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20 years ago, every founder feared one tech company: Google. Even when Patrick Collison (CEO of Stripe) was building a startup back then, he got the same question in every meeting: "What if Google does this ?" But the truth is, Google still didn't build most of what people...

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GeniusThinking

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14 Kommentare

Profilbild von shiv
shivvor 1 Monat

I remember someone said google is irreplaceable, and the product google map is more on top. But now I realise how this giant is so slow to take steps. The world around us changed in couple of years only, and everyone who hoped that this giant will win here too, how wrong that assumption comes out to now. Now I even myself am not sure if google is irreplaceable, I used chatgpt to search, my ai agent crawl web. It's completely a new world order. Everyone has to adapt here, especially giants !

Profilbild von MR - Michael Robertson
MR - Michael Robertsonvor 1 Monat

30 years ago it was IBM 20 years ago it was Microsoft 10 years ago it was Google Today: Anthropic, OpenAI?

Profilbild von Vikram Arora
Vikram Aroravor 1 Monat

@garrytan Google had Android mobile OS which had internet data, and everyones contact numbers and emails. Why didn’t it make Whatsapp?

Profilbild von GeniusThinking
GeniusThinkingvor 1 Monat

PS. Tech founders: we'll build your personal/company brand on 𝕏 without you lifting a finger. To date, we've generated 750M+ impressions for 22 tech founders. Interested? Schedule an 𝕏 audit here:

Profilbild von Clara Del VIllar
Clara Del VIllarvor 1 Monat

well said

Profilbild von Dr. Doubt, Ph.D.
Dr. Doubt, Ph.D.vor 1 Monat

the AI labs dont need people to do anything thats the real worry

Profilbild von Aldo
Aldovor 1 Monat

i seriously think hiring indians or having an indian lead your company will lead it to ruin.

Profilbild von AⓂ️εεη
AⓂ️εεηvor 1 Monat

Big companies have the resources to build almost anything, but they can’t pursue everything. That’s exactly where startups find their edge.

Profilbild von Kevin Beach
Kevin Beachvor 1 Monat

Where can I watch the full interview?

Profilbild von Ballstein Bull
Ballstein Bullvor 1 Monat

Idk why you all are forgetting that the DoJ put Google in a penalty box for years.

Profilbild von bodila
bodilavor 1 Monat

huh, now they're definitely not afraid of Google, since they've long since dropped out of the race

Profilbild von veve
vevevor 1 Monat

Bayangin tiap meeting cuma bahas itu. Sekarang malah lupa.

Profilbild von Celesnity
Celesnityvor 1 Monat

The question isn’t whether the AI labs can build your product. It’s whether your customer’s problem will ever become one of their top priorities.

Profilbild von KP bhoomika
KP bhoomikavor 1 Monat

If “Google could build it” killed startups, Stripe would still be a spreadsheet 💀

