Monday: How two brothers from no where changed the world

Morning Change Makers,

Firstly, an apology. The newsletter last week was riddled with mistakes. Not good enough, we will do better. 

This week is about two kids from a little town in Ireland who became the greatest entrepreneurs of a generation. 


Read on,
Jack

In a sleepy town in Ireland, a young ginger teenager was burrowing into a niche forum for a programming language called LISP. There he meets the giga-chad of startups, the innovator OG or maybe as he is better known, PG. Paul Graham invites the 15-year-old Patrick Collison out to Silicon Valley. There he meets Chris Sacca the soon-to-be legendary investor. Chris would go on to say:

The story of how two brothers from a town no one had heard of created an empire of innovation.

The boys from Limerick

Patrick Collison, the first of the brothers, spent his first communion money on a computer. Raised Catholic in a small town called Limerick in southwest Ireland, his future improbably involved computers and programming.

Collison gravitated towards a high-level programming language called LISP. Whilst exploring, he connected with Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, which was then a fledgling accelerator program out of San Francisco. This all happened at the age of 15, during a year when he dropped out of school to learn to code.

Both Collisons’ childhoods are littered with episodes that have the same story at their centre: exploring curiosity. Patrick commented on the Tim Ferris show that his parents were lenient, saying “I think I was actually really lucky where from an early age, my parents were very okay with myself and John charting our own course.”

Patrick then chose to sit a different exam system and taught himself 2 years' worth of material in 20 days, slingshotting him to start MIT a year early. Before starting his second semester at MIT, Patrick and his brother John decided they wanted to start a company. In a talk he gave in 2009 he said “You could not have found two more unlikely candidates”.

John is the less public of the two brothers and whilst his early story is more obscure both he and Patrick had similar upbringings and deep curiosities.

Patrick and John were 18 and 16 at the time they started Auctomatic. John flew out to MIT in Boston to work on initial ideas. After, they went back to Ireland, rented an office in Limerick, and set out to build a combination of “Ebay, Wikipedia, and Amazon” and they called in Auctomatic. As their product grew they needed to find funding and unfortunately, the VC community in Limerick was not too active. Instead, they contacted Paul at YC and decided to move out to San Francisco, joining a 2007 YC batch.

The decision to move to SF and join YC no doubt changed Patrick and John’s careers. Serendipitous encounters with other Change Makers significantly alter the trajectory of young Change Makers like the Collisons. These encounters frequently occur in holes of the internet that are unexplored or misnomered as boring. You have to ignore the views of others, pursue your curiosity, and see who you meet along the way.

Increasing the GDP of the internet

Patrick and John sold Auctomatic for $5 million dollars in 2008. They were millionaires and John was still a teenager. Over the next 2 years, Patrick would move to Vancouver, to Zurich with his then-girlfriend, back to the US, and restart college. While Patrick and John were both back at college, they began to discuss why it was so hard to set up a merchant account and why it was so hard to accept payments online when running Automatic. Paypal existed but it was a completely different user experience.

On the surface, there were loads of reasons why it was hard. Banking is complicated and highly regulated and there are a million ways it can go wrong. You are dealing with people's money, it’s not something you can afford to fuck up.

This is just a complex problem and the Collisons loved complex problems. John and Patrick decided to build the V1 of a payment engine in Buenos Aires and they took their time. The brothers spent two years building the first version of Stripe (not all in Buenos Aires). By the end of the first two years, they would launch to 50 customers and this was no accident. The Collisons were obsessive over customer problems, such that they would fix bugs and launch new features in minutes not days.

This allowed them to tighten their iteration cycle and launch something that worked. This matters in payments. You need the customer to trust you with their money so the “move fast and break things” approach can quickly backfire. They iterated quickly, but intentionally with a microscopic attention for excellence.

Stripe is the Silicon Valley golden child. In 2014, Sequoia would lead their $18mil Series A funding round. Stripe is now worth over $50bn and processes 1% of global GDP; over a trillion dollars a year. There isn’t much story to tell in between. This is a company that scaled quickly and methodically.

So Patrick and John Collison are geniuses from Ireland who change global finance. Is that all there is?

Change is never easy

The stories I struggle to write are the ones where it's easy. I want these people to grind, to face challenges and obstacles that feel insurmountable. I want to write their David and Goliath stories, but Collison’s story seems to be too easy. Yet what I have come to realise is that it is never easy and whilst some stories are written with less Golaiths than others, just being a Change Maker is hard.

Patrick, when asked about failure in an interview Tim Ferris describes some of the tough moments. In doing so, he explains the trouble that comes with creating something.

“But I think the – there’s this inevitable thing when you’re creating something where, on the one hand, you have to be very optimistic because if you weren’t optimistic, you wouldn’t bother doing it, especially in the face of such hardship and uncertainty. You also have to be very pessimistic because you have – there are tons of problems. And you have to be very tuned to spotting them, so you can go fix them. And so you exist in this superposition, this juxtaposition of pessimism and optimism. And you’re an extreme on both axes. And that’s just a weird psychological state.”

and

“the reality is that it is just pretty pummeling on an ongoing basis and that even for Stripe which, perhaps from the outside might look like this really neat little story, there have been many such moments where it just seems hard.”

(highly recommend the podcast below)

Creating something that endures means you have to care. It is a bond with your creation that makes you almost schizophrenic. To ensure its longevity you have to be worried about every problem that could destroy it and yet these concerns can’t dampen the sheer force of will you need to bring about an optimistic future.

It is the act of caring that makes a journey hard and you don’t need to be a Change Maker to care.

John Collison once tweeted:

Whilst it is the Collisons who might process 1% of the world’s GDP, it is principles like caring, excellence, and tenacity that can be seen all around us. As John said, the world is a museum of passion projects; a gallery of work from the people who cared.

Wrapping up

Patrick and John are two Change Makers who, on the surface, I would typically sigh at. However, having read their story I now realise they are much more than two untouchable geniuses.

It would have been easy for them to have become drunk on their greatness.

However, they have a way of viewing the world that feels very tangible to me. They see the difficulty and discipline it takes to build anything, acknowledging that challenging old ideas is hard at any scale. They are contrarian without being brash and arrogant.

It shouldn’t be understated what a difficult position this is to take. The world is full of loud and confident people who are wrong.

However, Patrick and John Collison touch on the very essence of what it is to be a Change Maker; boldly questioning orthodoxy with humility and diffidence.

What I researched