Patrick Collison
speaker
266 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Patrick Collison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And on the one hand, it seemed like an obviously good idea in the sense that nobody liked the existing ways of doing so.
And they were broadly extremely unpopular and kind of antiquated and legacy.
And you had to fill out all this paperwork and go to the bank in person.
And the paperwork was in Latin.
And it was all bad.
But then the flip side is it just seems kind of ridiculous that two kids would start a financial services business.
And fintech didn't exist as a sector at the time, like the word literally didn't exist.
And so it's just kind of, you know, we felt like the proverbial squirrels, you know, in a trench coat trying to masquerade as a sort of a real business or as serious adults, but obviously knowing nothing coming in about the
about the space.
And certainly a lot of people we met and pitched, or banks, or partners, or whatever that we talked to, I mean, they didn't literally laugh us out of the room, but you kind of see them looking for the button to call security under the desk and have them haul us out, because it just seemed so improbable.
So anyway, I'd say it both seemed like an obviously good idea in that people really wanted this, but also a bad idea in that nobody took us seriously.
But I think ultimately the fact that it was grounded in such a concrete, actual, real user problem saved us.
Yeah.
Well, actually, this is not an answer to your question.
But just a thing that strikes me as I sit here is the reason we decided to start Stripe is because John and I were in college together.
He was in his freshman year.
And we went to startup school in 2009, which was held in Berkeley.
And we thought it was pretty cool.
And so we went and we got sushi afterwards in Potrero and we were walking back from sushi and we're like, you know, we'd kind of been kicking around this idea for a payments thing or like we've been thinking of the space.
And it was walking back that evening after startup school that we decided to start Stripe.
Showing 101–120 of 266 · page 6 of 14
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