case that you know, there are some things that are just kind of absolute inputs into happiness and that you know, you kind of your health or chronic pain or whether your kids die or not or whatever, you know, these really do matter right? And yeah, I think in any example of
VI meanwhile kind of on the one hand, I think you know as I guess you saw, you know, it's not like this is a country where sort of everyone is sort of in the Perpetual depth of Despair. It does rank in the in the bottom half of sort of you know, Global happiness surveys and actually Max Roser has this he does a lot of kind of a data visualization around kind of development economics and he has this wonderful visualization this kind of scatter plot of Happiness against kind of per capita income and sure enough what you see is it's certainly not a you know, a perfect correlation. There are all these other factors would be kind of cultural effects or these again comparative questions and so on but broadly speaking the correlation really is very very strong. And so I guess another version of me the kind of complexity or getting at is when you look at this kind of these intertemporal comparisons when you sort of look back,
At how people are happy. They reported themselves as being you know, 60 years ago, you know, obviously they had kind of you know, inferior Health outcomes or didn't have many Leisure options or they couldn't travel as much or whatever. So, you know, they're kind of lives in some objective level were worse, but you know, their happiness scores aren't that bad because you know, I guess you know on some level they kind of didn't know what missing but I see that as more being a more being something that's tricky about happiness surveys than something about kind of fundamental human well-being in that if I like the fact that our Base Line shifts as we realize that better is possible does not mean that the the gains are illusory and if you know if
If half of my kids died, but I still scored myself as being pretty happy because I didn't even realize that some that not having that happen. It was even an option. You know, I such that when that problem was solved my kind of self-reported level didn't change that much as I you know adjusted to The New Normal, I don't think that means that that gain that Improvement is not very very real. Oh sure totally and and I was another that's you're saying I know I think I think the core Point you're making is about the kinds of complexities happiness surveys think is 100% right? Yeah. It's very very slippery. And she's got a Scott Scott Alexander slicer codex has a really good blog post about just like the trickiness of these kind of Happiness surveys where I think the core message and data from them is kind of correct, but but kind of a lot of specific I think interpretations and kind of comparisons about to make our a little bit fraud.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean it's not too I don't want to cast aspersions on all social sciences or anything like that. But a lot of it gets very squishy and it's so highly multivariate when you're trying to assess something like this in the field that even the definitions by which the absolute laser surveys are being conducted get very very subjective and Porsha. I was looking at a recent National Geographic. I suppose I would call it's a pole it was a reasonably well constructed for what I could tell to try to assess the happiest places on Earth and what I found striking about it was was was not necessarily of the some of the frontrunners. Although I did find how different they were interesting in the sense that you have. Let's say Denmark Singapore, which is particularly interesting because it's so brand-new in a lot of respects it was
A grand experiment and Costa Rica very different places what I've but what I found striking was that Bhutan which is talked about all the time as among for lack of a better term kind of hippie new-age circles as being very forward-thinking because they focus on what was it like gross national happiness instead of GDP is in fact, one of the most unhappy places and that something like gross national happiness can be used as kind of a don't look at this thing in front of you look over here because we're focusing a bit can be looked it can be used as a distracting factor from the from the things that are actually quantifiably bad. Yes. So there's that I would have you found I mean in so we've talked about the suppose the certain aspects of the
Wide Divergence of economic Prosperity that's across the world. My question would then be now what right? What are what are the levers to pull what actually matters. I mean, there are a lot of people squandering a lot of attention and energy trying to fix this in a thousand ways 900 of which probably aren't going to amount to much. What are the what are the Archimedes levers in a situation like this? Well, I guess the first thing I'd say is I think that questions you just asked is the big question. I think we should all be obsessed with like I think you know, the I think you should ask every guest that question. I think people should be people in positions of influence or or or they can have a great impact like they should be obsessed with it. It is the it's it is an issue of true moral importance. I don't think there's going to be any silver.
