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- John Collison explains why it’s important for founders to be curious
John Collison explains why it’s important for founders to be curious
John recounts a story about Magnus Carlson winning a chess trivia contest:
“He knew the most chess trivia out of anyone in this contest, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the world’s number one player has also studied the most about chess history.”
As the Collison brothers scaled Stripe from two people to 7,000 people, they studied how other businesses navigated similar stages:
“I think you have to be curious about what is required to run a good company at that stage… One thing we try to do is just spend a lot of time looking at all the other companies and what they’ve done. Not that you want to blindly emulate them, but you should at least understand them.”
He gives Apple and Amazon as an example:
“You cannot imagine two companies that work more differently than the two of those… Yet they’re both really successful models. And so I think it’s useful to have a framework for how that stuff works.”
John also recommends trying to learn the best mental models from various domains and industries:
“I don’t know if every founder has to do it, but I do think it’s probably effective to be able to just know the top mental models from finance, engineering, product, sales, and stuff like that. I don’t see how you could be that effective without being pretty curious on how to learn the most important mental models from this particular domain or function.”