The Tim Ferriss Show - #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work

Starting point is 00:00:32 together. From logos to apps and packaging to books, 99designs is the go-to design resource for any budget. I've used 99designs for many, many years now. I've used them for book covers, for instance, mock-ups for The 4-Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller, illustrations for my multi-volume The Tao of Seneca, and other graphic design projects. And I've been really impressed by the quality of their designers and the designs that I've ended up using. Most recently, I used 99designs to update the illustrations and layouts of my five morning rituals ebook. This covers my most consistent morning routines and rituals.

Starting point is 00:01:13 And I offer that as an incentive for people to sign up for my newsletter. So this is a PDF bonus that acts as a carrot to increase the number of email subscribers. The illustrations inside are gorgeous, and I loved working with the designer who we selected for the project. So you can check it out. Take a look at that at 99designs.com forward slash Tim. That's the number 99designs.com forward slash Tim. And you can see exactly what I'm talking about with a real world example of what has come out of working with them. 99designs designer search tool connects you directly with one designer based on design category or industry specialization, style, skill level, availability, and more. So you can really

Starting point is 00:01:57 check all the boxes that you need and see who matches up. Or you can start a contest. And that means you invite the entire community to take a shot at your project. Then you pick your favorite. Right now, you guys, my listeners that is, can receive a free $99 upgrade on your first design contest. So check it out. To see what it looks like to get your first free upgrade, please visit 99designs.com forward slash Tim and click on the link in the landing page. So again, check it visit 99designs.com forward slash Tim and click on the link in the landing page. So again, check it out 99designs.com forward slash Tim. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? And my answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in the 4-Hour Body,

Starting point is 00:02:44 did not get paid for that. And I travel with it to avoid nutritional insurance. I recommended it in the 4-Hour Body, did not get paid for that, and I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases. If I can't get what I need through whole food meals throughout the rest of the day. If you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they are offering a free 20-count travel pack for first-time users. I always travel with at least three or four of these.

Starting point is 00:03:06 This represents a $100 value. So if you buy Athletic Greens, you get an extra $100 in free product. So check it out, athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim for your free travel pack with any purchase. 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, C-O-L-L-I-S-O-N, at Patrick C on Twitter, PatrickCollison.com, Stripe.com. Patrick is CEO and co-founder of Stripe, a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. We'll explain what that means in this

Starting point is 00:03:59 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 assessed it. And yet, today, Stripe powers millions of online businesses around the world and is worth roughly $20 billion, making the brothers

Starting point is 00:04:30 two of the youngest multi-billionaires on the planet. Prior to Stripe, Patrick co-founded Octomatic, 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 read humans I've ever encountered. And that's saying a lot. He's read, 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

Starting point is 00:05:17 at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. The first is the rise and fall of American growth. And that's my dog whining in the background. The second is a novel, Mind-Body Problem, that's a hyphen, Mind-Body Problem. Poor Charlie's Almanac, which has come up a lot on this podcast by Charlie Munger. And Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens, subtitled 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.blog forward slash podcast and just search Patrick and it'll pop right up. So without further

Starting point is 00:05:55 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 texts that I got from our mutual friend, Chris Saka, who's also been on the podcast, for those who don't know him, extremely adept investor and all-around hilarious guy. He's a real character. He's a real character. He's managed to make one or two or however many billions of dollars,

Starting point is 00:06:37 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 course, I was familiar with Stripe. I had heard your name before. We had, I think, even exchanged potentially a couple of DMs on Twitter. 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 two, has a near photographic memory for what he has read. His thoughts are provocative and

Starting point is 00:07:22 challenge the status quo. His success is no accident. And then you can fact check this when we get into more of a conversation here. But plus his origin story is great. As I recall, Colin 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 u.s 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 airbnb founders patrick said he would meet them there and rented a small plane to fly himself from Florida. Okay, pause. Now, Chris and I were also

Starting point is 00:08:09 exchanging text messages earlier today because I wanted to ask his permission to read that. And there are two more things I'll add as background color, and then we can get amongst it. So the first, he says, quick story. Octomatic, and we can get into that, but 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 Octomatic 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, end quote. And then this is a very Saka-esque 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, this then place district, this is in San Francisco. Well, they were both underage, but Patrick's brother, John, got negged from the bar, literally could not get into his own celebration for selling a company and becoming a millionaire. I will never forget that moment.

Starting point is 00:09:07 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, end quote. So that is all by means of introduction. Yeah, I think we should probably just end the podcast right now.

Starting point is 00:09:25 I don't think there's any possible way that any human alive today or who's ever existed in human history could possibly live up to that. Yeah, I was going to say no pressure, nothing to live up to now. But I think we can start with very comfortable ground,

Starting point is 00:09:39 and that is 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 it wrong maybe it's been changed and you've you've categorized them you have some in above average you have others as labeled particularly great and those range this is from a quoting from a wired article in the uk but they range from imperialism to engineering democracy on and on and on uh what makes a book particularly great and which of those do you end up recommending the most or gifting the most to other people?

Starting point is 00:10:34 Hmm. I think, well, I find personally, actually, that it really matters a lot sort of when I read a book and sort of the frame of mind that I'm in at the time, sort of when I stumble across it. And often I'll kind of start a book, you know, at some point and maybe revisit it sort of months or in some cases, even years later, and find that it has kind of a completely a book, you know, at some point and maybe revisit it sort of months or in some cases, even years later, and find that it has kind of a completely sort of, you know, renewed resonance or significance or something. And so I think there's kind of, you know, Chris and Mark Andreessen and others talk about this idea. And of course, many people at this point talk about sort of product market fit and founder market fit. I think with books, there's really something around reader book fit and the particulars of that moment. And so just by way of example,

Starting point is 00:11:15 I've been thinking a whole lot of late about the importance 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 maybe the first two thirds of the 20th century, or maybe the first two thirds of the 20th century, there were kind of lots of examples of that. And perhaps, I mean, I'm not sure whether this is the case or not, but maybe perhaps there are fewer of those today.

Starting point is 00:11:54 Anyway, thinking about this of late, and of course, you know, I'm not the first to kind of point this out or raise this as an issue, but I stumbled upon just a couple of days ago, um, a book published by, I'm probably going to get the name wrong, but there's a center at ASU. It's like the Center for Science and Possibility or something like that. I'm pretty sure I'm getting that name wrong, but it's along those lines. And they actually published a book of science fiction written by, well, I guess a whole host of authors with a foreword from Neil Stevenson 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, this kind of matching of 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 a corollary of that is that it's actually valuable to sort of,

Starting point is 00:13:06 or I at least find it useful to sort of, to buy a lot of books that sort of seem interesting and 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 of chapters or something, but, you know, not really kind of commit to finishing it. And, you know, I'll leave it out around the house. There's books on the bookshelves, there's books on the kitchen table, there's books beside the couch, there's books in my bedroom,

Starting point is 00:13:35 there's usually books on my bed, and so on. It's in your mental landscape, and I often find, I guess, that 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 gonna say, if it's helpful, I was going to ask about the dream machine. And maybe that illustrates how you vet books or 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. So there's a selection challenge.

Starting point is 00:14:20 Yes. Okay. Well, so first off, I think you should mostly ignore the books that are published every year. Right. 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 quite a lot of books have been published, say, 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 real gem is there. And of course, there are a lot of false negatives. There are a lot of great books that just never, for whatever reason, got the attention they kind of deserved. Or maybe they don't have the salience they ought to have for you. But I really think people should be kind of much more biased towards older books than they are. I 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 what it is. It is a book about the

Starting point is 00:15:11 history, well, it is nominally a biography of J.C.R. Licklider. And, you know, many people were responsible for the creation of the internet. But I think Licklider has more claim than any other single person to being the individual kind of causally responsible for its creation. He funded a lot of the early researchers. He sort of tried to bring the community together. And he really kind of instigated much of the movement that led to ARPANET and the Internet and so on. And it's 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

Starting point is 00:15:54 in depth not just kind of the specific sequence of events that led to this happening but the kind of milieu and sort of intellectual environment and thinking and landscape that it all came from. And so the book starts way before Lichtlider was doing anything, because there were kind of all these different kind of fields and disciplines and sort of strains of thinking that Lichtlider built on. I think it's, you know, pretty rare that an author either takes the time or has the time to kind of really go deep in that manner. And it's striking that if you look at sort of how the Dream Machine came to be, he was funded by a grant. As I recall, it was the Sloan Foundation. I could be wrong on that, but I believe it was the Sloan Foundation. They thought this was obviously a super important

Starting point is 00:16:47 period in history, but Waldrop was not on toiling under the clock to get a book out by Christmas. He was really trying 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 out of print. There were a couple of copies on Amazon. And 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 away to my friends.

