# Patrick Collison **Draft profile.** Irish-born co-founder and CEO of **[[Stripe]]**, the payments-infrastructure company he started in 2010 with his brother **[[John Collison]]**. Patrick is the more public, ideologically forward Collison — co-author of the 2019 *Atlantic* essay that launched **Progress Studies** with [[Tyler Cowen]], and a key personal LP in **[[California Forever]]**. ## Background - Born 1988 in Limerick, Ireland; raised in County Tipperary. - **2004** (age 16) — Won the Young Scientist of the Year award for an AI-derived programming language ("Croma"). - Attended **MIT** briefly; dropped out to start a company. - **2008** — Sold first startup **Auctomatic** (with John) to Live Current Media for ~$5M. - **2010** — Co-founded [[Stripe]] with John out of [[Y Combinator]]. ## Stripe (2010–present) - Co-founded and serves as **CEO** (John is **President**). - Stripe's 2011 seed round closed with capital from **[[Peter Thiel]]** personally, **[[Elon Musk]]** personally, **[[Sequoia Capital]]**, **[[Andreessen Horowitz]]**, and SV Angel — anchoring Patrick inside the [[PayPal Mafia]] capital network from the outset. - Stripe valued ~**$91.5B** in a February 2025 tender; has never IPO'd. - Patrick is the ideological/public face; John runs day-to-day operations. ## Progress Studies (2019) In **July 2019**, Patrick co-wrote *"We Need a New Science of Progress"* in *The Atlantic* with [[Tyler Cowen]]. The essay argued that the underlying drivers of scientific, technological, and institutional progress are themselves understudied — and proposed a new discipline, **Progress Studies**, to fix that. Progress Studies is best understood as a **softer, academic-flavored cousin of [[Extropianism]]** and a parallel track to [[Longtermism]]: techno-optimist in posture, anti-stagnation in politics, sympathetic to deregulation as a growth lever. It spawned: - **[[Roots of Progress]]** ([[Jason Crawford]]) — the movement's institutional anchor - **[[Institute for Progress]]** ([[Alec Stapp]], [[Caleb Watney]], 2021) — DC-focused metascience and immigration think tank - A loose network of newsletters, fellowships, and grant programs (including [[Tyler Cowen]]'s [[Emergent Ventures]]) Patrick has hosted [[Tyler Cowen]] at Stripe for Conversations with Tyler episodes and partnered with him repeatedly on metascience funding (e.g., **[[Fast Grants]]** during COVID — emergency R&D funding distributed in days rather than months). ## Stance on Effective Altruism / Longtermism Patrick is **EA-adjacent rather than EA-aligned**. In public conversation (2020) he described EA as *"a kind of totalizing framework"* — friendly engagement while preserving distance. He prefers the Progress Studies frame (build more) over the EA/longtermism frame (avert catastrophe). That said: - **2025** — Co-funded [[Open Philanthropy]]'s **Abundance & Growth Fund** alongside [[Dustin Moskovitz]]/[[Good Ventures]]. This is a direct capital partnership with the EA/longtermist megafunder couple. - Has publicly admired (and pushed back on) work by [[William MacAskill]] and [[Toby Ord]]. - Friendly with the broader rationalist/EA Bay Area circle without identifying as a member. ## TESCREAL Mapping Patrick is a **TESCREAL-adjacent figure**, not a card-carrying acolyte. Mapped against the seven components: | Component | Patrick Collison | |-----------|-------------------| | **T**ranshumanism | No major public position | | **E**xtropianism | ✓ Adjacent via Progress Studies (the "build more, faster" extropian instinct without the cryonics / radical-life-extension trappings) | | **S**ingularitarianism | No major public position; invested in AI labs | | **C**osmism | No major public position | | **R**ationalism | Adjacent — engages with the community, not a member | | **EA** | Adjacent — friendly engagement, Open Phil co-funding partnership | | **L**ongtermism | Adjacent — Progress Studies overlaps with longtermist framings on growth and civilizational trajectory | Net read: Patrick is the **velvet-glove TESCREAL** — same destination (techno-elite stewardship, deregulatory growth politics, AI as civilizational project) reached via a more academic, less apocalyptic vocabulary than the Yudkowsky/Bostrom canon. ## California Forever Personal LP in [[California Forever]] alongside his brother [[John Collison]]. The connection to [[Jan Sramek]] runs through Sramek's earlier Stripe contractor stint on "special projects." The brothers join [[Marc Andreessen]], [[Michael Moritz]], [[Reid Hoffman]], and [[Laurene Powell Jobs]] in the consortium funding the Solano County project. ## Other Investments / Initiatives - **Fast Grants** (2020, with [[Tyler Cowen]]) — emergency COVID research funding - **[[Arc Institute]]** — non-profit biomedical research institute (Stanford-affiliated); Patrick is a founding supporter - Personal angel investments across AI, fusion (Commonwealth Fusion, Helion), longevity, and developer tools - Public reading list (`patrickcollison.com/bookshelf`) is itself influential in the progress/techno-optimist subculture ## Style and Reputation Cerebral, polymath-coded, low-key personally. Patrick's online presence is a curated wall of book recommendations, science-policy commentary, and engineering culture writing — a deliberate contrast to the bombastic Musk/Andreessen style of techno-optimism. Critics see this as a more legitimating, harder-to-counter version of the same underlying politics. ## Draft Notes / To Expand - Document the **Fast Grants** record and metascience funding output - Trace the Arc Institute investor/governance structure - Map Patrick's specific California Forever check size if disclosed - Cross-link to a future [[Progress Studies]] concept page - Add detail on his appearances at Republican-aligned events (or lack thereof) post-2024 ## See Also - [[John Collison]] - [[Stripe]] - [[California Forever]] - [[Jan Sramek]] - [[Tyler Cowen]] - [[Peter Thiel]] - [[Marc Andreessen]] - [[Dustin Moskovitz]] - [[Greg Brockman]] - [[TESCREAL]] - [[Effective Altruism]] - [[Longtermism]] - [[Extropianism]] - [[PayPal Mafia]]