Stripe CEO Patrick Collison on Crafting a Culture that Prizes Details | Dean's Speaker Series [Bonus Episode #3]

**Sameer Srivastava** (0:00)
From Berkeley Haas and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation, this is The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer.

**Jenny Chatman** (0:08)
I'm Jenny Chatman.

**Sameer Srivastava** (0:10)
And I'm Sameer Srivastava.

**Jenny Chatman** (0:13)
We're professors at the Haas School of Business. On this podcast, we'll answer your questions about workplace culture.

**Sameer Srivastava** (0:19)
We'll give you practical advice that you can put to work right away.

**Jenny Chatman** (0:23)
Join us to start building your culture toolkit. Hi Sameer.

**Sameer Srivastava** (0:29)
Hey Jenny. So tell us about today's episode.

**Jenny Chatman** (0:32)
Well, in the spring, we hosted Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison for a fireside chat as part of our Dean Speaker Series. He's brilliant and charming. And he had some really interesting things to say about the company's culture. So we wanted to share it with our Culture Kit listeners.

**Sameer Srivastava** (0:50)
Absolutely. It really made an impression on me when he talked about Stripe's culture of craftsmanship and rigor and building something that can endure for decades.

**Jenny Chatman** (1:00)
Right. And he also had a strong perspective on remote versus in-person work as it relates to an organization's culture.

**Sameer Srivastava** (1:07)
All right. So let's hear it.

**Jenny Chatman** (1:09)
Welcome to our Dean Speaker Series, co-hosted by the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation. My name is Jenny Chatman. I'm the Associate Dean here at Haas. And I'm so absolutely thrilled to introduce our guest today, Patrick Collison. Patrick has been an entrepreneur, I'm guessing since the day you were born. He created iPhone apps with his brother John and his teams, founding Optomatic while at MIT and co-founding his biggest venture, Stripe, which we're going to talk a lot about. Stripe was born when Patrick and John looked for a payment platform, but couldn't find all of the features they thought would be important. Stripe debuted in 2010 and grew exponentially, because the product is really simple for businesses to implement. Of course, the back end is anything but simple, but it's easy on the front end for customers. Through Patrick's leadership, Stripe has reached, listen to this, $1 trillion in total payment volume.
So, it's really becoming a dominant methodology, and today...

**Patrick Collison** (2:22)
You can't assume the causality, though, there. You can't say, like, because of my leadership. It could be just despite my leadership.

**Jenny Chatman** (2:30)
I'm not sure that that's correct. But we will talk about the attribution. I'm sure you will deflect it, and we will keep it on. So, today, millions of businesses from hyper-growth start-ups to global enterprises like Ford and Amazon use Stripe to accept payments and payouts, manage complex business online.
We were back in our green room here, and Patrick was telling us about his biomedical research foundation, the ARC Institute, that he co-founded in 2021 Fascinating, fascinating work. Through the ARC Institute, Patrick and his co-founders are pioneering new model research in partnership with Stanford, UC San Francisco, and UC Berkeley, and hopes to enable passionate biomedical investigations to study and address complex diseases, which gives us all great comfort to know that brilliant minds are researching some of the most difficult health challenges that we face. So Patrick, we're incredibly grateful to have you here today to impart your learnings on our student body.

**Patrick Collison** (3:36)
No, thanks for having me, and it's a particular honor to be here because the first time I tried to come here, you guys rejected me, so I might have rejected me as well.

**Jenny Chatman** (3:51)
So did you land at your safety school, MIT?

**Patrick Collison** (3:57)
My first ever trip to America was to the Bay Area, and I visited Stanford and Berkeley, and those were my first literally two experiences of the US. I just assumed all of the US is like this, and so then I decided to apply to college here, but I couldn't get further than the East Coast.

**Jenny Chatman** (4:18)
Oh my gosh. Well, that was a miss on our part. I can't say it would be the first or last one. But anyway, let me introduce my colleague, Sameer Srivastava, my partner in crime. We are the co-founders of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation, and many of you probably have had Sameer for the Power and Politics class. So Sameer, welcome to. So let's give now a proper welcome to Patrick if we might. Thank you so much for coming up. So let's start with a softball question, which is, if you could walk us through your kind of career progression, I think it would be of great interest to our students.

**Patrick Collison** (5:03)
Oh gosh. All right. Well, you already heard an important detail in it. But so I grew up in a very rural Ireland, and our house was kind of far from the phone exchange. And it's more detailed maybe in the career than you want. But you can push fast forward at any point. And the relevant kind of consequence of that was we couldn't really get a proper internet connection. And so I first learned about the internet by reading books and from the library and to think, wow, this internet thing sounds great. And there's no TikTok or anything. And then actually the first pitch I ever wrote was to my parents when I was 13, trying to convince them to get this kind of pre-Starlink satellite internet connection from Germany.