Starting point is 00:17:34 And 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, who's kind of best known for working at Xerox PARC, which is this amazing industrial research lab that played a sort of formative role in the creation of the GUI, the graphical computer interface, and Ethernet, one of the main networking technologies, and object-oriented programming,

Starting point is 00:18:12 which is the main programming paradigm that's used today. And so they were just really critical in the history of what we consider modern technology, modern software. Anyway, Alan Kay worked there and was one of the leading researchers there. And then Brett Victor is one of the most interesting researchers, software creatives working today. And I remember Alan saying that the Dream Machine is semi-unique among computer history and technology history books, and it really kind of gets it right. And obviously, you know, we're a pretty young field, and so there hasn't been a whole lot of research and deep scholarly scrutiny, at least to the extent that there might be for, I don't know, math or physics or something. But this book really stood out. And, you know, the technology

Starting point is 00:19:06 industry is not an industry that sort 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're kind of oblivious to the fact they've failed tons of times before. And that really is kind of a good thing, because sometimes, you know, the fact that it has failed five times before does not mean that it's going to fail a sixth time. But it can, of course, also in some ways be a weakness where we don't kind of build on ideas that precede us. Alan Kay's 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.

Starting point is 00:19:44 And so in that broader culture, I think the dream machine 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, or 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 Alan, which is the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Yes, that may be a quote that that peopleuted, but it is, I think, correctly attributed to Alan, which is the best way to predict the future is to invent it. That may be a quote that people recognize, but perhaps not in association with the name. Yeah, Alan, I would say is, I mean, kind of quite widely recognized as a genius. But kind of despite that, I think he is still kind of underrated. I think he will be even more highly regarded in 50 years or in 100 years than he is today. You're a young guy.

Starting point is 00:20:33 What is your age currently? I'm 30. 30. Wow. 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, or say research rather for this conversation. And that is that perhaps one shouldn't overweight with a recency bias

Starting point is 00:21:01 the books published in the last year, right? 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 companies du 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 greats in the earlier days of the Valley, or by extension, companies like Microsoft, where the outcomes are more known.

Starting point is 00:21:42 Could you talk about that a bit bit and 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 some of the conclusions you came to, even if temporarily after studying these grades. 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 some respect. So you questioned the value, please correct me or elaborate on this, the value of innovating in that particular capacity because there, and now I'm laying on my interpretation of that, which is there are potential unknown risks in doing so. And sort of questionable upside in throwing more unknown variables into something like that

Starting point is 00:22:46 versus other places where you could focus. So could you maybe expand on that and then share any other conclusions or lessons 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 what I specifically mean is people have tried a lot of different organizational structures and methodologies over time. while in broad strokes, many things have remained the same in terms of maybe some of the characteristics required for leadership or the importance,

Starting point is 00:23:30 or that which makes kind of a human satisfied in their work around sort of having kind of the opportunity to have autonomy and to kind of build mastery and having a kind of mission they believe in and so on. So there are lots of things that remain the same. There has been kind of some evolution in that organizations,

Starting point is 00:23:48 Google today, say, does not look especially like maybe IBM of 1950. There's parallels, but very material differences. However, I think that most of the experiments have failed. Most efforts to do something that's substantially different to the best practice of the day, most of those efforts fail. And so I think when you're designing a particular organization, doing something that truly might kill it is just a pretty risky thing to do.

Starting point is 00:24:25 And evidently, the way Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others are organized, Amazon, what have you, 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 kind of empirically adequate to be Google, Facebook, Apple, or Amazon. And I think doing better is just really pretty difficult. And so I actually love the fact that people are experimenting here. of remote organizations that have no physical headquarters or attempts to have... I mean, Buffer has been trying this kind of radical transparency down to compensation. Some

Starting point is 00:25:15 organizations like Medium and Zappos are trying holacracy. And so I love the fact that all these experiments are happening. Can you define holacracy for a second? Well, I don't deeply understand it, but I think it is, I believe, as I understand it, the core idea is having kind of differing kind of decision-making bodies, like groups of people

Starting point is 00:25:42 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 so perhaps you might have some set of people who are responsible for making compensation decisions, some other set of people who are responsible for deciding what the product strategy should be for next year, and some other set of people who are responsible for figuring out how the office should be decorated. But those sets of people don't need to map on to some traditional hierarchy. They can be partly overlapping or bigger or smaller or whatever. And when one describes that, I don't think that's, you know, a priori a ludicrous idea.

Starting point is 00:26:26 You know, maybe that'll work. But I think kind of 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, you know, there's probably a 90% chance, maybe higher, that kind of any meaningful deviation is a bad idea. And so, again, to kind of return to what I was sort of getting at at the beginning, I think we should celebrate the fact that all these experiments are happening and should really cheer them on and should really hope that they succeed. And kind of we ourselves should choose maybe some small number of experiments that we really believe in to, you know, to engage in. But I think for these kind of, you know, really high important or high importance, really hard to change sort of

Starting point is 00:27:16 trapdoor decisions, like what kind of organizational structure, you know, you're going to have, I think you actually want to bias towards being relatively conservative. Yeah, 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 10. No, 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 get 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 get kind of offended by it or it seems to – there's some kind of emotional response to it. Whereas I think at least the response I try to kind of cultivate in myself is I think that's a bad idea.

Starting point is 00:27:58 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,'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's so great about the transmission of knowledge that if it works in 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

Starting point is 00:28:27 comprehensions, you know, there's some combination of mockery or dismissiveness or, again, kind of emotional objection, whereas I really think we should be encouraging and celebrating them. And the weirder the effort is, the more they deserve our support. So I want to talk about what maybe some of the things you did differently, but not only what you did differently, because that's sort of a, in some respects, a causal factor, but in some respects, 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

Starting point is 00:29:32 why did you decide to pursue that what did you see that other people did not see in that case um well i think there's two different kinds of knowing, right? There's kind of conscious, explicit knowing where, you know, you see that there's kind of a prevailing belief or something and you understand why it's wrong and you have some kind of proprietary insight that everyone else doesn't have. I think there's another kind of sort of quote unquote knowing, which is just you have a belief or a model of the world and you don't even realize that it's different to others. It's kind of some deeply internalized thing that just for whatever circumstantial reasons you happen to have ended up with. And I think for us, it actually wasn't so much that we had, in the beginning, this kind of comprehensive, deep understanding of the space and realized how everyone else was mistaken. We just had like a particular perspective, you know, because of

Starting point is 00:30:29 how we, you know, where we came from and how we got started. And we were lucky. We turned out that kind of that model we had and that outlook kind of matched the world at that time. But I really, I think it's very important that, you know, we don't kind of drink our own Kool-Aid here and over-read into our supposed insight. I really think it was really just a lot of circumstance and good fortune. But I would say the particular things that differed about Stripe and our outlook were we just didn't think that the kind of regulatory and kind of partnership slash banking barriers were actually that bad. You know, they kind of sound intimidating, and obviously, you have to kind of do a lot of work there that maybe lots of other software companies don't have to do. But, you know, it's fundamentally feasible. I mean, ultimately,

Starting point is 00:31:19 regulators, and banks, and so on, are comprised of good people who want to do the right thing and may speak a different language or whatever, but are, you know, they're reasonable. And I guess the other thing is, we really had this mindset because of, I guess, where we came from, that the kind of developers and makers and software were just going to continue to become increasingly important. And it's really amazing where when we started out, our idea was that developers would just, like, we'd build a good product and developers would start using it. And that would be the story.

Starting point is 00:32:00 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. We were kind of skipping over. We just kind of had this very naive lucky where the world really, I think, started to change around 2010, 2011, where companies around the world, and especially in the US and Europe, really got the memo, like big traditional companies, that they would have to take advantage of what software was making possible and really transform themselves if they wanted to kind of survive and prosper. enterprise field team to 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 much more straightforward or much more powerful technology, unlike a decade before, they were actually being listened to.

Starting point is 00:33:21 And so, again, this isn't a thing we knew in the way that we could have, you know, argued for it 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. And actually, we did this survey earlier this year where we kind of surveyed a whole bunch of

Starting point is 00:33:45 traditional, but not software companies. We surveyed companies fairly broadly across multiple industries, and we just asked them what's holding them back. That's a very imperfect methodology, of course, because it's hard to know what the candidate answers there should be, and maybe there's questions, or do they all interpret it the same way, and so on. But the kind of very high level thing that sort of came back was that

Starting point is 00:34:12 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 that's just such an amazing fact, right? In that sort of, you know, economics for its history, basically, has been sort of a science of, in some sense, you know, access to and distribution of capital. And we're just at this moment of transformation where, on some level, you can exchange capital for software, talent, and output, and so on.

Starting point is 00:34:56 But it's actually really hard to do. And I think companies globally are 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, I shouldn't say synchronicities, but sort of fortuitous timing aspects to it. And I think that, of course, lady fortune, good luck or bad luck is always a factor, but 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 about free will. Let's just assume there are certain things that depend on you making very specific decisions.

