"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 well i didn't technically spea..."

"sort of a long and torturous story uh and i'll spare you most of the um less interesting details um i guess the overarching thing is while people in the u.s have grown up in environment in which colle..."

"progress in physics really felt like it had sort of slowed down pretty substantially compared to the you know 1910s 20s 30s the sort of the period in which so much of what we were learning about um yo..."

"well it's interesting too from a cultural standpoint where ireland has had very high rates of immigration um particularly post the expansion of the eu in 2004 a very large number of eastern european i..."

"of double contingency in the answer where it's a function of just what we've realized at this point but also sort of what it is that the organization and the company needs given the sort of challenges..."

"stripe and the struggles you were having and maybe walk me through some of the things that you've learned since then or some of the mistakes that you had made sure i mean the kind of background contex..."

"attempt it was it just seemed so strange that something with stripes character didn't exist in that we really looked for a stripe before we uh before we started it as an it just it felt that it must b..."

"getting fined by the cfpb and et cetera et cetera et cetera and uh and as we looked into it it became apparent that actually there was a good reason as to why the problem had not been solved where a t..."

"a couple of our friends uh started using it and i think the particular thing we realized that caused us to you know really go take it a little bit more seriously and i mean concretely to drop out of c..."

"from scaling the business i think on some level scaling a business is both relatively straightforward and extremely hard i mean it's relatively straightforward in the sense that it's usually not that ..."

"correction refinement and you might hit some walls along the way um it's it's rarely unprecedented and i think it's extremely difficult in the sense that you're you don't get to really choose the cloc..."

"of the organization or at every kind of level of abstraction or you know at every kind of magnitude and so on that's just a kind of unnatural thing that i think is just on a psychological emotional le..."

"we could have less uncertainty we could take steps to mitigate that but we just don't have time to uh and making a lot of decisions in that zone is somewhat dissatisfying right i think kind of correct..."

"is or are um and then maybe very lastly i mean those those are all kind of the structural ones um i think there's just also a um a personal version where you certainly don't start out being well adapt..."

"i want to go back to the explore exploit kind of comment that you made which we can probably just relate to focus how do you think about focusing on one thing and being exceptional at that or doing a ..."

"which already exists if we did not do that you know in the again if we did not do that that then this kind of default non-existence we just discussed would be guaranteed right um it's very easy to sor..."

"take on are they based on disrupting your business or these are things that i i want to do or won't stripe to do or i don't know that there's a better answer beyond given all of the axes of you know c..."

"to give a concrete example atlas uh the the service we launched for helping uh new founders incorporate companies and in particular sort of without the geographic restrictions that tended to exist bef..."

"i think um i mean i think the reason there aren't more good bets made in the world is because making good bets is difficult uh and again i think you can have in different areas um difficult in terms o..."

"right and and large institutions and incumbent organizations uh sort of dislike them right structurally speaking uh and find them difficult to understand and difficult to interact with and so on i thi..."

"um and uh anyway so the observation was that organizations with very different bucks than indices find it difficult to work together and if an organization with a really long time writing is working w..."

"feel like they're on the same team how do you do that come back in 30 years um i think i recall one of the interviews that i was watching as prep for this where you talked about one of the first five ..."

"did you come at this sort of notion of thoughtful disagreement before that influence and how if so how did you well yeah it's hard to know exactly where to attribute it and it's probably kind of over ..."

"and so on and like i i think one kind of deep mindset difference in people is often those who those who enjoy finding the limitations of arguments and beliefs and those who don't um and tyler cohen ta..."

"that be an enjoyable discovery rather than sort of something stressful and threatening i think globalization is a good example there where you know as we discussed i think that globalization um is on ..."

"decisions today and the patrick making decisions maybe five years ago in terms of how you actually make those decisions i think there are four big differences the first is i i now just place more valu..."

"fast decisions as a kind of uh asset and capability in their own right uh and it's quite striking to me how some of the organizations that i hold in the highest regard tend to do this the second thing..."

"mean who cares right um and so that's kind of the second one and just being kind of cognizant of that and before making the decision trying to categorize well what kind of decision is it uh the third ..."

"thing we're currently spending a bunch of time on here at stripe is having different parts of the organization write down what they're optimizing for essentially like what their mission is what the lo..."

