Patrick Collison — Why Silicon Valley's most talented should leave

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
Okay, today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe. Patrick, first question. You have an excellent compilation of advice on your blog for people 10 to 20, and you say there that once you turn 35, you'll write some for people in their 20s. What advice do you have for us now, the people in our 20s now?
When's it coming?

**Patrick Collison** (0:22)
I haven't really thought about that.
The one I've been wondering about recently is, I said for that advice for people in their teens, they should go to San Francisco. And I wonder for people in their 20s if they shouldn't go to San Francisco. And I mean, Glib, and I think there's a significant set of people who should in fact go to San Francisco. But the thing that I wonder about is, there is a set of career paths that I think some set of people ought to pursue and would derive most fulfillment from pursuing and that are really valuable for the world if pursued, that require accumulating a lot of expertise and really studying a domain in tremendous depth. And I think San Francisco valorizes, and look, this is also San Francisco's great virtue. San Francisco valorizes a kind of striking out on your own, iconoclastically dismissing the received wisdom and the founding archetypes and lore of the Steve Jobs and the Bill Gates and all the rest. And I'm way less successful than those people, but to some extent, Stripe, in as much as it fits a pattern, is an instance of that pattern.
And look, that's great, and I'm kind of happy that that phenomenon exists in the world, but I don't think that...
The world needs lots of other things, right? And I don't think San Francisco particularly... I mean, again, using San Francisco as a kind of metonym for a cultural orientation, but I think that San Francisco doesn't really encourage the pursuit of really deep technical depth. We're recording this in South San Francisco, and South San Francisco is most noteworthy in the corporate world, for of course being the headquarters of Genentech.
And Genentech was co-founded by Bob Swanson and Herb Boyer, and they produced cheap insulin for the first time with recombinant DNA. Herb Boyer couldn't have done that at age 23 Herb Boyer first had to accumulate all of the knowledge and the skills required to be able to invent that over the course of a multi-decade career. And then, I don't know what age he was when he finally went and invented it, but he was not in his 20s. And I feel San Francisco perhaps doesn't culturally encourage one to become Herb Boyer. Or yesterday, at the time of recording this podcast, Patrick Hsu, one of the co-founders of Arc, which maybe we will speak about later in the show. This is a biomedical research organization we started a few years ago. He announced this new phenomenon of bridge editing, which is a new recombinase where you can insert DNA into a genome. It's pretty early, but it might turn out to be quite consequential. And in order to do something like that, you have to study for a long time and acquire a lot of basic and not so basic technical skills. I don't quite know how to synthesize it yet, but as I think about advice for people in their 20s, I'm not going to normatively pretend or presume to know in which direction one should go in one's life. Obviously, there are successful examples of basically every strategy, and I'm really glad you're doing what you're doing.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (4:24)
23 23

**Patrick Collison** (4:28)
I think information dissemination is a really valuable thing in the world. The guy who last I heard was in the lead for Nat's Scroll Prize.
Nash told me, learned about the Scroll Prize listening to your podcast. I think increasing the catalytic surface area of certain kinds of information is a valuable thing in the world. I'm very glad you're presenting the podcast. Anyway, I don't presume to know what people should do with their lives, obviously. But I wonder, in as much as I'm trying to give advice, and especially maybe if they're reading my advice and not someone else's advice, maybe they're thinking about career paths that look directionally like mine, I think my advice might be, maybe you should do something like what I did or I'm trying to do, but there are other paths as well. And I think a lot of really important invention in the world and a lot of the things that I'm most happy are happening actually require a very different trajectory. And I think there are counterfactual versions of my life where I pursued that path.