Starting point is 00:35:37 There are 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 from the Yoda mentioned earlier, Paul Graham. And for people who 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 call it startup incubators of sorts. 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, and I think PG's essays are still a goldmine that, um, sort of like Alan Kay, I think are still like, people kind of know they're great, but,

Starting point is 00:36:53 uh, I think they're sort of even better than people appreciate. Oh, for sure. And a lot, and many of them, I've also read his book. Uh, many of them are, they are not timely in the best possible sense. They are, they're, they're based on first principles. And an example of that, I'm going to, I always mess up the headline, but I think it's the maker's schedule versus the manager's 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 says, quote, Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem

Starting point is 00:37:29 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 Stripe. But in fact, they're famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition. Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of potential users in the other companies we've funded, and none took better advantage of it than Stripe. At YC, we use the term, quote, Collison installation, end quote, for the technique they invented. More diffident founders ask, will you try our beta? And for people who don't know, that terminology just means effectively a rough draft of a product. Will you try our beta? And if the answer is yes, they say, great, we'll send you a link.

Starting point is 00:38:07 But the Collison 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 or could be a really important differentiator. So what are some of, feel free to take this in any direction, but some of the other things that you guys got right.

Starting point is 00:38:39 And I do remember even in Silicon Valley, which of course can be an echo chamber of sorts, but there was a lot of talk, even at the periphery of my circles, and I am non-technical, I'm 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 that, I'm sure on some level was a very conscious decision about not only in terms of product but also in terms of positioning so can you talk about some of the early decisions that yeah in retrospect were really important so i think um

Starting point is 00:39:18 there are two that really jump out to me where you you know, I think, um, they were actually kind of somewhat deliberate. Um, well, I'll give two and maybe I'll think of more. Um, so one is, you know, we had sort of grown up reading slash dot, you know, this early kind of tech news website, but it was kind of crowdsourced, and Hacker News, and Twitter, and blogs, and all these kinds of services. And I guess we just sort of had a belief that how people found out about things in the world had changed. And in particular, the 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 that maybe kind of 30 years ago or something, because there were sort of

Starting point is 00:40:18 much slower or fewer kind of distribution channels, that who won and what got used, we kind of determined more by marketing budgets or by sales decks or whatever, but that there was a new kind of transparency and efficacy and information dissemination that the internet now made possible that shifted the way that a product could really get adopted. And so just very concretely, our sales and marketing strategy for a very long time was writing blog posts that we just thought were good and interesting, or at least we hoped were, and building a good product

Starting point is 00:41:00 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 internet had changed, but we just kind of made a very deliberate bet on these kind of superior distribution channels. And I think that actually really helped us in two big ways. One is, it's kind of obviously cheaper. And so you look at a lot of other companies, especially companies selling to businesses, and they spend vast, gargantuan amounts of money on their sales and marketing strategies. And so early on, we didn't have to do that. And so it was kind of, you know, spend a lot on sort of getting started, it perhaps would have been, you know, that could have been a severe enough barrier that we wouldn't have gotten over

Starting point is 00:41:51 it at all. Maybe the company would never have happened. So that's the first. The second is... Can 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 at Stripe, his name is Evan.

Starting point is 00:42:14 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. It was actually a really good blog post. And this is probably back in 2012. And as you remember, that got a whole bunch of traffic. And as a consequence, people kind of found out about Stripe and maybe kind of realized that we knew something

Starting point is 00:42:42 of what we were talking about from a technical standpoint. And it moved the needle for us back at a time that we knew something of what we were talking about from a technical standpoint and um and it moved the needle for us um uh back at a time where really nobody had heard of us it's it's also if if i may i'm caffeinated enough now to feel the need to jump in and and commentate but the it's also a really good example of an editorial honeypot 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 frontline coders. It was, it's a very smart way of talking around the product in a sense that a lot of those

Starting point is 00:43:28 technical folks in my experience are also semi-allergic or very highly allergic to what they perceive as anything salesy. So you were able to bring them into the fold without directly, explicitly selling anything. Yes. Well, this actually brings me to kind of 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 incentives for us. Because if you think about sort of more traditional marketing, and by the way, to be clear, I'm not dismissing in any way kind of traditional sales and marketing. I mean, Stripe has salespeople and marketing people and they're immensely important in sort important in the organization we're

Starting point is 00:44:09 now building today. And so I'm kind of specifically talking about kind of strategies to kind of get started in the early days and to kind of get some initial traction. Anyway, that said, the super valuable thing about sort of pursuing these kind of non-traditional channels is if you think about a traditional marketing organization and kind of what it's or traditional marketing in general and kind of what the incentives are, the incentives are to 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 them these fancy presentations or whatever, but they're not actually using the

Starting point is 00:44:41 product directly, you know, if they find out sort of a year later that it sucks, well, you know, that's kind of fine, or at least it's fine in 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 kind of 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 it might 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 incentivized companies, because they've probably gotten a bit lazy and a bit ossified, and just a bit less competitive on this axis. And once you can make the battle about the quality of your product and

Starting point is 00:45:25 the quality of your product development, if you can get the battle fields to be sort of on that axis, you really have a huge advantage. And our experience was the incumbents just couldn't react. And they kind of realized that Stripe was kind of getting some traction and starting to get some mindshare and developers and startups were 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 they just kind of dismissed us, but even after they stopped dismissing us, you can't just kind of click your fingers and be like, okay, now we're going to start creating good products.

Starting point is 00:46:16 It's such a deep cultural and organizational thing that it's very difficult for competitors or potential competitors to shift there. Whereas, if you just have a better marketing campaign, that's super easy to copy. Anyone else can 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 really helping us. Yeah, I want to underscore something you just mentioned briefly, which is Google Ads, right? This is, well, 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

Starting point is 00:47:27 seductive as a silent song absolutely uh and uh the the the last thing i wanted to say just to underscore something you mentioned which is really important is if your customer acquisition is predicated on paid acquisition, that makes you just a sitting duck for incumbents who have larger budgets. And they can just decide to bleed chips for a period of time until you run out of chips. It's really, really important. So I'm glad you mentioned it. There's always a kind of a seductive psychological temptation where if something isn't growing, to tell yourself that it's because, well, I haven't invested enough in distribution. It's kind of harder to sort of come to realize or to tell yourself that, well, maybe our baby is just a bit too ugly. And so I think people are just very psychologically biased towards sort of blaming anything about growth on things that sound like sales or marketing. And then, yeah, I mean, kind of related to what you just said,

Starting point is 00:48:41 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 software. And, you know, I know that sounds strange in that, I mean, lots of organizations build some software, but like, it is just really weird, right? You know, if you think about sort about what a really good website or iOS application or whatever it is and feels like, it's really strange. 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.

Starting point is 00:49:30 Like, it's probably pretty bad. It's kind of janky. It looks old. Like, the animations already work right. It's kind of laggy, all that stuff, right? But that's weird. They probably have a nice building, a nice headquarters. There are many things

Starting point is 00:49:49 they can decide to do and just do it pretty competently. They can turn their capital advantage into an advantage in some other area. If they want to have a great fleet of cars, 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 a cool advertising campaign. 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

Starting point is 00:50:47 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 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 I 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 difficult names that you

Starting point is 00:51:39 guys have had with companies oh god so you have So you have Octomatic, right? Yes. Which I'm sure was not always spelled correctly by people. Not uniformly, no. And Stripe, could you just give us a brief description of the original name of what would later become Stripe and just walk us through some early iterations. Sure. What I'm hoping to do here, and I don't want to make this too leading of an introduction to what you're going to say, but is that the future of your company is probably not going

Starting point is 00:52:17 to hinge entirely on the first name that you give it, is where I'm trying to go with this. 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, Inc. spelled s l a s h d e v s l a s H, et cetera. Um, like the, it was the slashes are actually spelled out. And, and the reason for that is, uh, you know, we, well, it's, it's a long story. I won't bore you with it. It was like a programming joke, but you know, we thought it was funny. Um, uh, I think it was, uh, the, the rest of the world, you know, to, to, to our, uh, shock

Starting point is 00:53:00 and surprise did not quite find it as funny as we did. And the first name of the product was slash dev slash payments, because we wanted a slightly broader company name than product name. And extremely confusingly, while the company had all this S-L-A-S-H stuff spelled out, the product was just D-E-V-Payments.com. And so kind of the naming schemas didn't even really match. And so we would have these meetings and we'd describe what we do.

Starting point is 00:53:34 And we were already fighting an uphill battle here. I mean, we were, as John says, sort of three squirrels in a trench coat sort of trying to masquerade as like a a real thing uh and 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 uh in a way that's not a lie um and um uh or you know how do we say we have an open floor plan exactly exactly yes um uh yeah we we really embrace remote work so we were already fighting a bit of an uphill battle and then at the end of the meeting or something they'd ask us our name or for our business card or something we'd have to hand over this thing that doesn't even look like a company name

Starting point is 00:54:15 they'd look at it and it's like oh but what's the company name called like actually sorry sir it's this thing so it was all bad and not only did people often misspell it 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 where as soon as you kind of got stuck with your code or with some problem or something, we'd have sort of a little discussion about, well, what could we name this company?

Starting point is 00:54:58 And we had all these books around the office. I mean, just all sorts of random stuff. And so you just page through them and, like, come up with a word and, you know, toss it out to the group and be like, well, should we call our company this? And so I remember John was trying to learn how to ride a motorcycle. And so we had a motorcycle repair manual. And so we had a lot of motorcycle words. Should we call the company carburettor? Which, fortunately, did not make the cut.

