Patrick is quite literally one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. Like, he puts Larry Page on his heels smart. I don’t know anyone who has 1) read more books and 2) has the near photographic memory for what he has read. His thoughts are provocative and challenge the status quo. His success is no accident.

With reading, I don’t feel like I’m weird; I feel like everyone else is weird, in that there’s just … so much stuff to know, and I guess I just feel stressed out by... like, it feels important, it’s obviously important, and I don’t know it. And so, shit, I better get to work.

When I’m reading, I’m not in this … especially blissful place. I enjoy it perfectly fine, but I think there are extremely important things that I really should know and I don’t, and that feels problematic.

Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was Stripe. But in fact they're famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition.

Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of potential users in the other companies we've funded, and none took better advantage of it than Stripe.

At YC we use the term "Collison installation" for the technique they invented. More diffident founders ask "Will you try our beta?" and if the answer is yes, they say "Great, we'll send you a link." But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say "Right then, give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot.

This is I think what you find when you’re trying to hire the best people. You can filter first by expressed interest and then you can secondarily filter by which ones are good. Or you can first look for the good ones and then try to convert them to expressed interest. I think the latter is the more effective way to go about it.

I can think off the top of my head of five people who took 3+ years to hire.

And so, just to give a concrete example, Atlas, the service we launched for helping new founders incorporate companies, in particular without the geographic restrictions that tended to exist before — it’s essentially open to founders anywhere in the world.

There was no … one reason as to why that was a good bet. You can’t just measure that on any one axis. But when you look at it overall and you see that, “Well, if it doesn’t work, it’s hard to see how it could cause that much downside for Stripe. It’s not going to require an enormous fixed-cost investment in order to learn as to at least whether it’s initially working.

If it did work, it seems like it could produce quite significant returns. The kinds of things we’ll have to do for it directly are things that are probably valuable for us in other parts of the business, so we’ll learn interesting new capabilities and skills in the course of doing it.

I reach out to people whose work I admire and tell them that, and often it leads to a dialogue. And in some cases, I’ve gotten to know them pretty well.

I’m fortunate that Tyler Cowen, whom I mentioned, is a friend, but I was never introduced to him; I just randomly emailed him years ago, actually invited him to a Bitcoin Meetup that I held in 2011. And I did not, however, buy any bitcoin, but I invited him to that Meetup and he replied and apologized [that] he couldn’t make it, but we ended up in a dialogue after that.

When you reach out to other people, half the time they don’t respond, but half the time they do. It’s asymmetric; it doesn’t really cost too much when they don’t, and it can be incredibly rewarding when they do. If I did not do that, I would have missed out on a huge amount.

Sometimes you have a true binary decision like, “Do I go to this college or that college?” “Do I take this job offer or not?” And it’s an investing or investment-like decision. But it’s not usually that.

I think that the question I would encourage people to think more about is, “How do I get to make better decisions?” as in, “How do I make sure the decisions I’m confronted with end up being better?”

It’s not like, “How should I choose between option A and B,” but, “How do I make sure that both options A and B are as good as possible, and there’s also a C, D, and E, and that those options are great too?”

I think there are four big differences. The first is... I now just place more value on decision speed. If you can make twice as many decisions at half the precision, that’s actually often better. And then, given the fact that the rate of improvement of decision making with additional time almost necessarily tends to flatten out, I think that most people—certainly that Patrick of five years ago and partly from Patrick of today included—should be operating earlier in that curve.

Make more decisions with less confidence but in significantly less time. And just recognize that in most cases, you can course-correct and treat fast decisions as a kind of asset and capability in their own right. It’s quite striking to me how some of the organizations that I hold in the highest regard tend to do this.

The second thing is to not treat all decisions uniformly. I think the most obvious axes to break them down on are degree of reversibility and magnitude. Things with low reversibility and great impact and magnitude, those ones you do want to really deliberate over and try to get right.

The third thing is, I now try to fairly deliberately just make fewer decisions. “Why am I making the decision?” And for some kinds of decisions, there are some good reasons for that, and there are some decisions the CEO ought to make and is fundamentally on the hook for, but there are some decisions where if I’m making it or if I have to make it, that probably suggests [that] something else organizationally or institutionally has broken.

And then fourth, when I realize that I would make a decision differently [to] how someone else would make it, not even really discussing the decision itself but trying to dig into, what is the difference in our models such that they want to make Decision A and I want to make Decision B?