Patrick Collison

There's a set of concerns about just the general weight of regulation.

how hard it is to, you know, from everything from incorporating to in Germany, having to listen to very expensive notaries read out a contract in front of you, which Patrick Collison recently commented on.

But my friend who works in startup land and NVC land in Berlin has complained about to me many, many, many times before.

to, you know, taxation that you might be taxed in some European countries, I understand not all of them, on the theoretical valuation of your company, even if you don't have any of that money in your pocket yet as a startup founder, to the lack of a single European market, and I'm probably missing out three or four other kinds of explanations.

And then it sort of quietened down.

And I don't know whether that was over the summer, but I've heard the likes of, you know, someone like Patrick Collison of Stripe recently kind of going, how come that didn't get more notice? Yeah.

That's really scary development.

Why are

And they're doing the actual purchases in partnership with Stripe.

Patrick Collison from Stripe weighing in on this today on X.

So they are finding ways to enable you to make purchases.

They obviously don't want your agent going rogue and buying a lot of things that maybe you were just thinking about.

I mean, my dad's at the top of the list.

Uh, but I, I really admire, uh, Patrick Collison and, and, and John as well, but the Collison brothers, I think the way that they've run that business is, is really impressive.

The culture that they've built, the pace of execution, and the way that they've continued to kind of evolve the company over time as it's gotten bigger.

Obviously, they started serving startups, now they're serving enterprises.

because they get a part of what the founder gets.

So changing tracks a little bit at startup school, Patrick Collison recently said that lean startups may be dead.

Did he?

And part of that is because he says, you know, it's really easy to raise money these days.

Rarely is he skeptical about anything.

Here's co-founder of Stripe, Patrick Collison's take on Sam.

This is during the Y Combinator days, he's recalling.

He knows a lot about a lot of things and did then, Collison said.

See, they were very young when we backed them.

I think Patrick and John Collison.

So... it's a long time ago now it's 16 years 70 16 or 17 years ago and I think maybe I may be wrong but I think Patrick was maybe 21 maybe he was even 20 and and John 18 or 19. so they're incredibly young but It became very clear to me when I sat down with them that they were a pair of rather extraordinary characters.

And that was very, very evident, extremely evident.

The intelligence? A two-year-old could have figured that out.

Right.

20 years later, how was that discussion?

Well, Patrick Collison at Stripe had asked me to go and meet the founder of Instacart, who had asked for an introduction or something.