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In 2009, Patrick Collison and John Collison went to Startup School in Berkeley, got sushi in Potrero Hill afterward, and decided on the walk home to start Stripe. The reasoning, as Patrick remembers it, was that “we might as well because it probably won’t be that hard.” It took them two years to launch. Seventeen years later, at Startup School 2026, he talks with YC's Harj Taggar about dropping out of MIT twice, why founders should ask what happens if they succeed, and what Stripe’s own data says about the best time to start a company. 00:07 — What Should You Still Learn in the Age of AI? 02:01 — Knowledge Still Matters 05:12 — Should You Drop Out of College? 09:58 — Why Stripe Worked 12:10 — Building Stripe Before Launching 17:20 — Is the Lean Startup Still the Right Playbook? 19:07 — The Hidden Reward of Building Stripe 22:36 — Will AI Kill Your Startup? 25:17 — Why It's Never Been a Better Time to Start a Company 29:23 — What Stripe's Data Says About the AI Economy 30:45 — Build Something People Truly Need
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Jack Zhang on why he said no to Stripe’s $1.2 billion offer to buy Airwallex “In October 2018, Stripe reached out to buy us,” Airwallex co-founder Jack Zhang (Jack Zhang) begins. Patrick Collison flew out to Shanghai to meet Jack and his co-founder, and they spent the day together. After the meeting, Patrick sent over a Google Doc that was 10-20 pages long and asked Jack to make comments. “I was like, ‘Wow, the vision of the companies over the next decade is very much the same.’ We both wanted to build the AWS of financial services, and obviously Stripe was much further ahead of us. But this was before COVID. Stripe was like a $9 billion company — very similar to the scale of Airwallex today. I also really liked Patrick. It was like this guy is so smart.” Asked what makes Patrick Collison so smart, Jack replies: “He’s intellectually honest about everything, and he’s able to go deep in multiple dimensions.” Eventually Stripe offered $1.2 billion for Airwallex, and according to Jack, he and his co-founders would’ve walked away with $350 million. “I met with the whole team, and I was really impressed,” Jack recalls. “I basically said I think we’re going to do it.” But when he flew back to Melbourne, Jack decided against it. And it was actually Patrick Collison who inspired him to reject the offer. Jack explains: “So one of the things that really inspired me from talking and spending time with Patrick was I asked, ‘What’s the long-term thing for Stripe and yourself? Are you going to be here forever?’ And Patrick said to me that he’s going to build Stripe for the next 20-40 years. And I just never heard a founder tell me they will dedicate their entire life to building a business. And so that was inspiring to me, and I’m like that’s what I want to do.” Today, Airwallex (Airwallex) is an $8B company, with more than $1B in ARR. Video source: The Twenty Minute VC Harry Stebbings (2025)
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11/ This is not a small problem. Stripe handles more than a trillion dollars in payments every year. Millions of businesses rely on their tech. If they can put a “hold” on my money for no reason, they can do it to anyone. Is that the plan Patrick Collison?
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Patrick Collison on the importance of beauty and craftsmanship when building products “If Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn’t beautiful… I’ll be much less happy. The world’s just uglier than it needs to be.” Patrick believes that the impact of beauty and craftsmanship are higher than people think. And not just for aesthetic reasons — it’s rational for customers to buy beautiful products. “What does a beautiful thing tell you?” Patrick asks. “It tells you the person who made it really cared." Source: Million Stories Media (Mar 2024)

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Patrick Collison on the importance of beauty and craftsmanship when building products “If Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn’t beautiful… I’ll be much less happy. The world’s just uglier than it needs to be.” Patrick believes that the impact of beauty and craftsmanship are higher than people think. And not just for aesthetic reasons — it’s rational for customers to buy beautiful products. “What does a beautiful thing tell you?” Patrick asks. “It tells you the person who made it really cared." Video source: Million Stories Media (2024)
1:15

Patrick Collison on the importance of beauty and craftsmanship when building products “If Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn’t beautiful… I’ll be much less happy. The world’s just uglier than it needs to be.” Patrick believes that the impact of beauty and craftsmanship are higher than people think. And not just for aesthetic reasons — it’s rational for customers to buy beautiful products. “What does a beautiful thing tell you?” Patrick asks. “It tells you the person who made it really cared." Video source: Million Stories Media (2024)

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The founders of Stripe and Pinterest on how to convince people to join your startup Stripe CEO Patrick Collison argues that part of the reason startups resonate so much is because the outcome is not guaranteed: "If it were guaranteed, it would be boring... Whether or not you're the best person in the world at what you do, you're probably not going to alter Google's trajectory. But if you really want to benchmark yourself and see how much of a contribution and impact you can make--which is a really compelling prospect for a lot of the best people--a startup is a much better place to test that." Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann emphasized this as well: "No smart person that you're hiring is under the illusion that you have a crystal ball into the future and that joining is a guaranteed thing. In fact, if you're telling them that and they select in, you shouldn't hire them because they didn't pass a basic intelligence test. I think it's important to tell them what's exciting and where you think the company can go. But also tell them where it will be hard and chart your best plan. And then tell them why their role can be instrumental--because it will be... What I would discourage doing is whitewashing all of that. If people are joining your company because they want all of the certainty and safety of working at Google but also the perks of working at a small startup with lots of responsibility and transparency, that's a really negative sign." Apparently in the early days of PayPal, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin would tell people after they interviewed all the reasons that the company would fail: "Visa and MasterCard want to kill us. We also might be doing something that's illegal. But if we succeed, we'll redefine payments." Don't whitewash the risks. Instead tell them how your startup will change the world if you succeed and how their role will be instrumental in affecting that change. Video source: Y Combinator (2014)