That's and kind of panaceas. And I mean obviously stripe is kind of you know one iron in that fire. We're with stripe, you know, we hope to contribute when we frame our mission is to grow the GDP of the internet. I mean can a very directly around economic growth and like on some level that sense pretty arcane, but I think there are many other companies that sort of are you know framing their mission relative to GDP, but I mean, it really does get back to this this idea. We've been discussing where I think that's actually like a very urgent cause I think roughly speaking you can sort of break it down into ways this kind of actually maybe maybe three ways where this kind of how do you raise the level of countries that are going to be behind the frontier? So Emerging Markets developing countries, how do you raise them to kind of where we are today? And there were these kind of tantalizing examples that like that is actually possible and
You look at you mentioned Singapore. You look at Hong Kong Taiwan South Korea to some degree of Vietnam. Of course China. The China still has quite a ways to go but I mean through these amazing examples of countries that have really transformed themselves and remarkably short period of time South Korea is perhaps one of the best example just in terms of the magnitude of the change in like just a couple decades and so we might think like perhaps if you if you look at Africa and kind of no other countries existed you might say well just inevitably it takes centuries for this catch up to happen and you know, maybe we can kind of accelerated a little bit but like, you know, there's there's no way this can happen overnight that's empirically not true. We have these examples of countries in which it happened, you know in a kind of brand Arc of History sense happened essentially overnight. And so what is it about South Korea that kind of made that possible and can we enact the same transformation?
Night in Egypt or in Ethiopia. So I think that's kind of one dimension that question. I think the other dimension is how do we how do we advance at the frontier? And so if you think about the Western Europe or North America or Singapore, Japan, whatever how do we how do we make progress here? And I think so much of that is how do we how do we enable new things to happen? How do we have new technology get deployed? How do we have entrepreneurs start more companies? How do we unleash the potential of more people who want to do more weird things how to make sure that when somebody spots an opportunity for improvement that doesn't get kind of squished by the kind of you know, stultifying sort of deceleration of the status quo. How do we make sure that it gets kind of encouraged and Amplified and again obviously kind of stripe is an effort in this space as indeed to is is Pioneer and the third one is well, how do we how do we just generate new knowledge? And how do we you know,
Stand the world more deeply and is what is it intrinsically possible so that you know, we've more buttons to push on the on the sort of on the switchboard. And so I kind of break it down in those are the three ways and I think they're all kind of quite different questions and all really incredibly important. I agree that they're very important and I'd love to revisit her second. If you have any thoughts South Korea, it's come up a few times what what are some of the observations you've made or things that you think are interesting about South Korea like the anything any specifics of what they've done. Well, ironically, it's actually the it's the richest country in the world by GDP that I've not been to so so, you know, I caveat my answer with widths.
Bad having said that there's actually really good book on this topic called how Asia works by Joe stud. Well, I believe and basically he try and track of exactly this question of why you know, why did South Korea and Taiwan and China and Vietnam and and so forth. Why did they diverge from Philippines and from Indonesia and you know to a significant degree from India and and so forth and basically the answer he gives and he has commercials going to fairly compelling evidence for it is is the following and land reform protected but competitive industrial and kind of export Industries and then third tight control of the consumer credit sector and out of the seems like a very kind of, you know, arbitrary basket of things, but he makes a pretty strong case for it.
And you know just to provide a little bit of color and that like the idea. Is that kind of first you want to make sure that people own their own land so they can kind of farm and more effectively they can kind of reap the rewards the fruits of their own labor. And so that kind of gives you this immediate bump in kind of national income when people, you know can sort of invest in something they really own themselves. The second thing is well, most of these countries have no kind of meaningful, you know export Industries or these kind of you know, value added export Industries. And so you kind of want it you encourage the creation of like a national car company or something which of course South Korea successfully did or maybe do some Electronics manufacturing or whatever and you want to subsidize that but you do have to force them to compete internationally because they just kind of if you just protect them and they just serve the domestic Market you'll just end up with worse and less efficient version of stuff that exists in the rest of the world. So you gotta force him to compete and the third one is you want to kind of restrain the consumer credit industry. So there's that sort of rather than you know giving credit to Consumers.
