Stripe: Thinking Like a Civilization
As the story goes, after creating their first settlement, Rome’s wolf-weened founders fell out over the right hill upon which to build their city. While Remus liked the Aventine, Romulus preferred the Palantine.
Romulus exercised the most final method of winning an argument, killing Remus. In the aftermath, the surviving brother built an empire that indelibly altered the world, spanning hundreds of years.
As founding stories go, Romulus’s advances a rather consequentialist morality — can we really be too upset over one teensy-tiny murder balanced against the great technological and cultural gifts Rome wrought?
But there’s an alluring counterfactual to the legend. What would Rome have looked like had it not been forged from brutal fratricide? (And a rather petty fratricide at that, like kicking a co-worker down the stairs for stealing your standing desk.) If Romulus and Remus had navigated a more peaceful path — perhaps they needed a founder’s coach; ubi est Giro Colonnus? — what would Rome have looked like? Could we have had the progress without the gleeful savagery? Bread without the circus? A little more Marcus Aurelius, a little less Caligula?
In Patrick and John Collison, Stripe has two framers thinking at a civilization-level. This is rare, even among tech’s boldest executives. With the exception of Musk, Bezos, and Buterin, no founder is constructing an empire with quite the same thousand-year stare or detailed, architectural love as the Siblings Stripe. (Even Zuckerberg, lover of Augustus Caesar, is perhaps too absorbed with accumulating personal power to qualify).