Starting point is 00:55:23 So it was not going well, as you're hearing. We eventually decided to write a little script to just come up with random potential names and actually to check whether the relevant domain names were available because it was important for an online company that we have the.com domain. And I can't even remember how, but Stripe is one of the words that ended up sort of on our list of names to check. I think we were just at some point trying to think up kind of single

Starting point is 00:55:51 monosyllabic English words that didn't have some kind of strong pre-existing association. And Stripe, it turns out, was available, you know, relatively cheaply. It was, you know, it was, I think, $10,000 or $20,000, which, you know, that's not cheap in some sense, but compared to the costs we were living of having a terrible name, it seemed like a good deal. What year was this? This was like 2010. So that's astonishing to me. That's actually, I 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 honestly i'd have to go back to check the details um but but there wasn't a big lengthy negotiation um There was maybe a little bit of a back and forth.

Starting point is 00:56:46 Yeah, no, we really lucked out. I mean, what helped us, of course, is we weren't wedded to any of these names, right? If the guy had said, it's $200,000, well, that would have been exactly two seconds of thought and we'd have moved on to something else. Undecarburator.co.uk. Exactly, exactly.

Starting point is 00:57:01 So it really helped that we were happy to entertain anything at all. And the last thing worth mentioning there is, you know, we, okay, we bought the domain and started to rename all our code and the website and everything. And then one day in early January, we kind of flipped the switch and everything became Stripe. Somehow in the checklist of all the things to change and do, we'd neglected to add an entry for tell our customers. And so people woke up in the morning to go to devpayments.com and check their sales and whatever, and they got redirected to Stripe.com. And so we got a lot of confused customers being like, are you guys hacked? Have you been phished? What's going on here? Fortunately, back in January 2011, we had very few customers.

Starting point is 00:57:49 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. 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% of American adults have purchased something from a business powered by Stripe. Now, I know that doesn't mean that there are 80% of American adults are Stripe customers per se. But you now have millions of businesses in 130 plus countries. So something happened between those two points in time. So it'd be easy to talk about a lot of the highlights, a lot of the

Starting point is 00:58:31 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, what I'd love to talk about, if you're willing, are some of the harder periods, maybe near-death experiences, moments of doubt, and to make it as personal as possible, right? So not necessarily in abstract about the 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 to me and hopefully would help humanize the otherwise seemingly superhuman Patrick Collison. This could also be a personal period. Could have been high school, college, a difficult family situation, could be anything. I will, I'll give kind of the stripe version, the personal version. So, kind of with those

Starting point is 00:59:29 caveats on the stripe side, just the thing that I think is kind of important to communicate is, despite things having been relatively smooth in that macro sense, it often is just extremely hard. And I remember sort of early on after, I remember after one particular meeting back in, I don't know, 2011, 2012, like just after the meeting, the API broke. And so, you know, So the API application programming interface, could you just explain what that is? The core Stripe payments engine broke, and so our customers just couldn't get paid and couldn't accept payments from their customers. And we didn't have many customers back then. Maybe there were 100 or something, but there were still 100 businesses.

Starting point is 01:00:23 It felt like a huge deal. And we fixed it. It was only down for me 30 minutes or something. But I remember feeling kind of really bad about that. And then I just remember kind of, it wasn't like there was something kind of particularly special about that day. 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'd have to convince to use us that, you know, we had not yet convinced. And it was just kind of this moment of vertigo.

Starting point is 01:00:58 And, I mean, I just remember being kind of immensely dispirited and kind of talking to John about, well, you know, is there really actually any point doing this? And again, what's kind of important to me about that moment is not that 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 there's 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, you wouldn't bother doing it,

Starting point is 01:01:32 especially in the face of such hardship and uncertainty. You also have to be very pessimistic because there are tons of problems. And you have to be kind of very um 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 and you're kind of an extreme on both axes uh and that's just like a weird psychological state um and to remain in it as you must for kind of many years is it's just not normal and you're kind And you're always sort of necessarily over-extrapolating from limited data because, again, you kind of should be

Starting point is 01:02:08 in that 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? Has something changed? Is something systemically broken? Whatever. And because you're kind of always extrapolating from these bad things, while maintaining this kind of long-term optimism, I think that is just a recipe for real real, you know, psychological hardship.

Starting point is 01:02:46 And, you know, I don't want to overstate it in that, you know, there's all the obvious sort of, I don't know, acknowledgments about, you know, we're 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 hedonically, the hedonic treadmill is very powerful and we rapidly adapt to kind of take all those for granted. And so the fact that

Starting point is 01:03:11 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.

Starting point is 01:03:30 There have been many such moments where it just seems hard. What did the conversation look like with John that day? Do you recall any of the specifics? I mean, was it more commiseration so you could get out of your system? Were you actually talking to him to determine if you should proceed or not? What did that look like? It was more the former, like more of 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 um stubborn uh and and so the idea of stopping just it didn't seem like a just i guess it didn't feel like an option for us i don't know determination sounds glamorous to me

Starting point is 01:04:19 and i'm not sure we we have that but i think we're just dogged um 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 he's a pretty cheery guy. That day when I was super dejected, he was in his chipper way. He was telling me, that'll be fine. And you give it another 24 hours or something, and the world looks a bit different. There's something you mentioned just a few moments ago, I think is worth trying to reiterate

Starting point is 01:04:55 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 so that you can avert them. And it's tricky. It's really tricky. It's true also for... Go ahead. Well, it's tricky. It's kind of not natural.

Starting point is 01:05:35 And 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 cause a lot of damage or that are very scary. And people who are not just betting on the long side,

Starting point is 01:06:04 but betting on the short side. And I mean, mean of course we get into derivatives and stuff like that but it's uh it's they they're thinking about the edge cases that could really be yes catastrophic uh for for them and others right uh although when you're starting a company 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 trader. And you kind of have to be this sort of the catastrophic, you know, Taleb style, you know, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, sort of catastrophe trader. And you're, you kind of have to be both. And that's just weird. And I guess the thing that I think is maybe important to understand for folks is, it's kind of intuitive that if a company or a new effort of any sort is not going well, that things will feel hard, and you'll 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 sort of told that, well, if the company is succeeding, then clearly it's going to be not necessarily fun, but at least sort of it'll feel good day to day.

Starting point is 01:07:31 Whereas 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 you'd spare capacity, you just take on more. And so you're kind of therefore inevitably always 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 able to handle. And on the one hand, I sort of I don't't wish it were otherwise, in that I sort of enjoy testing myself and kind of finding my limits and developing and stretching myself. But on the other hand, you know, when you stretch your muscles, that's painful. Well, it also makes me think of a conversation I had with Laird Hamilton, who's one of the most legendary big wave surfers of all time. And I remember I was chatting with him.

Starting point is 01:08:29 He's got to be, I don't know how old he is. He's one of those guys who sort of defies any type of expectation of age affecting performance. I think he's in his early fifties, but still goes 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 i asked him roughly how big he thought they were and he was like ah you know 20 25 feet he's like once it gets to 20 you can start to have fun and i'm paraphrasing everybody's like once you get to 30

Starting point is 01:08:58 it's like you really like kind of want to watch yourself it's, 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, 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,

Starting point is 01:09:36 but zombie, to help you navigate this or learn how to surf that kind of wave? Because it is fucking unimaginable for most people i've 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 takes and how much it resembles a professional sport. So who or what has been helpful in learning to navigate that? Well, maybe just before answering that, to kind of add something to what we were just talking about, that it relates to what you just asked. There's a period in my life where I did feel a bit, not exactly lost, but

Starting point is 01:10:34 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, worked for that company, kind of exploring some other stuff as well. This is the live clip video. 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 I actually went back to college because I dropped out of college pretty early. And when I went to school, I sort of thought, well, maybe I want to become like a physicist or a mathematician or something like that. And who knows how successful, if at all, I would have been. Maybe I wouldn't even have made the cut,

Starting point is 01:11:22 but I kind of had that ambition, aspiration. And I sort of felt that we'd started 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 there, 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, move to Vancouver, move to this other country,

Starting point is 01:11:58 go back to college, then start this other company. And when we started Stripe, it did not seem very promising. I mean, it seemed like this 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, to many people who knew me or just kind of were around, like I'm sure it looked kind of pretty scattered, kind of weirdly planned, maybe misdirected. And, you know, they wouldn't be entirely wrong. I mean, I certainly

Starting point is 01:12:26 was not kind of pursuing 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 our own course. And, you know, you get these kind of real sort of hothouse environments where there's a lot of pressure to you know go to this school go to this college you know pursue this career path whatever you really kind of feel like you're on these kind of narrow train tracks and i would say that our upbringing was kind of the opposite um where really our parents even when we wanted to make sort of very ostensibly kind of strange and surprising decisions, our parents kind of supported us. And so when I was a 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.