To go and you know spend it on Leisure or whatever it is. I guess the consumers I choose to do. Did you kind of direct all that towards industrialization economic progress and said of catch-up growth with the rest of the world and then once you catch up, you know, then maybe you should kind of give it to Consumers because you know, who else are you going to give it to you? You reach the frontier, but the thesis of the book is that kind of raining it in in the development phases has really served this country as well. So that is basically the prescription as Joe against thud well lays it out and I'm no expert here. But I really spent quite a bit of times that are trying to better understand this question and it's certainly the best cut that I've seen another one that's going to worth mentioning is James Fallows were a piece of the Atlantic back in the 90s called it's a called how the world works but it's um, title like that. But if you search kind of James Fallows trade and if you include list this German Economist as a search term then you'll
- that's again care about it's basically about the the South Korea question great and I'll put all of these links or been a few things that have come up with a reference checks required. So for people listening I will have my team check on all that stuff and we'll put links in the show notes. So you'll be able to find those teamed up log for such podcast on South Korea just to add the may be ridiculous sidebar. Another head-scratcher about South Korea is that for many years in the last decade they have produced the best break dancers in the world and people who are curious to see what that looks like can check out b-boy pocket or some ridiculous footage and how that came to be is also a gigantic mystery to me, but I'm hoping that perhaps I can find online. There is a I want to say the history of Japan in nine minutes something like that on you.
Cube which accomplishes that feet by omitting most proper nouns particularly names of people but it gives you a really nice synopsis. I'm going to try to find something similar for South Korea and put it in the show notes. So we have just a little bit of time left what I would love to talk about because this is something that I feel like I'm pretty good at and this is decision making but I still know there is a ton of room for improvement and I in the process of preparing for this conversation came across a transcript of a conversation in which you talked about increasing the speed of decision making and it made me think a little bit of I think it's the Eisenhower Matrix of sort of prioritizing case of important, but not timely quadrant and so on but could you talk about
Making your your framework for making decisions or how you have cultivated making faster decisions that this is I think so important and it's along with the the involvement of now successful entrepreneurs as kids at the dinner table the focus on making Fast decisions, even if there's like a 10% or more error rate pops up a lot like Reid Hoffman LinkedIn Fame another kind of good example of that. I would love to hear you talk that talk us through that because on a day-to-day basis. I know that's important and yet I just I need a kind of methodical way to practice it more if that makes sense. Yes. Let me think for a second. I think that I actually think that decision making is probably a little bit over.
Rated as as kind of a question in that or an area of study in that investors. Obviously. This is their job, right and that's kind of all they can do in some sense invest or not and you know fine if there are, you know, certain kinds investors get actually help the companies they invest in and so they have kind of other levers of the disposal become in some simplified model. It's like an idiot click the button or not. You pull a lever or not and I actually think that kind of in our lives things rarely have that character. Sometimes you have a true binary decision, right? Like do I go to this college or that college do I take this job offer or not? And it sort of it sort of an investing or investment like decision, but it's not usually that and I think that the kind of the question I would sort of encourage people to kind of think more about is how do I get to make
Better decisions as in how like, how do I make sure the decisions? I'm confronted with end up being better like the you know, it's not like how should I choose the option A and B, but how do I make sure that both options A and B are as good as possible and it's also c d and e and at those options are great too. And that's about sort of how do you how do you explore the space to make sure that you sort of actually well just to kind of return to maybe the example, we just mentioned it's like do I go to this college or that college? It's I mean, there's also a see there which is well, should I go to college or it's you know, should I should I become a doctor or a dentist? But you know, maybe the answer is that you know, you should you should become a biochemist. And so the way I I find myself in conversations peoples are really trying to push them. It's lessons of how do you make a decision?
And and more about how do you jolt yourself out of the kind of particular kind of furrows that you're in and realize the possibility space and the world just so much bigger than perhaps people are thinking about it. That's so I mean, it happens all of us happens to me because I've your horizons narrow you get stuck in your existing models. You kind of get used to conceiving of the world and the options in front of you in a particular way and it's more about how do you repeatedly pull yourself out of that? How do you then other questions you ask? Are there any thinks I think certain certain people are great at this like I have a friend Michael Nielsen. And what was the last name Nielsen and iel ICN and he's just exceptionally good at sort of, you know, your sort of you know thinking well, should I go up or down?
