John Collison explains why it’s important for founders to be curious

Businesses are kind of different at every scale. And so Stripe has been different as two people to 50 people, to currently 7,000 people. I think you have to be curious about what is required to run a good company at that stage, and what's required to run Stripe well really matters. And one thing we try to do is just spend a lot of time looking at all the other companies and what they've done. Not that you want to blindly emulate them, but you should at least understand. It's funny, I remember Tyler Cowen commenting about Magnus Carlsen that he entered some chess trivia contest that was just literally about chess trivia and won it. He knew the most chess trivia out of anyone who was in this contest. And that's not a coincidence. I think that the world's number one player has also kind of studied the most about just all the chess histories and extremely knowledgeable on that and a little bit on that, where I don't know if we'd win the business trivia, but I think we'd have a respectable showing. Because you really just have to understand what, what makes like Apple versus Amazon. You cannot imagine two companies that work more differently than the two of those. You know, one is totally functional, one is this GM model, and yet they're both kind of really successful models. And so I think it's useful to have kind of a framework for how that stuff works. So anyway, that's one. The second is, I was actually just reading the galley for poor Charlie Salmanak, and obviously he has the famous speech about the multiple mental models and just kind of cribbing the best mental models from different industries. And I do think that. I don't know if you think that every founder kind of has to do this, but I do think it's probably a effective to be able to just know the top mental models from finance and from engineering and from product and from sales and stuff like that. I don't see how you could be that effective without being pretty curious on, like, how do I learn the most important mental models from this particular domain or function?