Debriefing Patrick Collison’s Advice to 10–20 Year Old’s + My Top 3 Advice Points For The Same Demographic

Zayn Patel
9 min readFeb 14, 2021

Patrick is the founder and CEO of Stripe, a billion dollar company. He started the company when he was 22 years old with his brother.

Founder of Stripe + Billionaire → Patrick Collison

I discovered Patrick by doing a deep dive into founder tandems and came upon a resource he put out on his website — patrickcollison.com/advice. The premise for this segment of his website is to provide advice to 10–20 year olds, guiding them through the “prime years” of life.

As a 17 year old I loved this resource and felt that I resonated with everything Patrick described. I believe one of the most important parts of life is finding a mentor, someone older and more experience that can provide consistent guidance for your endeavors. I would advise for staying away from parents, as mentors. Mentors and parents serve a distinct purpose and shouldn’t be the intersected.

Patrick’s advice column sparked some inspiration for me and I wanted to break down his top tips and provide three of my own.

I’m all about efficiency so here’s what I’m going to discuss today.

  1. The Importance of Going Deep
  2. Be Intentional About What You Do
  3. Leverage the Internet to Make Friends + Connections

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Zayn Patel
Zayn Patel

Written by Zayn Patel

Working on space technology and policy, improving government with data science, and launching a cubesat mission.