Interview: Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe Share In addition to being a friend and a Noahpinion subscriber, Patrick Collison is one of the world’s most successful founder-CEOs. Along with his co-founder and brother John, he built online payments company Stripe into a $36 billion behemoth in a decade. (Patrick and John hail from Ireland, continuing the hallowed tradition of Irish immigrants making it big in America.) But in addition to being an ace businessperson, Patrick is one of the most intellectually curious human beings I’ve ever met. Hanging out with Patrick will typically always involve him asking you to explain ideas in your area of specialization, which he will typically grasp with unusual alacrity; at least once, he threw a party that consisted of people giving him seminar talks on topics of their choice! His biggest intellectual interest is the idea of technological progress — what it means, why it happens, and how to encourage more of it. Among his ideas is the field Progress Studies, an interdisciplinary field that studies the history and determinants of technological advancement and how it feeds into social progress more generally.