Patrick Collison on how both Stripe and Facebook doubted their ideas in the beginning

I always love the story that in sort of the famous house that Facebook started in Palo Alto, that Facebook was not the only company they were working on. Right. There was also that peer to peer file sharing thing, Right, Sure. But I mean, Facebook had sort of launched at Harvard, at least in, I think, February of 04. And so they're working in that house that subsequent summer. And I find it very interesting that sort of call it six months later, it was kind of not obvious that Facebook was the thing to be working on. Right. Because you're pursuing multiple ideas in parallel. And sort of similarly with Stripe, even once we built this little prototype that we thought held some promise or whatever, it wasn't obviously a great idea or anything. What we actually went and did was we came out to the Bay Area again that subsequent summer, this was for us in the summer of 2010, and just decided to work on Stripe as our bootstrapped internship. And then over the course of that summer, basically, and again, I think there's maybe a lesson here where I think a lot of really good ideas really don't seem particularly great or big up front. Again, certainly speaking from personal experience, Stripe did not. But over the course of working on it that summer, instead of thinking about it and so on, we kind of came to shift from thinking about it merely as this nice little tool for developers that makes their lives easier initially, which is what we started out with, to realizing that, well, when you survey the broader landscape, it's not just that it sucks for developers to have to integrate payments initially into their website, our service or whatever, but that, like, the whole edifice is broken. Right. We came to appreciate that sort of what we thought was kind of a, you know, this little pond was actually kind of this much larger ocean. And so basically that summer we kind of made two decisions to drop out of school, or, you know, as our mom continues to prefer we call it, to take, you know, a leave of absence. And then secondly, we had to go, you know, raise some initial money from Sam Altman and Peter Thiel and Sequoia and a couple of others.