From the floor
What is your take on the likes of, say, Joomla, for example, like, from the transition from HTML for web design and that? Do you have an opinion on Joomla?
Patrick Collison
I’ve never used it, so I don’t have much of an opinion, to be honest. I mean, I’ve heard good things from people who do use it, but not having had direct experience with it myself, I can’t say very much, unfortunately.
From the floor
This is probably a question – after you had been targeted by a potential interested party, did you get any help in finally closing the deals on the business side, to make sure that you got a good deal, and, you know, you sold at the right price, at the right time etc?
Patrick Collison
Our investors were actually extremely helpful there. I mean, we obviously had Y Combinator, and they’ve guided several companies through acquisitions already, so they had plenty of experience with it. One of our other investors was Chris Sacca, who had just left Google. His position there had been their head of special initiatives, and so he again had had a lot of involvement with Google’s M&A, and obviously there’s lots of that. So they were always quite close to the process, and Chris in particular stayed really close to things. I mean, we would forward on different emails we were receiving, and he would give his take and basically just the day-to-day stuff of how you should deal with different things and different issues, and what sort of stuff tends to be significant and what you can safely ignore and all the rest. He was really, really helpful for that. And so, we definitely did have good support on that front. And for any company entering into any sort of acquisition negotiations, I do think it is really important to have someone who has gone through the process before, because just knowing what things you should worry about and what things you shouldn’t is a huge help.
Liz Bonnin
You made it very clear that it didn’t happen overnight. You had many pitches in your underwear. But we’ve got a lot of people from schools here today who, in this day and age, may have aspirations to be as successful as yourself fairly soon. You’re only 20 still. What would be your main points of advice for anyone who’s got a little idea but wouldn’t have a clue how to go about it, being only 16, 17, 18?
Patrick Collison
Well, I guess my main advice would be, whatever the idea is, to get in a position where you can build it yourself. I mean, obviously with computers that means you should learn to programme, but even something not necessarily to do with computers, I think you should just acquire a very deep technical knowledge of the area. Even if you don’t actually end up doing most of the development yourself, I think it’s incredibly important that you’ve a really, really good understanding of the area you’re involved with. I mean, like I say, I’m hesitant to generalise too much, because all of my experience is with computers. But I think this is something that applies generally in business. So I suppose the other part of that is, for anyone thinking of starting a company, I would strongly recommend doing something in computers for the reasons mentioned, in the sense that, just the start-up costs are so low, and you can get things up and running so fast. It’s like a really ideal proposition for young people. I mean, I’ve huge respect for young people who manage to start non-technology start-up companies, just because it’s so much harder. But for people who want to do something business related and don’t know exactly which area they want to get involved in, I would strongly recommend computers and the Internet.
Liz Bonnin
Do you think you were somewhat lucky with the support you got along the way? I mean, I know you’ve had hard times, but it seems to me like, even with your investors being so helpful, do you feel you got a lot of help that might be difficult to get for other people?
Patrick Collison
Without doubt. I think there’s an awful lot of help available to anyone who goes looking for it. I would never say to someone, you know – I don’t think anyone who actually wants to get help will have a problem finding it. And there’s a great culture of almost unreasonable helpfulness in Silicon Valley. One of my strongest or most memorable events was a couple of weeks after we got there. The CEO of one of our competitors dropped us an email asking if we wanted to catch up for a cup of coffee and just discuss things. I mean, he was one of our competitors, and by rights we should have been at loggerheads. But we met up, there was this sort of tentative initial period where we were trying to suss each other out, but we got over that, and we actually had a really good discussion, and he gave us various bits of advice, and told us about different things he had learned, working in the eBay ecosystem, different pieces of code we might be interested in taking a look at and all the rest. And it was really good advice, and we went and used it. And so, this sort of mindset of helping out even when there’s no immediate or obvious kind of self-interest in doing so pervades Silicon Valley, and it’s one of the best things about it. And I think people there have realised that what goes around comes around.
From the floor
What programming languages do you use, and what do you see as the future of programming, what language?
