Patrick Collison — Why Silicon Valley's most talented should leave

And I wonder for people in their 20s if they, like, shouldn't go to San Francisco. The entrepreneurs are held in excessively high regard, in my view, and San Francisco doesn't really encourage the pursuit of really deep technical depth. (whooshing) I guess my general view is most products and most businesses, things can just be done much better, and I think moats are, are typically kind of overrated. The businesses that we serve, which is, in rough terms, 1% of the global economy. I mean, that's, that's about a trillion dollars a year. That then makes us, like, really terrified of outages. We're all trying to impress upon people at Stripe the importance of multi-decadal abstractions. I think people sometimes respond to that thinking that that's implausibly ambitious, but no, I, I think that's actually just what happens when you get this stuff right.

Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe. Patrick, first question. You have an excellent compilation of advice...

Mm-hmm.

... uh, on your blog for people 10 to 20, and you say there that once you turn 35, you'll write some for people in their 20s. What do you, what advice do you have for us now, uh, the people in our 20s now? (laughs)

(laughs)

When's it coming? (laughs)

I haven't really thought about that. Um, though what I've been wondering recently is, um... You know, I, I said for that advice for people in their, uh, teens, they should-

Yeah.

... go to San Francisco. Um, and I wonder for people in their 20s if they, like, shouldn't go to San Francisco. And I'm being glib, and, you know, I think there's a (laughs) significant set of people who should, in fact, go to San Francisco, but the, the thing that I wonder about is, um, for... There- there is a set of career paths that I think some set of people, um, you know, ought to pursue and would derive most fulfillment from pursuing, uh, and, um, and that are, you know, that are really valuable for the world, uh, if pursued, that require accumulating a lot of expertise, uh, and you know, really, really studying a domain in, uh, in tremendous depth. And I think San Francisco valorizes, and look, this is, this is also San Francisco's great virtue. San Francisco valorizes a kind of striking out on your own, iconoclastically dismissing the sort of received wisdom and, uh, and, um, you know, the, the, the founding archetypes of, uh, and lore of the Steve Jobs and the Bill Gates and, uh, all the rest. And you know, I'm way less successful than those people, but like, to some extent, you know, Stripe, in as much as it fits a pattern, is an instance of that pattern. Um, and look, that's, that's great, and I'm kind of happy that that phenomenon exists in the world, but, but I, I don't think that, um... Just the world needs lots of other things, right? Uh, and I don't think San Francisco particular... I mean, I'm, I'm again using San Francisco as a kind of metonym for a cultural orientation, but, uh, I think that San Francisco doesn't really encourage, yeah, the, um, the, the pursuit of, uh, of really deep technical depth, uh, and you know, we're, we're here, we're recording this in South San Francisco, um, and, um, you know, South San Francisco is most noteworthy in, uh, the, um, in the corporate world for of course being the, uh, the headquarters of, uh, Genentech, uh, and you know, Genentech was, uh, was co-founded by, uh, Bob Swanson and Herb Boyer, um, and you know, they, they, they produced cheap insulin for the first time with recombinant DNA. Um, like, Herb Boyer couldn't have done that, like, at age 23. (laughs) Um, Herb Boyer first had to accumulate all of the knowledge and the skills required to, you know, be able to invent that over the course of a multi-decade career, and then I don't know what age he was when he, uh, finally went, went and invented it, but, uh, he was not in his 20s. Um, and, uh, and, like, I feel San Francisco perhaps doesn't, uh, doesn't culturally encourage one to become Herb Boyer.