Happy Monday!
I hope you had an amazing weekend.
Allow me to give a brief about Patrick Collison before I share 1 interesting story, 2 quotes to think about and 3 short lessons about him for you to read this week.
Patrick Collison is an Irish entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe. (American technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet.) which he started with his brother John in 2010 before which he had already started and sold a company (Auctomatic) at the age of 19.
1 STORY FOR YOU
Collison Installation
Stripe is famous within YCombinator for aggressive early user acquisition. Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of potential users in the other companies they’ve funded. And none took better advantage of it than Stripe.
At YC, they use the term, ‘Collison installation’ for the technique Collison brothers invented. More diffident founders ask, ‘Will you try our beta?’” And for people who don’t know, that terminology just means effectively, a rough draft of a product. ‘Will you try our beta?’ And if the answer is, ‘Yes,’ they say, ‘Great. We’ll send you a link.’
But the Collison brothers weren’t going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe, they’d say, ‘Right then. Give me your laptop,’ and set them up on the spot.” So this seems like a small thing, but if that’s the beginning of certain types of snowballs in user acquisition, that is really important or could be a really important differentiator.
2 QUOTES FROM HIM
If you can make twice as many decisions at half the precision, that’s actually often better.
If people around you don’t think what you’re doing is a bit strange, maybe it’s not strange enough.
3 LEARNINGS FOR YOU
Have your own Worldview
Nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. He believes a large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken so Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview. The correlation between your worldview and of those around you shouldn't be too strong unless you think you were especially lucky in your initial conditions.
Leverage the internet
Make friends over the internet with people who are great at things you're interested in. The internet is one of the biggest advantages you have over prior generations. Leverage it.
Find vivid examples of success in the domains you care about. If you want to become a great scientist, try to find ways to spend time with good (or, ideally, great) scientists in person. Watch YouTube videos of interviews. Follow some on Twitter.
You don’t have to finish every book you start.
He starts half the books he gets, and he probably finishes a third of the books he starts.
He thinks reading should be treated as a more active process. You should skim, you should skip, you should backtrack, you should discard and potentially return. You’re not subject to the book; you’re not a passive consumer. The book is there for you, you bought it, it’s yours. And jump back and forwards, tear it in half if you want, annotate it wildly, use it.
If someone wants to dive more into him, here is a Youtube video of him and Reid Hoffman in a fireside chat that I loved.
That’s it from me, until next Monday!
Would love to know if you have any feedback or want me to write about someone who you think is amazing at what they do! Please share it if you liked the post!