He's just great at sort of pointing out all the different ways in which you go sideways. It's like or you know, your sort of living in flatlined on this kind of two-dimensional plane and he points out maybe you could go up and and so I guess the best. Yeah the the best ways that I found our sort of particular people people who just sort of seemed to think laterally and kind of in my head. They're kind of thinking sideways and I think the second best way is exposing yourself to the kind of more perspective and ideas, you know and all the ways we've kind of already discussed but I think finding the people who just think a bit divergently the returns are really high and I think having that sort of little board of directors around you that's kind of an imperfect analogy because it's not like there's a specific set for me. I kind of got tend to go to different kinds of people for different kinds of issues and I thought like they actually any formal power obviously, but
And of that notion of there being these sources of perspective that are quite different to you. I think that's I think that's just really very powerful. I think valuing those people and and building those relationships really pays off. There's there's a this you mentioning that the peer group or virtual or real board of directors with Divergent thought process has made me think of a book that really helped me a long time ago. I've been meaning to revisit it but it's actually a combination of two books and I don't know how well these would Age if I were to pick them up now for where I am, but I would honestly like 15 or 20 years ago found them. Very very helpful Edward de Bono is the author there's one book. I want to say it's lateral thinking the other was something along the lines of the the six thinking hats and the the conceit are the premise behind the lat.
Is that you create a virtual table of advisers who represent different person a different extreme perspective, right? So you might have a pessimist you might have the innovator you might have the fill in the blank and there are a set of questions and priorities that each of those have so you run your situation through the lens of each of those thinking hats and I found that tremendously valuable for yes as you put it getting out of flat land. Well and the amazing thing is well I read about this study. I have not confirmed whether or not it has replicated. But the idea that people can improve their own decision-making by simply choosing other people. I mean basically exactly along the lines of what you just said and imagining what they would say, like specific other people imagining what they
Say and then averaging over the responses, but it's like a really amazing fact because of course this is all occurring in your own hedge and to the idea that by kind of just simulating other people and then again kind of brings it this kind of averaging computation over the responses. That's what she better is really like a pretty trippy thought and yet I mean it kind of makes sense to you right because you can actually for certain people predict. I think with relatively good accuracy what they're likely to say that's kind of a way of getting out of your own biases totally. And in fact, I haven't done the averaging of responses, but I do have a number of friends who have very well-developed characteristics. I would like to develop more myself and I was one of them who comes to mind is Matt mullenweg the great seas amazing guy CEO of a company called automatic matto automatic if people can put the two together now, so Matt mullenweg automatic and any case
Brilliant guy not to be confused with octo Matic but Matt mullenweg automatic is way way way more successful than automatic arrest. So Matt, Matt mullenweg is one of the calmest people on average I've ever met and this is particularly noticeable when he is going through circumstances or encountering business situations or personal situations that would elicit a really strong emotional response from most people. I know even high-achieving people so I very often when I am feel myself on the verge of getting spun up about a given situation will ask myself. What would Matt say? Yes. Yes because I've had him talked me off the ledge so many times away from making rash. Ultimately. We would have been really bad decisions often.
Some type of quick emotional response to yes, who knows what it could have been anything. And so those I have found that really useful and I've done that also with people like Richard Fineman for instance. Yes, surely. I think it's but surely you're joking. Mr. Find the remote my favorite books of all time. So does graphed it does not have to be someone, you know in a direct personal sense, but it helps us if it is someone who you have you feel you know, well, right. Yeah, and so I'm glad you mentioned that because I've personally used that mat for whatever reason I suppose for many reasons tends to be one I go to a lot because I wouldn't say that calmness is always my defining strong suit. Yeah. No, I think having those that that Pantheon of people both kind of people you actually know and
And sort of you know people, you know from afar and maybe the living maybe they're dead. It's just super powerful and I guess there's something about kind of us as humans. Where were sort of uniquely well adapted to being influenced by and understanding other humans and so the sort of rather than I think thinking that's of decision-making purely this kind of abstract science, but actually embracing the fact that it has this kind of deeply human character to it and you can really kind of use that to your advantage and you know it I'm sure many I know many guests in the show have talked about the importance of kind of being deliberate and intentional and kind of selecting your peer group and the people who influence you as an you know, one thing you can do is you can sort of try to make sure the people around you don't influence you too much and that you can have our you know, truly original and come up with their own thoughts and so on or you can embrace the fact that they do and they inevitably will and just be careful.
