When researching notable figures, most of us default to Google searches, piecing together scattered information from various sources.

But what if there’s a better approach? Instead of manual research, what if we could ask Claude Code to handle the heavy lifting—searching, synthesizing, and crafting a compelling narrative in whatever style resonates with you?

To test this approach, I chose Patrick Collison—Stripe’s co-founder and a fascinating figure in the tech world.

The result? A comprehensive, engaging profile that Claude Code assembled from multiple sources and presented in a cohesive narrative.

There’s something unsettling about meeting someone who has compressed decades of normal human achievement into their twenties. Patrick Collison belongs to that rare category of people who make you question whether you’ve been using your time wisely. By 22, he had co-founded a company worth $95 billion. But that’s not the interesting part.

The interesting part is how he thinks.

The Boy Who Asked Better Questions

In 2005, a 16-year-old from rural Ireland stood before judges at the Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, presenting something called “CROMA: a new dialect of LISP.” While his peers were building potato clocks, Patrick Collison was reimagining programming languages. The project won first place, earning him €7,500, a crystal trophy from President Mary McAleese, and a trip to Moscow to represent Ireland at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists.

But here’s what makes this moment revealing: most teenage winners disappear into normal lives. Patrick used his prize money to fuel an obsession with making computers do things they couldn’t do before.

The pattern was already visible. While others optimized for recognition, Patrick optimized for capability.

The First Fortune: Learning to Fail Successfully

At MIT, Patrick and his younger brother John built their first company, Auctomatic, during Patrick’s freshman year. The product helped eBay sellers manage inventory across multiple platforms. Think of it as mission control for people selling everything from vintage records to computer parts.

The technology was, by Patrick’s own admission, “incredibly fancy.” They used Smalltalk, an obscure programming language. They built their own distributed object data store instead of using conventional databases. They implemented features like VM image saving for debugging—technical wizardry that impressed other programmers.

After ten months, they sold to Live Current Media for $5 million.

Most people would call this success. Patrick calls it his most important failure.

“We really learned something about the importance of prioritizing actually manifested user value,” he reflected years later. “We had incredibly fancy technology and reached only 50 customers.”

The lesson wasn’t about building less sophisticated products. It was about building sophistication in service of real problems, not impressive demos.

The Payment Problem Nobody Else Saw

During Auctomatic’s development, the Collison brothers kept running into the same frustrating wall: accepting payments online was absurdly difficult. You needed to talk to banks, payment processors, and “gateways” that connected the two. The process took weeks, involved multiple people, and accumulated fees at every step.

Most entrepreneurs would have accepted this as the cost of doing business. The Collisons saw it as evidence that the entire system was broken.

In 2010, they founded Stripe with a radical proposition: what if accepting payments could be as simple as copying and pasting seven lines of code?

The idea sounds obvious now. It wasn’t obvious then. PayPal was worth billions, and dozens of companies were competing in the payments space. The market looked saturated.

But Patrick had learned something from Auctomatic’s technical elegance and commercial failure. The best technology isn’t the most impressive—it’s the most useful. Stripe wouldn’t win by being more sophisticated than PayPal; it would win by being more essential.

The Thiel Paradox

Here’s one of business history’s more delicious ironies: PayPal’s co-founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk became early investors in the company trying to replace PayPal.

When Patrick pitched to Thiel, he didn’t soft-pedal his criticism. He explained, at length, PayPal’s structural flaws. Most entrepreneurs would have diplomatically acknowledged the incumbent’s strengths while highlighting opportunities for improvement.

Patrick gave Thiel a technical audit of everything wrong with the company he had built.

Thiel wrote a $200,000 check at the first meeting.

This tells you something important about how contrarian thinking actually works. True contrarians don’t just disagree with conventional wisdom—they understand it better than the people who created it. Thiel recognized that Patrick wasn’t just another entrepreneur with a payment app; he was someone who had genuinely re-imagined how financial infrastructure should work.

The Seven Lines That Changed Everything

Stripe’s famous “seven lines of code” integration became legendary among developers. But the real innovation wasn’t the brevity—it was the thinking behind it.

Traditional payment systems were designed by financial institutions for financial institutions. Developers were an afterthought, forced to navigate documentation written by people who had never debugged code at 2 AM.

Patrick approached the problem from the opposite direction. What if you started with the developer experience and worked backward to the financial infrastructure?

The result was magical in the way that good abstractions are magical. Complexity didn’t disappear—it got hidden behind an interface so clean that using it felt inevitable.

John Collison captured this perfectly: “We have lots of stories of people integrating payments in an afternoon or an evening and then launching their business the next day.”

Compare this to the traditional process, which could take weeks and often involved phone calls to customer service representatives who couldn’t explain their own API.

The Progress Studies Insurgency

By his thirties, Patrick had built one of the world’s most valuable private companies. Most people would have stopped there, perhaps starting a venture capital fund or buying a sports team.

Patrick declared war on civilizational stagnation.

In 2019, he co-founded the Progress Studies movement with economist Tyler Cowen. Their thesis: despite having 100 times more scientists and vastly more resources than in 1950, the rate of meaningful scientific progress appears to be slowing down.