Starting point is 01:13:16 Or when I wanted to sort of sort of drop out of school to go take this totally different exam system, my parents were OK with that. And so, you know, we kind of 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 was kind of a lost period, but it was, again, it was definitely a highly exploratory one. And so just kind of to your question of, you know, periods of real hardship, I think a lot of people either don't get the opportunity to sort of, they don't kind of give themselves the permission to just kind of have a few, you know, slightly lost years where the narrative isn't super clear. And those periods 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 you're sailing. And you can and

Starting point is 01:14:22 do feel a bit adrift. And so looking back on that, I actually feel like it was kind of really important in kind of giving me confidence and perspective. But at the time, it definitely felt a bit unmoored. 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 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 attributed.

Starting point is 01:14:50 Him or Oscar Wilde. That's right. So 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 and don't know where you're located versus exploring and wandering. Um, the second, uh, which is, I suppose more a followup question than a point is, is this, I'm very curious how your parents, uh, and maybe you can also just tell us a little bit about what your parents did professionally or

Starting point is 01:15:25 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 either of those right so if you if a biographer at some point is writing the story of your life, you give them unfettered access, how might they answer that? What are examples they might give? Things your parents said, annual routines that you guys had or whatever, anything that comes to mind? Well, we were kind of – we grew up in very rural Ireland, right? The kind of the middle of the countryside, surrounded by kind of farms and fields. And, you know, we were kind of really, we had to kind of figure out ourselves what was going to be entertaining and interesting and fun. It wasn't just kind of provided to us by the environment.

Starting point is 01:16:21 And so we kind of grew up as these sort of free range children. And we were lucky where there were lots of books in the house, and we read those pretty voraciously. You know, our parents, I guess I'd say that the thing that our parents did is, there's a million things but the kind of the two that really um the 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 you know traveling in the summers they um if there were interesting guests coming over for dinner we weren't kind of you know dispatched uh 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 kind of really took us seriously and showed us the world. The second thing is they really gave us kind of agency on autonomy and kind

Starting point is 01:17:15 of treated us as adults. And it went two ways in that on the one hand, they gave 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 US 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 that month. We had a neighbor who checked in on us every day and made sure things were fine, but we spent most of the time alone when we weren't at school. And from myself and John's standpoint, that was fantastic. We loved the freedom, but of course they reciprocally expected us not to give them cause to regret it. And then the third thing is whenever we expressed interest in something, they really tried to find opportunities. When there was a small shoot of interest, they looked for opportunities to water it.

Starting point is 01:18:37 But they never sort of thrust those opportunities on us or I never felt that kind of or rather they thrust the interest on us. I never felt that I was sort of following a track laid down by somebody else. And so I remember kind of randomly mentioning when I was 12 or 13 that learning, I don't even remember why I thought this, but the learning ancient Greek seemed interesting. I think I just like read some Homer or something, I mean a translation, and the language seemed interesting. And I was just, you know, saying that as some kind of random throwaway remark, I guess, the way a kid does. And sure enough, my mom went and found somebody at literally a local monastery who was willing to teach ancient Greek. And then she told me about this. And so for two years, I went to that monastery once a week after school and learned ancient Greek. And that interest never went super far.

Starting point is 01:19:25 I haven't read much ancient Greek in the last 10 years. Me neither. Yeah, but it was the kind of thing they did. And obviously some other interests like programming, they kind of really took hold in a deeper way. And so 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 inriculars and sort of burnishing their college resumes, you know, from age 12 or earlier.

Starting point is 01:20:08 And the kind of the period of sort of teenagerhood and adolescence was kind of so intense. Whereas for myself and John, it really felt kind of exploratory. And that we were given a, that our parents were kind of life coaches or mentors while we were, yeah, exactly, while we were roaming. But that 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, it 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 the little cattle protector. When you had these dinners, this is something that has popped up a few times in conversations with a number of folks on the podcast that parents had them included

Starting point is 01:21:06 in specifically dinner discussions when interesting house guests would come over. That's interesting. It's interesting that that's commonality. It's come up a few times, not dozens of times, but enough where it piques my curiosity to dig into it a bit. Would your parents encourage you to ask questions? And actually, just so people can paint a picture in their own minds, did both of your parents work? One of them, what did they do professionally, or how did they spend their time? Just so we have a little context. So both of them worked. Our dad, from most of our childhood, ran a small kind of lakeside hotel, 24 bedrooms.

Starting point is 01:21:55 And so he was kind of, it was a few miles from our 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 giant playground as far as we were concerned. I think the staff didn't always appreciate that, but we loved roaming around it and going and sliding around the polished function room floor and all the rest. And our mom started a corporate training company back right around the time I was born. I think she had left her previous job and then I was born. And I think after a couple of weeks, she decided, oh, I don't know, this kid isn't

Starting point is 01:22:30 that interesting. And so from the house, she decided to start this company that would provide corporate quality management training. And so you've probably heard these acronyms like ISO 9000, these kind of certification programs. Sure. Yeah, yeah. And so kind of all these American multinationals setting up shop in Ireland, and there's kind of a lot of appetite for sort of making sure they were kind of doing things properly and well and so on. And so she started this business, again, providing this training. And so basically all through my childhood, she was running this business, well, for much of it out of her house, and then they kind of got a separate office.

Starting point is 01:23:04 But sort of 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 pretty normal. I think whatever your parents do is kind of almost, you know, from the child's perspective is just kind of is normal. And I'm sure if our parents had been astronauts, you know, being an astronaut would just seem like a totally normal career. And so, so that's what they did. And you mentioned travel.

Starting point is 01:23:33 Could you, was it, could, is there a particular trip that comes to mind? And I'd be curious, there are many different ways to travel and there, just as there are many different ways to live and choose places to live and so on.

Starting point is 01:23:45 So we, we, and there just as there are many different ways to live and choose places to live and so on so we we probably won't have time to get into how your parents ended up where you grew up if they started there or ended up there which is a whole separate side of things but yes uh could you describe perhaps a particularly memorable trip uh uh, sure. And how you traveled with your parents, like what, what that looked like? Um, yeah, so, so we went almost every summer, uh, camping in Europe. And so we'd take the ferry to Europe, uh, which, you know, from Ireland, obviously isn't that far. Um, and we'd bring, you know, uh, some tents or isn't that far. And we'd bring, you know, some tents or a little caravan. And we just go kind of driving around the continent, staying at all these different campgrounds. And Europe turns out to kind of have all these really great,

Starting point is 01:24:35 nice campgrounds, almost every town has one. And so we'd stay a few days here, maybe a week there, and so on. And it would be France and Germany and Austria and Hungary and Italy and whatever. And I have these kind of incredibly fond memories of those trips. And I mean, they'd be like a month long. And they were great, I guess, because they're kind of long enough that you didn'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 there were enough changes of scenery and environment that you sort of just got to take a whole lot of different things in. I mean, honestly, the other thing that was great about them is even though, you know,

Starting point is 01:25:20 being in Ireland, there wasn't kind of a whole lot of distraction. We were able to just kind of read a lot or kind of focus on our own 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, you know, we kind of load up the car and the caravan, which is like heaps and heaps of books. And, you know, you'd have these long drives, like, you know, eight 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

Starting point is 01:26:06 looking at a page on your website, patrickcollison.com forward slash advice. And 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 10 to 20, these are prime years. 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 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, it says more broadly,

Starting point is 01:26:49 nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview. The correlation between it and those around you shouldn't be too strong unless you think you are especially lucky in your initial conditions or, this is my language now, you choose your environment like a place like San Francisco or this is my language. Now you choose your environment, like a place like San Francisco or whatever it might be. But the, the, and I suppose even then, if the correlation is too high, you should be careful. But the, so my question here is going to be a little meandering,

Starting point is 01:27:18 so bear with me, but okay. There are people who seem to 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 a 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 may actually have diagnosable, say, Asperger's, which in some previous times could have been a very maladaptive trait 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 their sort of lack of absorbing worldviews from others

Starting point is 01:28:28 or feeling that pressure enables them to come up with their own perspective and orientation. So if we filter those people out, right, because they may be similarly difficult to imitate in a sense as a basketball player is to imitate in their height. How, how, uh, are there any books, any documentaries, any approaches, uh, 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 is kind of the uh this is the big question right um

Starting point is 01:29:14 uh and yeah maybe there are kind of two halves to it what are heuristics you should have and use for kind of who and what to listen to uh and then, yeah, secondly, separately, how do you think for yourself? And I think, okay, I'll start enumerating some particular heuristics or tricks. 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, that's kind of different to your own, rather than trying to figure out how they're wrong, trying to – I mean, that's valuable. But you'll inevitably do that. Your emotional brain will ensure you do. trying to figure out how they're right. Like, what is a sensible worldview in which what they believe or what they're saying actually kind of does make sense?

Starting point is 01:30:15 And that doesn't mean they're right, but sort of trying to figure out, like, if they're not stupid, why would they believe this? And so, you know, I'm personally, you know, very in favor of kind of openness to immigration. I've obviously benefited from it myself. I think there should be more of it in the world. But I think we can't just kind of dismiss people who oppose immigration as kind of, you know, nativist bigots, I think we're going to have to ask the questions and just try to understand, well, what could or would cause somebody to harbor concerns there, right? So that's one sort of trying to figure out what worldview helps have a view make

Starting point is 01:30:57 sense. A second one is, and we kind of touched on this at the beginning of the conversation, just exposing yourself to more worldviews. Because I think a lot of people, well, everyone finds it more comfortable to be around kind of views that accord with your own and models that accord with your own. And so there's a kind of who I follow on Twitter and what I read and even who I spend time with. I'm sort of trying to make sure that I expose myself to people who have kind of smart, thoughtful, and really pretty different perspectives on important matters. I have to pause because this just seems too fertile to let go quickly. Are there any people on Twitter you could give as examples? You just said they're smart and thoughtful, so you're already complimenting them.

