Stripe is worth $159 billion now. Like Bezos and Buffett, the Collison ‘way of building a business’ will create trillions in value and is worth studying.

800-word post on:
1. Craft & Beauty
2. Humility
3. Hiring
4. Culture
5. Decisions

1. On craft & beauty,
You can work on something you’re not proud of for 2 years. You can’t do it for 30.

Beauty has a practical function most people miss. When we go to a city or building that’s beautiful, there’s generosity in that construction. You never meet the architect, but it’s a gift they’ve bestowed on us. Products are no different.

And craft has another function that might matter even more: it’s the single best way to attract extraordinary people. The best people consider themselves craftspeople, and above almost all else, they want to work alongside other craftspeople.

Put bluntly: really good people don’t enjoy working on shitty things.

2. On founder humility,
Think carefully about what’s cool and what’s high status, and then make sure not to do that.
Once you’re succeeding, the real danger begins. Success breeds complacency. Other people are studying what you built and looking to replicate it. You can always be a month away from losing your business.

The antidote is simple but uncomfortable: stay close to reality. Every week at Stripe’s leadership meeting, they hear directly from a customer. It’s not an A-plus scorecard every time. That’s the point. It prevents you from getting delusional.

And when you see a smart person holding a view that’s different from your own, rather than figuring out how they’re wrong, try to figure out how they’re right.

3. On hiring,
Think like a value investor. You’re not looking for the best resume. You’re looking for human capital the market has significantly underpriced.

It took Patrick and John a full year to get to four people. No group will ever shape your company more than your early hires. When hiring anyone, ask: will I like the 50 people they hire?

Prioritize rate of learning over everything. Over a decade, fast learners obliterate credentialed hires. It’s not even close.

For senior hires, one question: can they get you where you need to be in four years, in two?

4. On culture,
Stripe’s moat isn’t technology or process or perks. It’s that the people there genuinely care about solving the problems they say they’re solving. That’s rarer than it sounds.

Care for the customer’s problem, executed with craft and rigor. A culture that prizes small details and careful abstraction.

And an operating rhythm that keeps it honest: micro pessimism, macro optimism. Everything is terrible today. Total conviction it’ll be fantastic in two years.

That tension is what keeps generational companies from getting comfortable.

5. On decisions,
Make twice as many decisions at half the precision. That’s almost always better than the alternative. You’ll never have perfect information and you don’t need it. Make the call, move forward, course correct if you’re wrong. You pay a far larger price for paralysis than for mistakes.

For co-founder disputes, one simple rule: whoever cares more carries the decision. Deeper conviction wins.

These ideas have shaped how we build Gamma and 1000s of others.

@patrickc @collision

The Stripe team published their annual letter this week.

We partnered up with them to drop it into Gamma.

Check it out: pic.x.com/UIfy77iTL3

It was also a bit surreal to see @gammaapp get a shoutout in this year’s letter