Patrick Collison - How both Stripe and Facebook founders doubted their ideas in the beginning?

Опубликовано: 04 Февраль 2025
на канале: Finance & Tech Career Advice

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.