Who they are and try to make sure they'll shape you instead of ways and directions as you want to be shaped and I think that's both more effective, but also want to see a more fulfilling way to go about it. And I I want to confess also that I thought when you were talking about binary decisions first, whether it be investing or say college where I thought you might go which I'm glad you didn't because now we have more to discuss is that there are many decisions where you cannot possibly make an informed right decision based on complete information and it oh, yeah, and and that's part of the reason why I find Eisenhower very interesting to study is that he had a lot of military experience in which case you cannot you do not have the luxury of taking forever to gather information to make a decision and in many
Cases you you the only way you can have more complete information is to make what might be yes the wrong decision and then and then course correct? Yeah, exactly. And this is back to this point. I think of your you're dead right to kind of like this and I think it's back to this idea that just try to get better try to get yourself into a position in which you can make a better decision. And one way you can do that is by kind of exploring for more options right. Now. Another way you can do that is just make the decision and like remake it if you have to because that can the remaking of us can often be a better decision because you'll have much better information once it's augmented with or once you have the kind of additional information that hey this Branch really does not look promising and I know that because I tried it for two months and again, I think another way in which the kind of framework of sort of optimizing decision making can be kind of a little bit harmful is and it sort of characterizes or because it focuses on the
Of the decision itself or as who cares you don't necessarily need to be sort of that good a decision making if you sort of get really good at re making the decisions when and as necessary, you know, you mentioned that you know, I fly, you know both John and I've been flying for more than 10 years and when you're when you're flying a landing, you're always off track always off track and you know, if you if so there was a big discussion of like, how do you make sure that you get established unlike precisely the right Glide slope when you start now, I don't think that really be that productive. I think we sort of pretty frustrating instead. It's all about like the constant feedback and course and error correction. And I think that's kind of as a general matter a better model for life and that even a lot of the decisions that look pretty trapped or may not necessarily be there's a really good book that I very highly recommend called the inner game of tennis kind of killer.
Timothy going right? Yeah, exactly and you know, obviously one of the kind of General messages that book is that so much of doing things. Well is about being really good at seeing just what is happening and kind of then sort of training your conscious and subconscious to kind of make the requisite Corrections and that intuition really resonated me. I'm so glad you mentioned that and it it's reinforced. I think a directional change for me or not. Not really it's not a directional change. It's a it's like reformatting of the thinking about the problem right? Because you could have the best Solutions imaginable for the wrong problems and you're not going to get where you want to go in my case. Exactly. I think I focused excessively on getting better at decision making Without Really refining that to say that perhaps the better question to ask is how can I get better?
At or better could mean faster develop more confidence in experimenting very quickly and then guess undoing or redoing the decision because that is that is for instance. I've eaten the last year focused on getting very good at renegotiating commitments, which I think for a long time philosophically or morally I was just an object to it until I realized that all of the people I know and say all but most who are very kind of Paragons of execution will occasionally just say fuck I bit off more than I can chew. I need to go back and renegotiate some of these I need to go back and have uncomfortable conversations and white my calendar of the handful of things that I committed to six months ago because it just does I have more information now, it does not make sense. Yep. Yep. Yep, and they'll the kind of hyperbolic discounting that we engage in with regard to our future selves and over-commitment students. Ooh and all the rest and I think also well, this is another I think fabulous book the kind of touches on some of this.
The Art of Doing science and during by Richard Hamming the eye of human artistic science and engineering yes, that's right and the last chapter especially when the whole book to some degree but especially the last chapter is I think really applicable to and relevant to really almost anyone at the last chapter is called you and your research actually have a talk that I'm sure a lot of people listening to the show have have previously kind of read or heard but a hemming worked at Bell labs and he in the book kind of often quotes insights John tukey this amazing guy who's of also worked at Bell labs and is the sort of father of data visualization and like a lot of kind of data visualizations and analyses that kind of were familiar with the kind of we think of as being standard know John tukey actually invented but there's this kind of two key line that it's far better to have an approximate answer to the right.