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Collison Brothers Explain Why Stripe is Better Off Staying Private John's (John Collison) take: " People generally make the argument that public companies run in a more disciplined fashion. I think that's hogwash." "If you need a 25-year old Fidelity analyst asking you to double click on your CapEx, blah, blah, blah, to run the company with discipline, something is horribly wrong at the company and you need new management." "It used to be the case that to do any return of capital to shareholders, or if you needed any kind of large sums of money, you needed the public markets." "That's obviously not true today, where stable private markets exist." " This is our life's work. We're not going anywhere. We'll be very happily running Stripe in 10 years time, in 20 years time." Patrick's (Patrick Collison) take: "We're a company at the intersection of financial services and technology. Being private for a long time is the norm." "What matters is less kind of the returns in a given year, and more duration. And so the question is, what enables the best compounding on a 10 year time horizon?" "And what's best for shareholders as you really take the longer-term perspective? And then what's best for customers?" " At this juncture, with the business growing at this rate, we want to spend the marginal hour with some customer."
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Collison Brothers Explain Why Stripe is Better Off Staying Private John's (John Collison) take: " People generally make the argument that public companies run in a more disciplined fashion. I think that's hogwash." "If you need a 25-year old Fidelity analyst asking you to double click on your CapEx, blah, blah, blah, to run the company with discipline, something is horribly wrong at the company and you need new management." "It used to be the case that to do any return of capital to shareholders, or if you needed any kind of large sums of money, you needed the public markets." "That's obviously not true today, where stable private markets exist." " This is our life's work. We're not going anywhere. We'll be very happily running Stripe in 10 years time, in 20 years time." Patrick's (Patrick Collison) take: "We're a company at the intersection of financial services and technology. Being private for a long time is the norm." "What matters is less kind of the returns in a given year, and more duration. And so the question is, what enables the best compounding on a 10 year time horizon?" "And what's best for shareholders as you really take the longer-term perspective? And then what's best for customers?" " At this juncture, with the business growing at this rate, we want to spend the marginal hour with some customer."

The All-In Podcast

407,511 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Peter Thiel on the question he asks every startup founder he invests in “Why will the 20th talented person join your company when they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google, and it will look better on their resume to go to Google?” The 20th employee won’t get the equity or prestige that someone on the founding team will get, so there needs to be another incentive if you’re going to build a truly great company and attract the best people in the world. Thiel believes the best answer is something along the lines of: “This is the only place in the world where you can work on this incredibly important problem.” He continues: “It has to—on some dimension—be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kind of businesses that are unique, and when they work, they end up being leaders in their respective markets.” If it’s a problem that a bunch of other team are working on, it will be hard to attract a truly world-class employee #20.
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Peter Thiel on the question he asks every startup founder he invests in “Why will the 20th talented person join your company when they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google, and it will look better on their resume to go to Google?” The 20th employee won’t get the equity or prestige that someone on the founding team will get, so there needs to be another incentive if you’re going to build a truly great company and attract the best people in the world. Thiel believes the best answer is something along the lines of: “This is the only place in the world where you can work on this incredibly important problem.” He continues: “It has to—on some dimension—be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kind of businesses that are unique, and when they work, they end up being leaders in their respective markets.” If it’s a problem that a bunch of other team are working on, it will be hard to attract a truly world-class employee #20.

Startup Archive

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Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: - A public chat room to provide support to people integrating Stripe - For the first 10 users of Stripe, every API request sent an email to the founders so they could better understand how users were using their product and see if users were doing anything weird - All errors generated a high-priority email to the founders. This created a pleasant user experience where 15 minutes after hitting an error, Patrick could reach out to them and let them know the issue was fixed “These are all kind of examples of a general pattern of trying to be hyper-attentive to all the micro details of what people were doing in the product and iterating rapidly in response to it. Generally speaking, I think pre-product/market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. If it’s 20 users, you can in some sense afford to just look at everything they’re doing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.” Another example of this Patrick gives is embedding a text input on each of their web pages with placeholder text prompting users to give them useful feedback(e.g. “The worst thing about Stripe is…”, “The worst thing about this page is…”, or “I really hate the way Stripe does…”). As Patrick explains: “At that stage, you have to be kind of masochistic. We’d always be waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to-do list for the day ahead." Source: Y Combinator (Oct 2018)
2:13