Patrick Collison
For Auctomatic, it was mostly written in Smalltalk. I guess there’s probably quite a few people here who haven’t come across it, but it’s a pretty obscure language, originally developed in the 1970s. It was one of the first object-oriented languages. I think I only know five people or so who actually programme in Smalltalk, day to day, so it’s a really obscure minority language, but I know – I had used even a Lisp programmer, which is also a really obscure minority language, so I was kind of used to being on the fringes in that sense. We felt that Smalltalk was a pretty good fit for the kind of stuff we wanted to do with Auctomatic. And I guess, more importantly, we felt that you really shouldn’t use a programming language based on how easy it is to find people who already know it, but I think it’s much more important to find a language that suits the problem you’re working on. All the people we hired had never, I mean, had hardly even heard of Smalltalk previously. Everyone had to learn it as soon as they joined the company, and that was never a problem for us. If you get smart programmers, there’s never a problem, having them pick up another language.
Liz Bonnin
And with respect to the future of the languages, do you have any thoughts?
Patrick Collison
I mean, it’s kind of strange in that my two favourite languages are Lisp and Smalltalk, and these are both extremely old languages. And to whatever extent I have ideas about the future, programming has kind of, there always have been two sort of families of languages, the ALGOL/C, and that’s kind of grown down through various iterations of becoming more dynamic. And then there was this sort of Lisp/Smalltalk family, which has always been very much on the fringes. And even though by popularity the C family has always prevailed, I think that’s gradually swinging towards the Lisp/Smalltalk side of things. So it’s always a bad idea to make predictions, especially when they’re about the future, but I see the Lisp/Smalltalk family of languages being the future of programming languages.
From the floor
Would you agree that the lack of technical community is equal, if not a greater problem, than the sort of red tape associated with getting investment capital in Ireland?
Patrick Collison
Well, I think that’s kind of a chicken and egg problem – I think to a fairly large degree, to what extent there is a lack of a technical community, a lot of that is because of the lack of a good investment community. And I mean, OK, sure, you can debate which is the original cause, but I certainly think that there are a lot of extremely good technical people that come out of Ireland, and there are certainly plenty, such that there could be a very vibrant technology scene here, and I think the reason that it’s not stronger than it is, is because so many of the people leave the country. I think a strong investment scene could go a long way towards changing that. You really don’t need a huge number of people to start creating that network effect. And, now being in Vancouver, I kind of see that. Vancouver is in a somewhat similar position to Ireland, in the sense that they have a fairly good technology scene, but they would like it to be stronger and they’re always sort of comparing it to Silicon Valley. But they have a significantly better investment community. And as a result of that, they’re actually starting to build up a pretty decent general technical community and different groups of programmers and companies and sort of springing up in the Vancouver area. And the main difference I see between Vancouver and Ireland is not the people themselves, or the kind of technical people the areas are producing, but just the investment communities.
From the floor
What was the transition like, moving in to work in a company? And how many are working underneath you? And you’re director, so are there people, are you director of people who are a lot older than you?
Patrick Collison
In terms of integrating into a larger company or whatever, the transition actually wasn’t that difficult, mostly because the company wasn’t that much larger. I think to move into a company of a couple of thousand people would have been a much more awkward transition. But going from a company of, whatever we were, seven or eight people, to a company of 30, 40, 50 people, it’s not all that different, and you still know everyone’s names and know everyone, and there’s still a similar kind of small company vibe. And so in that sense it wasn’t too hard. How many people are under me? I honestly don’t know offhand. I mean, because we’re still a pretty small company, the whole hierarchy thing just is not particularly strong. And so, for some given person, I mean, I’d even have to think, you know, like, are they under me or not. I mean, I just don’t know.
Liz Bonnin
Are you aware of being 20 and, sort of, supervising as such someone, I mean, does that feel odd to you?
Patrick Collison
I mean, yes; that is the case. I don’t feel particularly odd. I mean, I think people generally treat you the age you act rather than the age you are. And so I’ve never had any particular problem there. That’s also something I think the US is pretty good at, and I guess North America generally, because there is a fairly strong tradition of young people being fairly successful. I mean, there’s the Gateses and the Zuckerbergs and all the rest. So I don’t think people there find it all that strange.