Question, which is often vague than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. And again, I think this kind of gets back to the same idea that it's kind of somehow more important be kind of making the right decisions to have the right options then to be perfect at choosing between a specific set of options, right? You know what this is. Yeah. That's that's really Aunt I would like to sit and digest that myself and so it's probably just for like recency bias for people listening a good place to start wrapping up and I know where we could go for hours more so maybe we'll do another round sometime but that would be great. Are there any parting recommendations request suggestions words of wisdom anything at all questions, you'd like to pose to the audience and a place where they can respond or way in which they can respond anything at all that you'd like to say before. We before we wrap up. Um, I mean
I guess to whatever extent well, I wrote in that list of advice that if people around you don't think what you're doing is sort of a bit strange that maybe it's not strange enough and I don't know you should always be heating that but I do often wish that people did more did more strange things in service of or in pursuit of real sort of long-term economic and technological progress. And so, you know, that that's going to figure out how to help people to do more weird strange and original things in service of that is kind of that's that's my particular goal trying to kind of arm those upstarts and those Misfits and you know it but it's a very big space.
And I would very profoundly welcome more participants pushing for that cause here here and people can give away of hello Twitter at Patrick. See yes, they can and by the way, I think your podcast is is a fabulous effort in this direction. Thanks so much that that really means a lot and that's certainly hope of mine and that is that is a hope of mine. I so enjoy having these conversations and it's it's opened so many doors for me in terms of my own thinking and questioning so many of my own assumptions that you know, I hope cumulatively that it does help nudge things into a more positive direction along the lines that you mentioned. So I appreciate you saying that well, yeah. No, I won't bore you or flatter you with with you know,
With praise here, but but I think I mean it's my perspective certainly and I listen to a lot of podcasts that that this kind of a lineage of podcasts that can kind of be traced back to this show and the there's kind of a model that you prototyped and and of the continue to implement that you know now is about a lot of other podcasts are kind of somehow a different version of which you know, what which I'm excited about because hopefully they'll do it even better job and I've been so excited to see certainly Jocko willing run off and create his entire Empire and then you have Cal fuss men and right he had Peter Tia and others. It's it's it's really fun and Hamilton Morris. I'm waiting. I'm waiting for your podcast Hamilton to as are thousands people and brighten and you know, these aren't competitive in the sense that you know, Rob
Increase I was kind of one of the first novels and you know, it turns out of that was a big space and it was it was not a bad thing when more novelist came along and so kind of similarly. I actually think that said of I'm not even sure the podcast space is the podcast space per se it's more the sort of serious in-depth long-form exploration, but it's even though that obviously is going to way bigger now than it was five years ago. It still seems to me that it's actually still quite early. Oh, it's so early. I agree. It's really really early. I had people tell me when I was contemplating starting a podcast that the ship had already sailed. I mean, it's a pretty smart people with a lot of experience and I were telling me then that the ship itself and I'm telling anyone who's considering starting a podcast now that it's not even close the ship hasn't even been built. If this is one of them really interesting and surprising things for people keep feeling and at its spaces are too late when in fact
Are you know not only not too late but like still in the first ten percent Mark and recent talks about getting to Silicon Valley in you know, the early 90s and thinking man. I'm too late and the endless kind of similar examples you can point to and I mean we worried about it with striped obviously and you know yet we kind of came to realize that actually the internet as a whole is still in its earliest endings. Oh definitely. Yeah, there's there's always there's always I mean stripe is a great example of this. There's maybe there's always a market for great and and that is not dependent on creating or shipping something today or this afternoon. There's always there's always room for that. Well Patrick commence that Patrick I appreciate you taking the time and thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun and for everybody for everybody listening. I will put
Links to everything we discussed the papers the books the sites some of the folks on Twitter all these things in the show notes, which you can find at Tim double OG forward slash podcast just search Patrick or Collison and this episode. We'll come right up. You can scroll down to find it and until next time. Thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one. This is five. Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email for me? And what do you enjoy getting a short email for me? Every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend and five bullet. Friday's a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week that could include favorite new albums that have discovered it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've
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