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: - A public chat room to provide support to people integrating Stripe - For the first 10 users of Stripe, every API request sent an email to the founders so they could better understand how users were using their product and see if users were doing anything weird - All errors generated a high-priority email to the founders. This created a pleasant user experience where 15 minutes after hitting an error, Patrick could reach out to them and let them know the issue was fixed “These are all kind of examples of a general pattern of trying to be hyper-attentive to all the micro details of what people were doing in the product and iterating rapidly in response to it. Generally speaking, I think pre-product/market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. If it’s 20 users, you can in some sense afford to just look at everything they’re doing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.” Another example of this Patrick gives is embedding a text input on each of their web pages with placeholder text prompting users to give them useful feedback(e.g. “The worst thing about Stripe is…”, “The worst thing about this page is…”, or “I really hate the way Stripe does…”). As Patrick explains: “At that stage, you have to be kind of masochistic. We’d always be waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to-do list for the day ahead." Source: Y Combinator (Oct 2018)

Startup Archive

32,192 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: • A public chat room to provide support to people integrating Stripe • For the first 10 users of Stripe, every API request sent an email to the founders so they could better understand how users were using their product and see if users were doing anything weird • All errors generated a high-priority email to the founders. This created a pleasant user experience where 15 minutes after hitting an error, Patrick could reach out to them and let them know the issue was fixed “These are all kind of examples of a general pattern of trying to be hyper-attentive to all the micro details of what people were doing in the product and iterating rapidly in response to it. Generally speaking, I think pre-product/market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. If it’s 20 users, you can in some sense afford to just look at everything they’re doing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.” Another example of this Patrick gives is embedding a text input on each of their web pages with placeholder text prompting users to give them useful feedback(e.g. “The worst thing about Stripe is…”, “The worst thing about this page is…”, or “I really hate the way Stripe does…”). As Patrick explains: “At that stage, you have to be kind of masochistic. We’d always be waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to-do list for the day ahead. Video source: Y Combinator (2018)
2:13

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison shares the tactics he used for finding product/market fit “We tried very hard to understand in granular detail what exactly it was that people were doing, where they were tripping up and so on.” Patrick gives some examples of specific tactics: • A public chat room to provide support to people integrating Stripe • For the first 10 users of Stripe, every API request sent an email to the founders so they could better understand how users were using their product and see if users were doing anything weird • All errors generated a high-priority email to the founders. This created a pleasant user experience where 15 minutes after hitting an error, Patrick could reach out to them and let them know the issue was fixed “These are all kind of examples of a general pattern of trying to be hyper-attentive to all the micro details of what people were doing in the product and iterating rapidly in response to it. Generally speaking, I think pre-product/market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful because probably not that many people are using your product. If it’s 20 users, you can in some sense afford to just look at everything they’re doing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.” Another example of this Patrick gives is embedding a text input on each of their web pages with placeholder text prompting users to give them useful feedback(e.g. “The worst thing about Stripe is…”, “The worst thing about this page is…”, or “I really hate the way Stripe does…”). As Patrick explains: “At that stage, you have to be kind of masochistic. We’d always be waking up to all these emails telling us all the terrible things about Stripe. But that was a helpful to-do list for the day ahead. Video source: Y Combinator (2018)

Startup Archive

45,833 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

Jack Dent story time - his path from high school in the UK to founding Chai is pretty amazing: - Cold-emailed Stripe as a teenager - Daniela Amodei was running Stripe’s careers inbox and forwarded his email to Patrick Collison - Interned on Stripe’s payments API and eventually became the only engineer working on it - Greg Brockman walked around the office with no shoes - Met Joshua Meier while at Harvard. Years later, Sam Altman Facebook-messaged him about Josh when he was leaving OAI - asked if he could be convinced to stay or start a company ... All of it became part of the path to co-founding Chai Discovery a few years later. Early Stripe was a talent epicenter Daniela Amodei Patrick Collison Greg Brockman Sam Altman
7:53

Jack Dent story time - his path from high school in the UK to founding Chai is pretty amazing: - Cold-emailed Stripe as a teenager - Daniela Amodei was running Stripe’s careers inbox and forwarded his email to Patrick Collison - Interned on Stripe’s payments API and eventually became the only engineer working on it - Greg Brockman walked around the office with no shoes - Met Joshua Meier while at Harvard. Years later, Sam Altman Facebook-messaged him about Josh when he was leaving OAI - asked if he could be convinced to stay or start a company ... All of it became part of the path to co-founding Chai Discovery a few years later. Early Stripe was a talent epicenter Daniela Amodei Patrick Collison Greg Brockman Sam Altman