Starting point is 01:31:55 Yeah, right. We could also bookmark and come back to it if it's hard to come up with. Yeah, I mean, I have a – let me see if I can think of a few. Let me think about that and come back. Yeah, no problem. But it's a good question. And maybe the other one is the kind of general heuristic or habit here or something is just to not get mad and to not get offended uh in that you know outrage and offense and anger are they're sometimes useful of course um but i think they're

Starting point is 01:32:38 sort of useful um they're less useful than uh uh well they're overutilized um they're not useful as often as they are invoked um uh and uh and i think for whatever reason uh the kind of the ability to not take offense and to inspect and to try to understand and to even try to really extrapolate from an idea or a set of ideas or a worldview without taking offense at it, that's not something that for whatever reason is really valued in our culture, but I think is actually super important. Can you, as has been said, can you

Starting point is 01:33:32 run an idea in emulation in your head? Like in computers, people talk about running VMs, 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 make sure that it can't kind of break out and affect other users' applications. And so kind of similarly, can you run an idea and scrutinize it and inspect it and kind of follow its consequences, you know, without it kind of bleeding out into kind of the rest of your brain and sort of infecting your whole worldview. 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, in a way, you can be less careful about what ideas 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

Starting point is 01:34:41 opposing viewpoints. And I should say also, I'm looking at your followers on Twitter, which people can find at Patrick C, that's your account. And I just want to give an example of two contrasts. So you have one, Harsh Sikka, S-I-K-K-A, bio, applying biological constraints to building intelligent, robust, and generalizable systems at Harvard, at Georgia Tech, tech at uc san diego right next to at uh relo almighty almighty hello and bio is almighty relo the hustler say hello to the bad guy they say i'm a bad guy dot dot dot so those are a lot of a lot of professors a lot of researchers uh also here's a friend of mine you follow, Graham Duncan, really interesting guy. Oh, yeah, sure.

Starting point is 01:35:26 He's awesome. I made a list of some people I follow at PatrickHolson.com slash people. And I wouldn't say that all of them are excellent at this, at sort of not taking offense and at sort of trying to find the best in some particular idea or 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 same list, but it's an easy-to-follow format. And so anyone can go follow that list.

Starting point is 01:36:14 And I think actually a reasonable number of people now do. And you seem to, whether it's reading or people have an intense interest in... I'm looking at your patrickcaustin.com forward slash people right now. Yeah, you do have some great, John Arnold is definitely worth checking out for a lot of folks who will not recognize that name. Of course, Stuart Brand, lots of, lots of good people on this list. So I encourage people to check this out, but coming back to one name that popped up when I was looking on your Twitter account, which I think you also recently shared, Pseudo-Erasmus.

Starting point is 01:36:49 Yes. Pseudo-Erasmus. So economic history and development economics. This feed contains no current events, no political news, no 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 can seem very niche, but I suspect there's a lot more to that. Labor repression and the Indo-Japanese divergence is the pin tweet by Sudo Erasmus. 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 that have been lived in human history is that we have the immense

Starting point is 01:37:39 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 parents are way more likely to be alive. Our siblings are far more likely to be alive. We get to work on things we find sort of way more interesting than tilling in the field or foraging for bushes. It means we're sort of exposed to kind of the full, you know, a more complete picture of the kind of variety and complexity and fascination or fascinating material of the world. Hey, I don't need to obviously enumerate all this, but just like it's astounding compared to sort of all humans who ever lived, just how amazingly lucky

Starting point is 01:38:25 we are. And again, that luck 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 so I think there's a real moral question. What can we do to put them on an equal footing with us? And indeed, how can we raise the waterline for all of us, such that while our lives are amazing compared to the people who lived before us, there's still tons of terrible things that happen.

Starting point is 01:39:25 People die of cancer. And people die of death caused by pollution. And while some people in society today get fantastic educations and have the good fortune to have great colleagues and meaningful work, a lot of people don't, et cetera, et cetera. And so I see kind of economics and economic history

Starting point is 01:39:50 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 really takes primacy? I want to thin slice this a little bit and dig on this because it's something that I've thought a lot about without any concrete conclusions. And I've bounced around quite a bit, and I'll explain what I mean by that. So the question that I'll want to ask,

Starting point is 01:40:34 but I'll give 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, I've also spent some time in Africa, not in, uh, not certainly I would, I would doubt in as many countries as you have, but I've spent time in Kenya and spent time in Africa, not in, uh, not certainly I would, I would doubt in as many countries as you have, but I've spent time in Kenya and spent time in Ethiopia and in Ethiopia was mostly in the Tigray region in some very, very poor areas. And I was chatting with, uh, a lot of the folks we

Starting point is 01:41:22 interacted with those who, those who spoke English or those with whom I could communicate through translator. And one thing that struck me in Ethiopia was how much people smiled. Now, that doesn't mean they don't need clean drinking water. It does not mean they wouldn't benefit from footwear in some instances. There are all sorts of not just comforts but necessities and infrastructure that would almost certainly have tremendous upside and benefits with very few downside possibilities. And I was talking to some people who lived in Tigray about how happy Ethiopians seem to be. And I heard on several occasions, it wasn't just one, these were in different locations, people say, oh, yeah, people are really happy until they get TV. And I asked

Starting point is 01:42:20 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 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 think about which components you're trying to solve for or to optimize for? So I think happiness is certainly kind of a tricky measure, right? And as you say say there's kind of this sort of sociological um and kind of uh comparative version of it and you know the phenomenon is seen where kind of to some degree uh i guess there's another version or another way of saying what you just alluded to which is the kind of uh the happiness you have with your level of wealth is kind of a function

Starting point is 01:43:20 of the wealth of those around you um and so if you find out about more people who are above you in some income table, that might actually kind of depress your happiness slightly. However, it's also kind of pretty robustly the case that there are some things that are just kind of absolute inputs into happiness and that, you know, kind of your health or chronic pain or whether your kids die or not or whatever, you know, these really do matter, right? And I think, you know, in the example of Ethiopia, I mean, while kind of on the one hand, I think, you know, as I guess you saw, you know, it's not like, um, you know, this is a country where sort of everyone is sort of in the perpetual depth of despair. Um, it does rank in the, uh, in the bottom half, um, of sort of, you know, global happiness surveys. Um, and, uh, actually Max Roser has this, uh, you know, he does a lot of kind of, uh, data visualization, uh, around kind

Starting point is 01:44:24 of development economics. Uh, and he, he does a lot of kind of data visualization around kind of development economics. And he has this wonderful visualization, this kind of scatterplot of happiness against kind of per capita income. And sure enough, what you see is it's certainly not a perfect correlation. There are all these other factors, maybe 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 maybe the kind of complexity you're 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,

Starting point is 01:45:01 you know, obviously, they had kind of, you they had inferior health outcomes, or they didn't have as many leisure options, or they couldn't travel as much or whatever. So their lives on some objective level were worse. But their happiness scores aren't that bad, because I guess on some level, they didn't know what they were 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 baseline shifts as we realize that better is possible does not mean that the gains are illusory. And if half of my kids died, but I still scored myself as being pretty happy because I didn't even realize that not having that happen

Starting point is 01:45:57 was even an option, 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 I was... Not that that's what you're saying. I know. I think the core point you're making about the complexity of happiness surveys, I think is 100% right. Yeah, it's very, very slippery. Yes, yes.

Starting point is 01:46:27 Actually, Scott Alexander, Slate's R Codex, has a really good blog post about just the trickiness of these kind of happiness surveys, where I think the core message and data from them is kind of correct, but a lot of specific, I think, interpretations and kind of comparisons we want to make are a little bit fraught. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, not to, I don't want to cast aspersions on all social sciences or anything like that, but a lot of it gets very squishy and

Starting point is 01:46:56 it's so highly multivariate when you're trying to assess something like this in the field that even the definitions by which the polls or surveys are being conducted get very, very subjective. And I was looking at a recent National Geographic, I suppose I would call it a poll. It was 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 not necessarily 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.