The evidence is everywhere once you start looking. Nobel Prize winners averaged 37 years old in the early 20th century; now they average 47. We’ve gone from building the Empire State Building in 410 days to taking decades for major infrastructure projects. The average NIH grant application takes hundreds of days to process, while Patrick’s Fast Grants program proved you could make high-quality funding decisions in 48 hours.

Most people see inefficiency and shrug. Patrick sees inefficiency and builds institutions to fix it.

The Questions That Keep Him Up at Night

Patrick maintains a public list of questions that fascinate him. Reading through them is like glimpsing the operating system of an unusually curious mind:

“Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable?”

“Why don’t we have more definitive books about life’s most important questions—how to navigate education, select careers, choose partners, or raise children?”

“How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?”

These aren’t the questions of someone optimizing for the next quarterly earnings report. They’re the questions of someone trying to figure out how civilization actually works—and how it could work better.

The Infrastructure Philosopher

There’s a pattern to Patrick’s career that becomes clear when you step back: he doesn’t build products, he builds infrastructure. Auctomatic was infrastructure for eBay sellers. Stripe is infrastructure for online businesses. Progress Studies is infrastructure for scientific advancement.

As he puts it: “Most tech companies are building cars. Stripe is building roads.”

This is more than a business strategy—it’s a philosophy about how progress happens. The most important innovations are often invisible, enabling countless other innovations that get the credit and attention.

Consider how many companies exist today only because Stripe made it trivial to accept payments online. Consider how many scientific breakthroughs might happen because Fast Grants proved you could fund research quickly without compromising quality.

Patrick builds the foundations that let other people build castles.

The Contrarian’s Contrarian

Patrick has developed what might be the most sophisticated approach to contrarianism I’ve encountered. He warns against being reflexively contrarian: “If you’re just contrarian to the prevailing mood, then you’re following the prevailing mood but with a sign bit inversion.”

True contrarianism, in Patrick’s model, requires deeper work. It means understanding why conventional wisdom exists, identifying its specific failure modes, and building something genuinely better.

This is why he could criticize PayPal to Peter Thiel’s face and get funded for it. He wasn’t being contrarian for the sake of it—he was being precise about problems that needed solving.

The Long View

When most entrepreneurs think about scale, they think about users or revenue. Patrick thinks about civilizational impact.

“We have a weighty obligation to the businesses built on Stripe and the everyday people they serve,” reads one of Stripe’s core values. This isn’t just corporate speak—it reflects Patrick’s genuine belief that infrastructure companies have moral responsibilities that extend beyond their shareholders.

In conversations about artificial intelligence, he focuses less on the technology itself and more on how it might accelerate scientific progress. In discussions about Silicon Valley, he worries less about competition and more about complacency: “We had too much wealth, we had too much early success, and it caused us to lose our hunger and our edge.”

Patrick is playing a longer game than most people realize—not just building a successful company, but building institutions that make other forms of progress more likely.

The Paradox of Inevitability

There’s something almost inevitable-seeming about Patrick’s success, which makes it easy to miss how many things had to go exactly right. The timing of internet commerce. The specific technical challenges that matched his particular skills. The willingness of investors to fund two Irish brothers with unconventional ideas.

But inevitability is often what success looks like in retrospect. What made Patrick different wasn’t luck—it was his systematic approach to understanding why things were broken and his willingness to spend years building better versions.

“The most successful people I know have a very strong bias toward action,” he observes. “They don’t wait for things to be perfect. They start, they iterate, they optimize.”

This isn’t profound advice, but Patrick has followed it more consistently than almost anyone. While others debate whether payments need disruption, he built Stripe. While others worry about scientific stagnation, he launched Fast Grants.

The pattern is always the same: see the problem clearly, understand it better than anyone else, build something that solves it elegantly.

The Next Frontier

Patrick is now in his mid-thirties, running a company worth nearly $100 billion, with enough resources to pursue any problem that interests him. The question isn’t what he can accomplish—it’s what he’ll choose to focus on.

If the past is any guide, he’ll pick something that seems simultaneously obvious and impossible. Something everyone knows is broken but assumes can’t be fixed. Something important enough to justify years of patient infrastructure building.

My guess? He’s not done with the payments industry—Stripe still processes a tiny fraction of global commerce. But more fundamentally, he’s not done with the meta-problem that has driven his entire career: how do you build systems that make it easier for other people to build important things?

That’s the question of someone who understands that the most lasting impact comes not from building monuments to your own genius, but from building platforms that let other people discover theirs.

In a world full of entrepreneurs optimizing for exits and investors optimizing for returns, Patrick Collison remains focused on something more interesting: optimizing for civilization itself.

And he’s only getting started.

Sources consulted include Patrick Collison’s personal website, Stripe’s company materials, interviews with the Collison brothers, academic papers on Progress Studies, and analysis of the Fast Grants program. The aim was to understand not just what Patrick accomplished, but how he thinks about the world—and why that thinking led to such extraordinary results.