From the floor
In terms of when you were a kid, and school and that, and your first computer, when you had your first computer, was there this eureka moment where all of a sudden you knew how to programme, or was it something that you had to work at or...?
Patrick Collison
Right from when we got our first computer, I was immediately kind of obsessed with it. And so, yeah, like, I – when we got it I was never thinking of careers or jobs or the future or anything like that, but certainly from the very beginning it was something I was really interested in. I didn’t start programming until I was maybe13 or 14 or so. I mean, you hear these people in the US who start when they could barely talk or whatever, and I was certainly not one of those people. But from when I started programming I was hooked straight away, so I spent an awful lot of time throughout secondary school programming. So, yeah, I mean, to answer your question, it wasn’t like a gradual sort of transition to be involved with computers or anything like that. Right from the very beginning I was pretty much hooked.
From the floor
You mentioned at the start that you didn’t have a Leaving Cert. And do you think that was actually an advantage to you, and you didn’t have to concentrate on stuff, you were concentrating all your effort on programming? And the second part of that question is, when you left college after your first term, do you think that was also an advantage, in that you weren’t, like, institutionalised into that way of thinking?
Patrick Collison
With regard to the Leaving Cert or whatever, the reason I didn’t do it was just that I wanted to do it sooner, basically, and so my original plan was to do the Leaving Cert at the end of what would have been my fifth year or whatever. But the Department of Education actually doesn’t allow you to do this, so I just ended up doing the A-levels myself. I mean, and so in that sense, like, I did a kind of equivalent exam, and so even though I didn’t do the Leaving Cert itself, I don’t think my experience was massively different to everyone else.
Liz Bonnin
You did five subjects, didn’t you?
Patrick Collison
Four. Yeah.
Liz Bonnin
Chemistry, physics –
Patrick Collison
Yeah, the great thing about the A-levels is, you can – there are no compulsory subjects, so if you’re not a big language person you just don’t do any languages. So I did maths, physics, computing and chemistry.
Liz Bonnin
And got what in all of them?
Patrick Collison
I got four As.
Liz Bonnin
Says he very meekly.
Patrick Collison
But with regard to the college thing, there was a similar question last night, and this is something that I’ve been wondering about myself. I went away and actually looked into this to see if there is any kind of correlation between the level of educational achievement and entrepreneurial success. And there is a correlation, but it’s in favour of education. So I think this kind of popular perception of really successful business people being school dropouts or whatever is, or may actually just be random bias. I mean, sure, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Wozniak were all college dropouts. But as you move further down that list, pretty much all the guys there have college degrees. And so, I guess the two answers to that question of how college influences it, and the first is, I don’t think it actually matters all that much, and to whatever extent it does matter, I think college is actually probably net a good thing. And I certainly have no particular aversion to college or anything, and it’s something I can imagine myself finishing at some stage.
Liz Bonnin
Do you think you might go back to MIT then?
Patrick Collison
I I’ve no plans at the moment, but I would consider it at some point.
Liz Bonnin
Is the door open for you? Do they allow that?
Patrick Collison
This is the great thing about the US college system. You can take time off at any point. I actually didn’t tell them that I was going to defer until the first day of my second semester, but I walked into the registration office, said I would like to put everything on hold, and essentially I just had to sign one form and that was it. And, yeah, I can now go back pretty much any semester in the future. Having that sort of flexibility is obviously a huge advantage, in that, if I had to have made a definite commitment that I was leaving in the very beginning, I don’t think I would’ve been prepared to do that. But given that the worst case scenario, we just, you know, we decided to start this company, and then it went nowhere and whatever, I mean, I could’ve just resumed stuff in six months’ time. Having that safety net below is certainly pretty important for me, and I think is a big reason why so many people do not feel much hesitation in taking time off.
Liz Bonnin
Sure. I’m afraid we’re out of time, but that was absolutely brilliant, very interesting. I’m sure you all agree. Patrick Collison, everyone.
Patrick Collison
Thank you very much.
« previous
« Back to Lecture