Starting point is 01:47:46 It was kind of a grand experiment. And Costa Rica, very different places. 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 uh 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 on that it can be used as kind of a don't look at this thing in front of you look over here because we're focusing yeah it can be looked it can be used as a distracting factor from the from the things that are actually quantifiably bad uh yes so there's that uh what have you found i mean in so we've talked about the uh i suppose the certain aspects of the wide divergence of economic prosperity across the world,

Starting point is 01:48:51 my question would then be, now what? 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 Archimedes levers in a situation like this? Well, I guess the first thing I'd say is I think that question you just asked is the big question that I think we should all be obsessed with. I, like I think, you know, I think you should ask every guest that question. Uh, I think people should be, uh, people in positions of influence or, um, uh, or where they can have great impact, like they should be obsessed with it. Um, it is the, uh, it's,

Starting point is 01:49:37 it is an issue of true moral importance. Um, I don't think there's going to be any silver bullets and panaceas. Obviously, Stripe is one iron in that fire. With Stripe, we frame our mission as to grow the GDP of the internet very I mean, kind of very directly around economic growth. And like on some level, you know, that sounds pretty arcane. I don't 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 idea we've been discussing where I think that's actually like a very urgent cause. I think roughly speaking, you can sort can break it down in two ways. There's kind of, actually, maybe three ways, where there's kind of, how do you raise the level

Starting point is 01:50:32 of countries that are kind of behind the frontier? So, emerging markets, developing countries, how do you raise them to kind of where we are today? And there are these kind of tantalizing examples that, like, that is actually possible. And so, you look at, you mentioned Singapore, you look at Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, to some degree Vietnam, of course China, though China still has quite a ways to go. But I mean, there are these amazing examples of countries that have really transformed themselves in remarkably short periods of time. You know, South Korea is perhaps kind of the best example, just in terms of the magnitude of the change in like just a couple of decades. And so, you know, we might think like perhaps if you look at Africa and kind of no other

Starting point is 01:51:16 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 accelerate it a little bit, but like, you know, 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 grand arc of history sense, it happened essentially overnight. And so what is it about South Korea that kind of made that possible? And can we enact the same transformation in Egypt or in Ethiopia? So I think that's kind of one dimension of the question. I think the other dimension is how do we advance at the frontier? And so if you think about Western Europe or North America

Starting point is 01:51:59 or Singapore or Japan, whatever, how do we make progress here? And I think so much of that is 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 do we 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, you know, an effort in this space, as indeed, too, is Pioneer. And the third one is, well, how do we just generate new knowledge? How do we,

Starting point is 01:52:43 you know, understand the world more deeply? And what is it, you know, intrinsically possible? So that, you know, so we have more buttons to push on the sort of on the switchboard. And so I kind of break it down in those sort of three ways. And I think they're all kind of quite different questions and all really incredibly important. I agree that they are very important. And I'd love to revisit for a second, if you have any thoughts, South Korea, it's come up a few times. What are some of the observations you've made or things that you think are interesting about South Korea? Like any specifics of what they've done?

Starting point is 01:53:39 Well, ironically, it's actually the richest country in the world by GDP that I've not been to. So I caveat my answer with sort of that. Having said that, there's actually a really good book on this topic called How Asia Works by Joe Studwell, I believe. And basically, he's trying to answer kind of exactly this question of why did South Korea and Taiwan and China and Vietnam and so forth, why did they diverge from Philippines and from Indonesia and to a significant degree from India and so forth? And basically the answer he gives and he marshalsals fairly compelling evidence for it, is the following. Land reform, protected but competitive industrial and export industries, and then third, tight control over the consumer credit sector. And that obviously seems like a very arbitrary basket of things, but he makes a pretty strong case for it. And, you know, just to provide a little bit of color on that, like the idea is that kind of first,

Starting point is 01:54:49 you want to make sure that people own their own land, so they can kind of farm it 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 export industries or these kind of value-added export industries. And so you kind of want to 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.

Starting point is 01:55:25 And you want to kind of 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 a worse and less efficient version of stuff that exists in the rest of the world. So you got to force them to compete. And the third one is you want to kind of restrain the consumer credit industry, such that sort of rather than, you know, giving credit to consumers to go and, you know, spend it on leisure or, you know, whatever it is, I guess, that consumers might choose to do. That you kind of direct all of that towards industrialization, economic progress, and sort of catch up growth with the rest of the world.

Starting point is 01:55:58 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've reached the frontier. But the thesis of the book is that kind of reining it in in the development phases has really served those countries well. So that is basically the prescription as Joe, again, Sudwell lays it out. And I'm no expert here, but I've really spent quite a bit of time sort of trying to better understand this question. And it's certainly the best cut that I've seen. Another one that's kind of worth mentioning is James Fallows wrote a piece for the Atlantic back in the 90s called, it's not called How the World Works, but it's some title like that. But if you search kind of James

Starting point is 01:56:36 Fallows trade, and if you include list, this German economist as a search term, then you'll find it. And it's again, then you'll find it. And it's again kind of about, it's basically about the South Korea question. And I'll put all of these links. There've been a few things that have come up with maybe reference checks required. So for people listening,

Starting point is 01:56:57 I will have my team check on all that stuff and we'll put links into the show notes. So you'll be able to find those at tim.blog forward slash podcast. On South Korea, stuff and we'll put links into the show notes so you'll be able to find those at tim.blog forward slash podcast on south korea just to add the uh a maybe ridiculous sidebar uh 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 uh people who are curious to see what that looks like can check out B-Boy Pocket for 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

Starting point is 01:57:42 of Japan in nine minutes, something like that on YouTube, which accomplishes that feat 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 i feel like i'm pretty good at and this is uh 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 the important but not timely quadrant and so on. but could you talk about making your your framework for making decisions or or

Starting point is 01:58:49 how you have cultivated making faster decisions because this is i think so important and it's along with the uh 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. Um, I would love to hear you talk, 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. Um, let me think for a second. Um, I think that I actually think that decision making is probably a little bit overrated as kind of a question 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.

Starting point is 02:00:02 And, you know, fine if they're, you know, certain kinds of investors got to actually help the companies they invest in. And so they have kind of other levers at the disposal, but kind of in some simplified model, it's like, you know, do you click the button or not? Do 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's sort of an investing or investment-like decision. But it's not usually that. And I think that 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 do I make sure the decisions I'm confronted with end up being better? Like,

Starting point is 02:00:52 you know, it's not like, how should I choose an option A and B? But how do I make sure that both options A and B are as good as possible? And there's also C, D, and E, and that 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, you know, do I go to this college or that college? It's, I mean, there's also a C there, which is, well, should I go to college? Or it's, you know, should I become a doctor or a dentist? But, maybe the answer is that, you know, you should become a biochemist. And so, the way I find myself in conversations with people is really trying to push them. It's less on sort of how do you make a decision and more about how do you jolt yourself out of the kind of particular kind of furrows that you're in

Starting point is 02:01:55 and realize the possibility space and the world is just so much bigger than perhaps people are thinking about it. I mean, it happens to all of us. It happens to me. 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

Starting point is 02:02:16 pull yourself out of that. How do you do that? Are there questions you ask? Are there any? I think certain people are great at this. Like i have a friend michael nielsen um and what was the last name nielsen and i e l s e n and he's just exceptionally good at sort of um you know uh you're sort of um you know thinking well should i go up or down and he's just great at sort of, you know, thinking, well, should I go up or down? And he's just great at sort of pointing out all the different ways in which you could go sideways.

Starting point is 02:02:48 And it's like, or, you know, you're sort of living in flatland on this kind of two-dimensional plane. And he points out, maybe you could go up. And so I guess the best, yeah, the best ways that I found are particular people, people who just seem to think laterally. In my head, they're thinking sideways. I think the second best way is exposing yourself to more perspective and ideas in all the ways we've already discussed. But I think finding the people

Starting point is 02:03:23 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 tend to go to different kinds of people for different kinds of issues. And it's not like they actually have any formal power, obviously.

Starting point is 02:03:44 But just kind of that notion of there being these, um, sources of perspective that are quite different to you. I think that's, um, I think that's just really very powerful. I think valuing those people, um, and, and, and building those relationships really pays off. There's, there's a, this, uh, you mentioning that the, uh, peer group or virtual or real board of directors with divergent thought processes 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 want to say probably 15 or 20 years ago, I 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

Starting point is 02:04:35 something along the lines of the six thinking hats. And the conceit or the premise behind the latter is that you create a virtual table of advisors who represent a different extreme perspective, right? So you might have the 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, as you put it, getting out about this study. I've 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 would say, and then averaging over the responses. But that's like a really amazing fact, because of course, this is all occurring in your own head. And so the idea that by kind of just simulating other people, and then, again, kind of performing this kind of averaging computation over the responses, that's actually 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

Starting point is 02:06:09 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 one of them who comes to mind is Matt Mullenweg. He's great. He's an amazing guy, CEO of a company called Automatic, M-A-T-T, Automatic, if people can put the two together now. So Matt Mullenweg, Automatic. In any case, brilliant guy, not to be confused with Octomatic. But so Matt Mullenweg. Automatic is way, way, way more successful than automatic ever was.

Starting point is 02:06:53 So 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 feel myself on the verge of getting spun up about a given situation, will ask myself, what would Matt say? Yes, yes. rash, ultimately would have been really bad decisions, often some type of quick emotional response to who knows what. It could have been anything. And so I have found that really useful. And I've done that also with people like Richard Feynman, for instance. Yes. Surely, I think it's what, surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman, one of my favorite books of all time.

