Patrick Collison & John Collison - A Business State of Mind

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:44)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of PositiveSum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:16)
My two guests today are John and Patrick Collison, co-founders of Stripe.
My conversation with John in 2020 was, for a long time, our most downloaded episode. In this conversation, we went in a totally different direction, talking about Stripe, the global internet economy and beyond.
This year, along with John Malone, John and Patrick were recipients of the Singleton Prize, given annually by the Singleton Foundation to active CEOs. The Foundation was recognizing John and Patrick as up-and-coming CEOs in the mold of Henry Singleton, who I spent years studying and who heavily influenced my own thinking on business and investing, both in my quantitative investing days and today. This was one of those conversations that I went into with tons of topics to cover, only to get through close to zero of them because I became so wrapped up in other interesting topics with two of the smarter people that I've ever encountered. I hope you enjoyed this great and wide-ranging conversation with John and Patrick Collison.
I was talking to Will Thorndyke about what was so interesting about Henry Singleton's life and career, and it was just wild adaptability. He just never held on to a strategy. He just adapted and updated his strategy for the prevailing conditions, and it whiplashed around all the time. And then he did it for a very long period of time. The classic, don't interrupt compounding unnecessarily. And I'm really curious about how you think about that vis-à-vis Stripe when such a big part of its compounding potential is born of your two curiosities about the world and about business and about technology and how you make sure that it's set up in the right way so that Stripe is the recipient of the reinvestment of your curiosity, so that, yes, payments is probably endlessly fascinating and maybe if you just stayed in the payments lane forever, it would be interesting enough to you both that you stick around and the business and the team benefits from your curiosity. But how do you think about that, which seems to be a common theme in technology businesses, that technologists tend to be very omni-curious, interested in a lot of things, pursue a lot of things, and there's leakage, there's enterprise value leakage or something. How do you think about that 40 years hence, and what Stripe can become?

**John Collison** (4:20)
I think for founders, there's two kinds of curiosity that have a lot of business value or probably important.
There's also a lot of forms of curiosity that don't have particular business value, like Patrick coming to me with his latest scheme on carbon dioxide. There was a time when Stripe's conference room... If it's true when we saw this, it produced so much value pressure.