43 Quotes by Patrick Collison

If you want to hire the best people, the best people are already doing pretty impressive things. They have their life plans, their picture for what they want to be doing. To figure out a way in which those trajectories align really takes time.

I grew up in very rural Ireland. The Internet was kind of a connection to the greater world. It had a lot of significance.

At most large companies, what is locally optimal for you is very frequently not what is globally optimal for the company.

I started Stripe with my brother John Collison while we were in school together. We first started off building iPhone apps together and using the money we made from them to pay our tuition.

Our goal definitely isn't to sell Stripe.

I think that Stripe generally is comprised of the kind of people who believe in technology or are kind of optimistic about its effect and want to have whatever future it's leading to happen.

If you're building a consumer app, you're necessarily coupled to the intrinsic time cycle of human fashion in that it's a fashion-driven space, and we see that in the cycle of these various apps. I think for infrastructure that that just naturally tends to play out over a longer time horizon.

Silicon Valley does not breed great technology. Instead, the smartest people from around the world tend to move to Silicon Valley.

It's a common case with high-growth startups where the co-founding team breaks up - generally, it's hard to get the team to persist. It's easy to stick with it when you have known the person for decades either as a friend or family.