Everything Patrick Collison has said about building stripe & craft
Collison treats company-building as a compounding craft: hire the first people painfully slowly because each one selects the next fifty, keep the team small enough to stay maximally responsive, and sweat the foundational choices — APIs, data models, infrastructure — because they endure for decades. In the AI era he reframes the same instinct as 'craft and beauty': abundance of software must not mean more slop.
6 points · 3 appearances · 2015–2025
How the view evolved
Be okay hiring painfully slowly → Craft and beauty versus AI slop
2015 (Blitzscaling) vs 2025 (Cursor): in 2015 Collison framed engineering quality as won through painfully slow, persistent acquisition of scarce top developers — the constraint was elite talent. By 2025 he treats software itself as becoming abundant via AI, and relocates the constraint to 'craft and beauty': the worry is no longer finding people who can produce great software, but ensuring the AI-driven flood produces more of the best software and not just more slop.
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6 points · 2 appearances · 2019–2020
“The kind of the story of total factor productivity growth in the US over the course of the last, call it, you know, 150 years, is one of a sort of lowish growth, and then sort of, you know, a real growth spurt over the course is the kind of the middle of 20th century. It's been a sort of much lower level since, you know, perhaps 1970 or so, a slight kind of peak around, you know, 2000, hypothesized to be because the sort of corn quote ICT revolution, and now back to, again, quite historically low levels, at least, again, if we take our, you know, window as being the last hundred fifty years. And so, I mean, that is, you know, that charge, that picture, is very consistent with one we're sort of mid-century science, you know, worked really well, we discovered a lot of amazing things, but somehow the the rate of discovery seems to be lower since then.”
8 points · 7 appearances · 2019–2025 · changed view
“Wealth is the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory that with the robots as cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that's running at night that's serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth, because you can rent it out — although that's probably a lower use of productivity — but land and actually doing some commercial enterprise. So my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.”
5 points · 5 appearances · 2024–2026 · changed view
“The observation is that don't die is the most played game by everyone all over the world every day. You and I breathe every few seconds, we look both ways before we cross the street, we all play don't die. So it's played more than capitalism, it's played more than any religion. It's the most played game in the world.”
6 points · 4 appearances · 2007–2020 · changed view
“Well, you can say everybody knows that. Well, I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.”