Patrick Collison

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

“The promise of the Internet is around this transcendence of physical geography. To a large degree, the Internet has delivered on that promise, but when it comes to the movement of money and the ability to start and operate a business or needing to purchase from a business, it really hasn't.”

“It's very possible that advertising business models will simply never do as well on mobile devices as those oriented around transactions.”

“I actually made a website called Y2 Combinator, which was the Y Combinator that starts Y Combinator clones. There's a very clear difference in the quality between the companies that come from YC and the companies that don't.”

“I myself am not religious, but yes, I certainly grew up in a very Catholic environment.”

“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.”

“I watch virtually no TV. All my screen time is computer time for me. When I'm not doing that I'm reading or talking to my friends who I got to know through computers.”

“One of the first major programming projects that I worked on when I was growing up in Ireland, back just coding by myself, was a programming language. Then I spent a bunch of time working on a new web framer. Just back-end things to make it easier to go in and build things on top of, do other development.”

“Square is turning informal, cash transactions, like you would do with a taco truck, into card swipes. Stripe is more for the Internet, it's focused on the kinds of transactions that weren't possible years ago. We think about how you would buy things from a mobile phone, crowd-funding, how should that work.”

“Our goal definitely isn't to sell Stripe.”

“It's not that I don't enjoy TV. If I had infinite time, I would watch it.”

“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.”

“The part of Stripe that I've always found most interesting is the idea of facilitating new commerce that wouldn't otherwise happen. Payouts is turning out to be a big part of that. These new networks are efficient, intelligent replacements for offline behemoths.”

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

“When you talk to people who are old, some wish they had enjoyed themselves more, but not many wish they had wasted more time.”

“Presumably, what you want to do is work on something meaningful and significant with people you really admire.”

“There is really an issue in Silicon Valley with companies getting a bit ahead of themselves in terms of their own self-perception of their own success.”

“'Entrepreneur' is a long, fancy French word, but it didn't seem like something you aspire to. It seemed normal, because whatever your parents do seems normal.”

“In 2007, there weren't any other accelerators, at least that I was aware of. We were almost the prototypical Y Combinator founders: We were highly technical but had never done a startup before. We also didn't know anyone in the Valley - investors, other entrepreneurs, potential hires. YC seemed like a great way to bootstrap that network.”

“Being a public company certainly doesn't stop you from taking a really long-term time horizon, but it does make it more difficult.”