Sabrina Halper

33,476 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten

Patrick Collison on the importance of beauty and craftsmanship when building products “If Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn’t beautiful, and Stripe doesn’t embody a culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship, I’ll be much less happy. I think the returns to both of those things in the world are really high. I think even beyond the pecuniary or financial returns, the world’s just uglier than it needs to be… One can do things well or poorly, and beauty is not a rivalrous good.” Patrick believes a commitment to craftsmanship and beauty played an important role in Stripe’s success: “My intuition is that more of Stripe’s success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things—and for kind of rational reasons because what does a beautiful thing tell you? Well it tells you the person who made it really cared… And so if you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not an irrational thing to do.”
1:29

Patrick Collison on the importance of beauty and craftsmanship when building products “If Stripe is a monstrously successful business, but what we make isn’t beautiful, and Stripe doesn’t embody a culture of incredibly exacting craftsmanship, I’ll be much less happy. I think the returns to both of those things in the world are really high. I think even beyond the pecuniary or financial returns, the world’s just uglier than it needs to be… One can do things well or poorly, and beauty is not a rivalrous good.” Patrick believes a commitment to craftsmanship and beauty played an important role in Stripe’s success: “My intuition is that more of Stripe’s success than one would think is downstream of the fact that people like beautiful things—and for kind of rational reasons because what does a beautiful thing tell you? Well it tells you the person who made it really cared… And so if you care about the infrastructure being holistically good, indexing on the superficial characteristics that you can actually observe is not an irrational thing to do.”

Startup Archive

750,588 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Pedro Franceschi on the advice Paul Graham gave him about scaling Brex In 2019, Brex was generating more than $100 million in revenue, scaling, and growing really fast. Founder Pedro Franceschi recalls having a conversation with Paul Graham around this time and asking, “What’s the job of the founder at this new scale?” Paul Graham replied: “The job of a founder is to figure out how to be happy. If you believe in founder-led companies, the thing that matters most is you being there to lead it. And if you don’t like it, you’re not going to do it because people won’t do what they don’t like for a long time. What’s impressive about the Collison brothers at Stripe or Mark Zuckerberg at Meta is not that Meta is a trillion dollar company and growing. It’s that it’s a trillion dollar company, growing, and the founder is still there 20 years later. That’s the part that’s really impressive… A lot of it is: how do you manufacture the culture, the way of working, and the way of building to be something that gives you energy so that you can do it for a long time?” Source: Kleiner Perkins (Apr 2025)
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Pedro Franceschi on the advice Paul Graham gave him about scaling Brex In 2019, Brex was generating more than $100 million in revenue, scaling, and growing really fast. Founder Pedro Franceschi recalls having a conversation with Paul Graham around this time and asking, “What’s the job of the founder at this new scale?” Paul Graham replied: “The job of a founder is to figure out how to be happy. If you believe in founder-led companies, the thing that matters most is you being there to lead it. And if you don’t like it, you’re not going to do it because people won’t do what they don’t like for a long time. What’s impressive about the Collison brothers at Stripe or Mark Zuckerberg at Meta is not that Meta is a trillion dollar company and growing. It’s that it’s a trillion dollar company, growing, and the founder is still there 20 years later. That’s the part that’s really impressive… A lot of it is: how do you manufacture the culture, the way of working, and the way of building to be something that gives you energy so that you can do it for a long time?” Source: Kleiner Perkins (Apr 2025)

Startup Archive

17,592 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

What will AI look like in 5 years? That's the trillion-dollar question every Big Tech company is trying to answer. But here's an even bigger question: Who will own it? If nothing changes, the most powerful technology in history could be controlled by a handful of billionaires. It doesn't have to end that way. That's why we're building Action Model. Community-owned AI, where the people helping build the future can share in the value they create. AI is inevitable. Who owns it is still a choice.
0:57

What will AI look like in 5 years? That's the trillion-dollar question every Big Tech company is trying to answer. But here's an even bigger question: Who will own it? If nothing changes, the most powerful technology in history could be controlled by a handful of billionaires. It doesn't have to end that way. That's why we're building Action Model. Community-owned AI, where the people helping build the future can share in the value they create. AI is inevitable. Who owns it is still a choice.

Action Model

20,373 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten