#32 Patrick Collison: Earning Your Stripes

**Shane Parrish** (0:08)
Welcome to the Furnam Street Podcast called The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish, the curator behind the Furnam Street Blog, which is an online community focused on mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. The Knowledge Project is where we talk with interesting people to uncover the frameworks you can use to learn more and less time, make better decisions, and live a happier and more meaningful life.
On this episode, I have Patrick Collison, the co-founder of Stripe, which he started with his younger brother, John, in 2011 While Stripe started as a company to make online payments easier, it's morphed into an internet infrastructure company. Patrick is one of the most well-read and thoughtful people I've ever met. After listening to this conversation, you'll realize his success is less about luck and more about thought. I'm pleased to have Patrick Collison on the show.
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Patrick, I'm so happy to get to talk to you.

**Patrick Collison** (2:13)
Thanks so much for having me.

**Shane Parrish** (2:14)
You have the unique background of having dropped out of high school and dropped out of university. Can you explain what went through your mind dropping out of high school?

**Patrick Collison** (2:26)
Well, I didn't technically speaking drop out, although I sort of practically speaking did, but given my lack of education credentials elsewhere, I do, I should, for the sake of my parents, insist that I do in fact, or did in fact, formally speaking graduate from high school. But I guess what happened is that I'd become very interested in programming and I sort of wanted to spend as much time on it as possible. And Ireland actually has this kind of interesting thing called transition year, at this year between the sort of two major exams of kind of high school, or at least Ireland's high school equivalent. And in transition year, it's sort of a, it's a formally designated year that's optional where you can go and pursue things that you might not otherwise naturally tend to pursue. And the school tends to be kind of much more permissive of going and spending three months abroad or going and doing some work experience in this area or whatever the case might be. And so in that year, I basically decided to spend as much of it as possible programming. And so, you know, I did that. And then I returned to school for kind of the, you know, latter half of, again, Ireland's kind of high school system. And it felt so much slower and less fun. And so I tried to see if, well, as part of the programming, I had visited the US for the first time. I'd gone to Stanford for the 2005 International Lisp Conference.
And it was a fairly small conference, but it was very eye-opening for me. And I remember walking around Stanford and thinking, man, American colleges seem great.
And so back in high school in Ireland, I decided to see if there was some way that I could just go to college in the US the subsequent year.
And it was sort of a long story, but I eventually figured out that I could not do it if I did the standard Irish, kind of followed the standard Irish education path, but that I could do it if I did the British sort of terminal examination. And so I kind of resumed my sort of self-education, except instead of programming, I was now studying for these British exams and did that for the subsequent year and ended up starting at MIT the next fall.

**Shane Parrish** (4:43)
And how do we get from MIT to where we are today, which is Stripe's offices in San Francisco?