Starting point is 02:08:08 So it does not have to be someone you know in a direct personal sense, but it helps if it is someone who you feel you know well. Yes. And so I'm glad you mentioned that. Because I've personally used that map for whatever reason, you know, people you know from afar, and maybe they're living, maybe they're dead, is just super powerful. And I guess there's something about kind of us as humans where we're sort of uniquely well adapted to being influenced by and understanding other humans. And so rather than, I think, thinking about decision-making

Starting point is 02:09:06 purely as this kind of abstract science, but actually embracing the fact that it has this kind of deeply human character to it, you can really kind of use that to your advantage. And 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

Starting point is 02:09:25 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 that people around you don't influence you too much. And that you kind of are, you know, truly original and coming 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 about who they are and try to make sure that they'll shape you in ways and directions that you want to be shaped. And I think that's both more effective but also a more fulfilling way to go about it. 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 decision based on complete information. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 02:10:31 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 do not have the luxury of taking forever to gather information to make a decision. And in many cases, the only way you can have more complete information is to make what might be the wrong decision and then course correct. Yeah, exactly. This is back to this point, I think, of you're dead right to kind of flag this. And I think it's back to this idea that just 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 remake it if you have to, because the remaking of it 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.

Starting point is 02:11:32 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 it sort of characterizes or I guess it focuses on the locus of the decision itself. Whereas who cares? You don't necessarily need to be sort of that good at decision making if you sort of get really good at remaking the decisions when and as necessary. You know, you mentioned that, you know, I fly, you know, both John and I have been flying for more than 10 years. And, you know, when you're when you're flying a landing, you're always off track, always off track. And, you know, if you if sort of there was a big discussion of like, how do you make sure that you get established on like precisely the right glide slope when you start, you know, 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

Starting point is 02:12:25 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 trapdoor may not necessarily be. There's a really good book that I very highly recommend called The Inner Game of Tennis. It's kind of... Timothy Galway, right? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, obviously one of the kind of general messages of that book is that so much of doing things well

Starting point is 02:12:53 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 resonates with me. I'm so glad you mentioned that. And it's reinforced, I think, a directional change for me, or not really, it's not a directional change. 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, I think I focused excessively on getting better at

Starting point is 02:13:30 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 undoing or redoing the decision. Because that is, for instance, in the last year, focused on getting very good at renegotiating commitments, which I think for a long time, philosophically or morally, I was just objected to it until I realized that all of the people I know, I shouldn't say all, but most who are 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 wipe my calendar of the handful of things that I committed to six months ago because it just doesn't, I have more information now, it does not make sense.

Starting point is 02:14:28 Yep, yep, yep. And there's all the kind of hyperbolic discounting that we engage in with regard to our future selves and over commitments that ensue and all the rest. And I think also, well, there's another, I think, fabulous book that kind of touches on some of this, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering? Yes, that's right. And the last chapter, especially, I mean, the whole book to some degree, but especially the last chapter is, I think, really applicable to and relevant to really almost anyone. The last chapter is called You and Your Research. It's actually kind of a talk that I'm sure a lot of people listening to the show have previously kind of read or heard. But Heming worked at Bell Labs, and he, in the book,

Starting point is 02:15:13 kind of often quotes and cites John Tukey, this amazing guy who sort of father of data visualization. And like a lot of kind of data visualizations and analyses that kind of we're familiar with, that kind of we think of as being standard, you know, John Tukey actually invented. But there's this kind of Tukey line that it's far better to have an approximate answer to the right question, you know, which is often vague,

Starting point is 02:15:47 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 to be kind of making the right decisions to have the right options than to be perfect at choosing between a specific set of options. Right. You know what? This is, yeah, that's really on. 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'd be great. Are there any parting recommendations,

Starting point is 02:16:26 requests, suggestions, uh, words of wisdom, anything at all, questions you'd like to pose to the audience in a place where they can respond or a way in which they can respond, anything at all that you'd like to say before we, before we wrap up? Um, I mean, um, I guess to whatever extent, um, well, I, I, I wrote in that list of advice, um, that if people around you don't think what you're doing is sort of, uh, a bit strange, uh, that maybe it's not strange enough. Uh, and I don't think you should always be heeding that, but I do often wish that people did more strange things in service of or in pursuit of real sort of long-term economic and technological progress. And so figuring out how to help people to do more weird, strange and original things

Starting point is 02:17:26 in service of that is kind of that's my particular goal, trying to kind of arm those upstarts and those misfits. And, you know, but it's a very big space. And I would, you know, very profoundly welcome more participants pushing for that cause. Hear, hear. And people can give a wave hello on Twitter, at Patrick C. Yes. And by the way, I think your podcast is a fabulous effort in this direction.

Starting point is 02:18:02 Thanks so much. That really means a lot. And that's certainly a hope of mine. I mean, that is a hope of mine. I so enjoy having these conversations. And it's opened so many doors for me in terms of my own thinking and questioning so many of my own assumptions

Starting point is 02:18:25 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. Yeah, no, I won't, you know, bore you or flatter you with, you know, with praise here. But I think, I mean, to my perspective, certainly certainly and I listen to a lot of podcasts that there's kind of a lineage of podcasts that can kind of be traced back to this show.

Starting point is 02:18:58 There's a model that you prototyped and obviously continue to implement that now a lot of other podcasts are kind of somehow you know a different version of which uh you know what which i'm excited about because hopefully they'll they'll do an even better job and i've i've been so excited to see uh certainly jocko willing run off and create his entire empire. And then you have Cal Fussman and Peter Tia and others. It's really fun. And Hamilton Morris, I'm waiting for your podcast, Hamilton,

Starting point is 02:19:33 to Ezra thousands of people. Yeah, exactly. And these aren't competitive in the sense that Robinson Crusoe was kind of one of the first novels. And it turns out that was a big space. And it was not a bad thing when more novelists came along. And so kind of similarly, I actually think that sort of I'm not even sure the podcast space is the podcast space per se. It's more the sort of the serious, in-depth, long-form exploration.

Starting point is 02:20:06 But even though that obviously is kind of 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.

Starting point is 02:20:22 I mean, it's a pretty smart people with a lot of experience. And they were telling me then that the ship had already sailed. I mean, some pretty smart people with a lot of experience were telling me then that the ship had sailed, 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. This is one of the really interesting and surprising things where people keep feeling that spaces are too late when in fact they're not only not too late, but still fact, they're, you know, not only not too late, but like still in the first

Starting point is 02:20:46 10%. Mark Andreessen 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 Stri um uh obviously uh and uh and you know yet yet we kind of came to realize that actually you know the internet as a whole is still in its earliest innings oh definitely yeah there's there's always there's always i mean stripe is a great example of this there's i mean there's always a market for great uh and and and that is not dependent on creating or shipping something today or this afternoon. There's always room for that.

Starting point is 02:21:31 Well, Patrick. I meant that. Patrick, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. And 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.blog forward slash podcast. Just search Patrick or Collison and this episode will come right up. You can scroll down to find it. And until next time, thank you for listening.

Starting point is 02:22:02 Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things thank you for listening. is 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 I've 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 shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign

Starting point is 02:23:01 up, I hope you enjoy it. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? My answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in the 4-Hour Body, did not get paid for that. And I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases. If I can't get what I need through whole food meals throughout the rest of the day. If you want to give Athletic Greens a try, they are offering a free 20 count travel pack

Starting point is 02:23:31 for first time users. I always travel with at least three or four of these. This represents a $100 value. So if you buy Athletic Greens, you get an extra $100 in free product. So check it out. Athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim. Again, it out, athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Tim for your free travel pack with any purchase.

Starting point is 02:23:53 This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together. From logos to apps, packaging to books, 99designs is the go-to design resource for any budget. I've used 99designs for many, many years now. I've used them for book covers, for instance, mock-ups for The 4-Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller, illustrations for my multi-volume The Tao of Seneca, and other graphic design projects. And I've been really impressed by the quality of their designers and the designs that I've ended up using. Most recently, I used 99designs to update the illustrations and layouts of my five morning

Starting point is 02:24:36 rituals ebook. This covers my most consistent morning routines and rituals. And I offer that as an incentive for people to sign up for my newsletter. So this is a PDF bonus that acts as a carrot to increase the number of email subscribers. The illustrations inside are gorgeous, and I loved working with the designer who we selected for the project. So you can check it out. Take a look at that at 99designs.com forward slash Tim. That's the number 99designs.com forward slash Tim. And you can see exactly what I'm talking about with a real world example of what has come out of working with them. 99designs designer search tool connects you directly with one designer based on design category or an industry specialization, style, skill level, availability, and more.

Starting point is 02:25:26 So you can really check all the boxes that you need and see who matches up. Or you can start a contest. And that means you invite the entire community to take a shot at your project. Then you pick your favorite. Right now, you guys, my listeners that is, can receive a free $99 upgrade on your first design contest. So check

Starting point is 02:25:46 it out. To see what it looks like to get your first free upgrade, please visit 99designs.com forward slash Tim and click on the link in the landing page. So again, check it out 99designs.com forward slash Tim. you

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.

Your Ad Here

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #353: Patrick Collison — CEO of Stripe

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.