Patrick Collison
About
Cofounder and CEO of Stripe; co-author of the progress op-ed
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Claims by Patrick Collison (20 of 96)
CRISPR as a telescope for complex disease
Beyond direct therapeutic use, CRISPR can serve as a new kind of telescope: systematically perturbing each of the ~20,000 genes one by one in cell cultures under stressors lets researchers map gene effects and generate synthetic data, which is especially valuable for 'complex' diseases (non-infectious, non-monogenic — most cancers, autoimmune, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative) where understanding the genetic pathway could reveal how the disease arises and enable conventional treatments.
People in their 20s should reconsider San Francisco
While teenagers may benefit from going to San Francisco, people in their 20s pursuing deep technical expertise should reconsider, because San Francisco culturally valorizes iconoclastic founding over the multi-decade accumulation of deep technical knowledge that many of the most valuable inventions require.
Pre-WWII science had 1% the scientists for comparable output
There were roughly 1% as many practicing professional scientists in the US pre-World War II as post-1950, with papers and patents following similar ratios, yet a great deal of high-quality science emerged in the first half of the century — so despite spending increasing by two-plus orders of magnitude, there is no clear linear relationship between scientific spending and output.
Cori lab shows organization beats raw genius
Gerty and Carl Cori ran a lab at Washington University St. Louis that produced six Nobel laureate students despite not being the most prestigious lab able to cherry-pick top talent, suggesting their success rested on replicable organizational structures and cultural practices rather than on access to rare 'seven-sigma' genius — which matters because such practices are, in principle, replicable.
Organizations are poor at self-reflection
Organizations are generally not good at objective self-reflection, partly because the founders are long gone and the current leaders' incentives are not clearly aligned with honestly assessing what was done well or poorly — so it is unclear who would even have the incentive to take stock critically after an event like COVID.
Silicon Valley undervalues operational excellence
Much of the tech industry doesn't place much value on process and operational excellence — culturally prizing the spontaneous, creative, iconoclastic, and path-breaking — so building mechanisms for reliable provision of important services at scale and removing sources of variability doesn't get as much cultural credit, even though tenacious multi-year adoption of well-understood production practices yields very high returns.
AMCs can fund unpatentable but valuable innovation
Advance market commitments could address cases where socially beneficial innovation lacks a patent-based incentive — like testing whether mannose (an unpatentable generic sugar) could selectively starve tumors, or developing absent vaccines like Lyme disease — because no actor has the incentive to fund the work despite potential large benefit.
Stripe aims to grow the GDP of the internet at the margin
Stripe's goal of 'growing the GDP of the internet' is not merely migrating existing economic activity onto its rails but causing new economic activity that wouldn't otherwise occur — making it possible for people who weren't monetizing, or businesses in underserved markets like Albania, to transact, where the counterfactual impact is far larger than in well-served markets like the US.
Shared LLM prompts yield high collaborative returns
Stripe's internal LLM tooling found surprisingly high returns from letting people share prompts across the organization (e.g. a SQL-query-optimization prompt others discover and reuse) and from routing all LLM access through a central bus, enabling experimentation across models with observability into performance — now running millions of invocations per day across dozens of production use cases.
Stripe's interface is its architecture
Stripe does not draw a sharp distinction between interface and implementation because customers are essentially purchasing Stripe's architecture — what it makes easy and possible — analogous to Mathematica selling a self-contained universe of primitives for modeling, rather than just a GUI.
Payment costs asymptote around 2-3% for hidden reasons
Once you layer in customer support, consumer protection, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering controls, and credit, payment system costs seem to asymptote around 2-3% for hard-to-understand reasons, and much of this is remitted back to consumers as rewards, so it is unclear whether interchange should be counted as a transaction tax; evidence does not suggest the ~2% level is massively inefficient.
Frontier AMC induced carbon removal companies to form
Frontier, a $1B advance market commitment modeled on the vaccine AMC, contracted with 40-50 carbon removal companies, most of which didn't exist when it started; an anonymous survey found 74% said Frontier played a causal role in their deciding to start the company, demonstrating that demand-side inducement effects can be significant.
Foundation ownership may extend corporate longevity and mission
Shareholder capitalism may attenuate the lifespan of corporations, while in places like Denmark many firms (Novo Nordisk, Maersk, Lego) are controlled by non-profit foundations that legally embed mission into a binding constitution — e.g. Novo Nordisk being obligated to keep insulin cheap in Scandinavia and reinvest profits in R&D — which may plausibly be causal in remarkable discoveries like GLP-1 agonists.
Extending capital makes businesses grow faster persistently
Stripe extends capital to businesses not to profit from loans but because the businesses it extends capital to then grow faster on a persistent subsequent basis, illustrating how optimizing the under-explored 'meta system of business' yields large gains.
Card networks' architecture absorbed many use cases
Visa and MasterCard, designed by Dee Hock, got their architecture so right that one core design successfully addressed successive use cases over decades — originally replacing store credit, then supplanting travelers checks with jet-age tourism, then enabling internet transactions — demonstrating the enduring value of correct foundational architecture even when later criticisms (like interchange) are valid.
Textual cultures enable a different kind of collaboration
Writing-oriented ('textual') organizational cultures are fundamentally different from oral ones — benefiting both readers (efficient, intertemporal access to the through-line of reasoning) and writers (organizing one's own thoughts) — analogous to how Latour argued the printing revolution helped cause the scientific revolution by making knowledge rigid enough that discrepancies between theory and reality became visible.
Big business and incumbent innovation are underrated
Big business is underrated: while people view startups and small businesses favorably and big business relatively negatively, established businesses tend to pay better, be more efficient, produce more consumer surplus, and account for a large aggregate share of innovation (turbines, fabs, insulation, relentless iterative improvement like Moore's Law and solar costs) — the startup's conspicuousness creates a cognitive bias understating incumbents' contribution.
Money is not the binding constraint on outputs
Treating funding as a proxy for output ('moneyism') falsely assumes a constant elasticity between dollars invested and outcomes produced; in reality the conversion rate is not a cosmological constant, and the binding constraint may be permits, labor shortages, or other non-financial factors, making spending a poor measure of R&D or scientific output.
Most scientists would change research agenda with flexible funding
A survey of Fast Grants recipients found that 79% (four out of five) said their research agenda would change 'a lot' if they had flexible funding they could direct however they wanted, suggesting the binding constraint on scientific output may be the rigidity of how grantees can choose their agenda rather than the funding level itself.
Reflexive contrarianism is following the herd inverted
Reflexive contrarianism for its own sake is not genuine independent thinking — if you simply oppose the prevailing mood, you are still following the herd, just with a 'sign bit' inversion; truly resisting the herd is extremely difficult in practice.
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