Earlier, I demonstrated how Claude Code can craft engaging narratives about notable figures in my previous post.

But what if you need comprehensive information without the storytelling flourishes? Claude Code adapts to different formats seamlessly.

Using the same research session, here’s the same Patrick Collison profile optimized for information density over narrative flow.

Patrick Collison (born September 9, 1988) is an Irish entrepreneur worth ~$11.5 billion, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, and intellectual catalyst behind the Progress Studies movement.

Early Achievements

Started programming at 10. Won Ireland’s Young Scientist award at 16 for “CROMA,” a LISP dialect enhancement. Received €7,500, crystal trophy from President Mary McAleese, and represented Ireland in Moscow. Attended MIT, dropped out freshman year.

Auctomatic (2007-2008)

Co-founded with brother John as “Shuppa” (Irish for shop). Built eBay/Amazon seller management tools using Smalltalk and custom distributed object stores. Joined Y Combinator Winter 2007, received $400K funding. Reached 50 customers before selling to Live Current Media for $5 million after 10 months. Patrick became Director of Product Engineering at 19.

Key lesson: “Incredibly fancy technology, only 50 customers. Learned importance of prioritizing manifested user value over technical sophistication.”

Stripe (2010-present)

Founded October 2010 (originally SlashDevSlashFinance Inc.) to solve payments integration difficulty discovered during Auctomatic development. Reduced payment integration from weeks to “7 lines of code.”

Funding timeline: $20K-30K seed (2010), $2M Series A from Sequoia/A16z/Thiel/Musk (2010), public launch September 2011 (10 employees, 100 customers), peak $95B valuation (2021), current $91.5B (2025).

The Thiel paradox: Pitched to PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel by extensively criticizing PayPal’s structural flaws. Thiel invested $200K at first meeting, proving contrarian thinking works when you understand incumbents better than they understand themselves.

Core philosophy: “Most tech companies build cars. Stripe builds roads.” Developer-first experience enabling afternoon integration and next-day business launch versus traditional weeks-long processes.

Progress Studies Movement (2019)

Co-founded with Tyler Cowen to study why scientific progress appears to be slowing despite 100x more resources since 1950. Evidence: Nobel Prize winner average age increased from 37 to 47 years old. Argues for systematic study of progress through science, technology, economics, history, philosophy, and culture.

Fast Grants (2020)

COVID-19 research funding program proving bureaucracy unnecessary for quality decisions. Distributed $50M+ to 260+ grants with 48-hour decisions (versus hundreds of days for NIH), 30-minute applications, $10K-$500K funding ranges. Recipients rated traditional funding institutions 5/10 for pandemic response.

Intellectual Obsessions

Cost Disease: Healthcare spending up 9x since 1960, K-12 education 2-3x per student, college costs doubled since 1984, all outpacing inflation.

Infrastructure Decline: Empire State Building took 410 days; modern equivalent takes years and billions. NYC first subway: 4.7 years, 28 stations, $1.1B (2019 dollars). Second Avenue Subway Phase 1: 17 years, 3 stations, $4.45B.

Scientific Stagnation: Despite vastly more scientists, breakthrough rate appears constant or declining. Resource misallocation and poor grant epistemology identified as key problems.

End-User Programming: Questions whether applications will ever be truly programmable, arguing software becoming less flexible—transforming from “bicycle for the mind” to “monorail.”

Contrarian Philosophy

On status: “If you think something important but people older don’t regard highly, reasonable chance you’re right. Status lags by generation or more.”

On contrarianism: “If you’re just contrarian to prevailing mood, you’re following prevailing mood with sign bit inversion. True contrarianism requires understanding why conventional wisdom exists, identifying failure modes, building genuinely better solutions.”

On Silicon Valley: “Too much wealth, too much early success caused us to lose hunger and edge. Chinese tech companies show lack of entitlement, real determination not uniformly present here.”

Key Insights

Automation: Predicts “almost unnoticeably smooth continuum up to considerable autonomy” rather than sudden disruption. Concerned about fraud sophistication when “tokens and thinking are free.”

Achievement timing: “People who did great things often did so at surprisingly young ages. They were grayhaired when famous, not when they did the work. So hurry up!”

Action bias: “Most successful people have strong bias toward action. Don’t wait for perfect. Start, iterate, optimize.”

Institutional innovation: “How do you ensure adequate replacement rate in systems with no natural way to die?”

Reading and Learning

Maintains extensive physical book collection, follows “Umberto Eco theory of library”—unread books (anti-library) as valuable as read ones. Top recommendations: “The Power Law” on venture capital (“by far the best book on the sector”), “A Shot To Save The World” on COVID vaccines, Joel Mokyr’s economic history works, “The Singapore Story.”

Current Projects

Arc Institute: Nonprofit research organization co-founded 2021. Stripe Press: Publishes works on economic and technological advancement. California YIMBY: $1M contribution for pro-housing development. Progress Studies: Ongoing research into civilizational optimization.

Personal Philosophy

Hiring test: “Someone team would want to come into office Saturday just to hang out with.” Core value: “Weighty obligation to businesses built on Stripe and everyday people they serve.” Enjoys chess, supports UBI, interested in space exploration.

On progress: “We do these things not because easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy.”

On infrastructure: “How easy it is to get things done completely shapes what gets created.”

On human potential: “The idea that workers are not capable of anything more than performing automatable clerical tasks, I don’t believe for a second.”

Meta-Approach

Builds platforms enabling others to build important things rather than end-user products. Focuses on civilizational impact over quarterly metrics. Systematically identifies “broken” systems everyone accepts as unchangeable, then builds elegant solutions. Pattern: see problems clearly, understand better than anyone else, build infrastructure that makes solutions inevitable.

Current status: Running $91.5B payments infrastructure while researching scientific stagnation and building institutions to accelerate human progress. Next target unknown but likely something “simultaneously obvious and impossible.”