Patrick Collison on how both Stripe and Facebook doubted their ideas in the beginning

As Patrick tells the founding story of Stripe, he reflects on the fact that he and his cofounder John weren’t quite sure how seriously to take it:

“Even once we built this prototype we thought held some promise, it wasn’t obviously a great idea.”

He points out that the same was true of Facebook, which was also working on a peer-to-peer file sharing product six months after it launched Facebook.

“I find it very interesting that six months later it was not obvious that Facebook was the thing to be working on.”

Patrick believes there may be a broader lesson here:

“I think a lot of really good ideas don’t seem particularly great or big upfront. Certainly, speaking from personal experience, Stripe did not. But over the course of working on it that summer and thinking about it and so on, we shifted from thinking about it merely as this nice little tool for developers that makes their lives easier… [To realizing] that the whole edifice is broken… We came to appreciate that what we thought was this little pond was actually this much larger ocean.”

It was only after coming to this realization that the Collison brothers decided to drop out of school and raise some initial funding from Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Sequoia, Elon Musk, and a couple others.

Full video: This Week in Startups “E723: Stripe Patrick Collison on online payment pwrhouse, Atlas, public/private mkts, & GDP of net“ (Apr 2017)

More popular advice from Patrick Collison

Patrick Collison on the importance of beauty and craftsmanship when building products “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.” (full article).

Patrick Collison’s advice for people in their 20s: “Work at a place with high standards” “So maybe one versions of the ‘what people in their twenties should do’ is get some idea as to the domains you’re interested in, but then figure out where you can learn the highest standards. Where are the highest standards embodied? And where can you go and experience that firsthand?” (full article).

Patrick Collison on how hiring changes as a startup scales “In the really early days, you have to hire people who will be productive immediately. You don’t have the luxury of hiring people who are really promising but won’t quite be up to speed for another year or two. But after two or three years, it’s much more reasonable to make those investments. And in fact, if you’re not making those investments, you’re probably being much too short-term focused.” (full article).