"part of culture is learning from the decisions the organization makes what do you do at stripe to make sure that people are learning and what do you do personally to make sure that you're learning fro..."

"to optimize are the incentive structures and the mindsets and the definitions of the goals and the feedback mechanisms from the outcomes to the inputs and the work and the operations themselves and al..."

"three years ago stripe was under 100 people uh and and i think either to uh opine as if uh or to even more problematically believe that we kind of have it figured out would be would be real hubris um ..."

"and facebook and so on whatsapp um and they're all these sort of suggestive examples that i think at least again suggest that we may not have it all figured out i mean the fact that whatsapp was such ..."

"organizational cultures are some kind of milky toast averaging right so that's number one um the second is cultures of of perfection um and so both the economist and apple have extraordinarily high st..."

"sequoia there's been tons of vc firms and a lot of different firms have had at any moment in time a strong claim to being a top three firm but what are the underlying institutional characteristics tha..."

"unpacked the answer to that yet can you give us an example of what you've learned from studying coke industries it's very striking to me how [Music] warren and charlie at berkshire and how the folks a..."

"love of books get started well we crappy internet when i was growing up because our house was so remote there's so much noise on the phone line and that we didn't have internet for years and then we g..."

"pretty unfettered and i think our parents had a kind of they followed our interests uh and supported them but they didn't choose them um it felt like they they pushed from behind rather than pulling u..."

"books that you can read than you can read in a lifetime uh and so uh i sort of decided well i will read all of the um the books that are really worth reading and really enjoyable to read and when i ru..."

"what they admired and i try to do that i try to figure out for the people who seem to be doing really great work or have really interesting ideas or just who i admire and whatever regard um to figure ..."

"collisions more likely to happen what types of things do you typically mark up in a book and how do you what does that look like um so i tend to just make notes in the margin um so sorry i tend to und..."

"for friends and just you know share an email or a google doc or something or just share snippets with friends um and that's valuable both because again sort of the act of of summary or summarization u..."

"know was it the abundance of uh or what was it the abundance of coal in the uk was it the something that the intellectual property system and patents was it the high cost of labor in the uk that sort ..."

"and so yeah i i summarized it from my friends that's awesome which book or books would you say have most influenced you so i asked this question on twitter back a couple weeks ago and some of the fans..."

"like it's also just sort of clusters of books uh in that you know i think i'm programming for example like it would be hard for me to answer this question and not cite any programming books i mean it'..."

"how would you answer a question about what your personal values are probably by evading it uh i'm not about to do you think perhaps this disprove that answer um um by actually answering it but i i gue..."

"think almost all of us at least subconsciously have a set of people we hold in really high regard or would like to be more like in at least some ways and so on um i see people well in my opinion um th..."

"unnatural sort of sub-clusters existing not because of sort of you know deep necessary limitations but because of something much more arbitrary and contingent and you know economists talk about sort o..."

"extraordinarily far from being the case today right we have had commerce on the internet for decades at this point but it's still like 90 plus percent of brazilian credit cards do not work online outs..."

"and you know just to give some kind of um illustrative maybe um intuition pumps here uh when we survey companies started with atlas 60 of them tell us they would not exist uh if not for atlas you know..."

"end users consumers customers and so on and kind of mediated by payments as this kind of foundational layer because it's something every business necessarily has and because it gives us good sort of u..."

"it's almost like we were talking about this earlier but bets when you get big you have more loss aversion and so your goal is not necessarily to get better from your customers perspective it could be ..."

"sort of seesaw if you will where success sows the seeds of its own destructions would you how would you make an argument right now that san francisco or silicon valley is doing that oh i mean the obvi..."

"and if you sort of if you were to um look at the seattle and uh and the bay area kind of together right and look at the kind of that aggregate urban zone you know separated as they are by a two and a ..."

"on on housing supply have had just very stable housing costs have not had the same displacement right and so the the kind of the issues we face and we see here in san francisco where it's getting ever..."

"well i don't make any secret of the uh the injustice and well the the moral injustice in terms of the displacement that's occurring um and the sort of economic wrong-headedness of the prevailing polic..."

"is not hong kong you you can triple san francisco and get to greenwich um uh we can decide that that's our preference um but sort of you know sober estimates uh are are measuring the cost of that in u..."