Patrick Collison Thinks Silicon Valley Is Overrated. Especially for People in Their 20s

For decades, Silicon Valley has been sold as the default destination for ambitious young builders. If you’re smart, driven, and interested in technology, the script goes, you move to San Francisco, start a company, and change the world.

But in a recent appearance on The Lunar Society Podcast, Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison offered a more contrarian—and far more nuanced—take. For many people in their 20s, he suggested, Silicon Valley may actually be the wrong place to build a meaningful career.

Not because startups are bad. And not because entrepreneurship doesn’t matter.

But because some of the most important work in the world requires something Silicon Valley doesn’t reward nearly enough: deep, patient, technical mastery built over decades.

The Problem With a Culture That Worships Founders

Silicon Valley’s great strength—its celebration of bold founders and fast iteration—is also its weakness.

Collison argues that San Francisco “valorizes striking out on your own,” dismissing received wisdom and rewarding iconoclasts who move fast and build companies early. That cultural orientation has produced extraordinary outcomes. Stripe itself fits that archetype.

But it also creates a distortion.

“I think San Francisco doesn’t really encourage the pursuit of a really deep technical depth.”

In other words, when founders are treated as cultural heroes, other equally important paths—scientists, engineers, domain experts—get undervalued. Status flows toward entrepreneurship, not mastery.

The result? A generation of talented people rushing to start companies before they’ve accumulated the depth required to tackle truly hard problems.

The Work That Can’t Be Rushed

To make his point, Collison reaches far outside software.

He points to Herbert Boyer, co-founder of Genentech, who helped invent recombinant DNA technology and enabled the first production of synthetic human insulin. That breakthrough didn’t come from a 23-year-old dropout chasing product-market fit.

It came after decades of accumulated expertise.

Similarly, Collison highlights recent breakthroughs in biomedical research—like new genome-editing techniques—that required years of bench work, technical training, and immersion in a field before meaningful progress was possible .

The uncomfortable truth: many of the most important inventions in the world are inaccessible to people who optimize for speed, visibility, or early status.

The Hidden Skill: Learning What “Great” Actually Looks Like

One of Collison’s most powerful ideas isn’t about knowledge—it’s about standards.

He references how scientists often learn what excellence really is only by working closely with exceptional mentors or institutions. Books can’t fully teach this. Neither can podcasts.

What gets transferred, Collison notes, is an understanding of problem selection, taste, and standards—knowing not just how to work, but what’s worth working on .

This is why he believes environments with the highest standards, not the highest prestige, matter most—especially early in a career.

For wantrepreneurs, this reframes the question entirely. Instead of asking:

“Where can I get the most attention?”

A better question might be:

“Where can I learn what great actually looks like?”

Why “Moats” Are Overrated, but Execution Isn’t

Collison also dismantles a popular startup obsession: moats.

Despite Stripe operating in a heavily regulated, network-effect-driven industry, he argues that moats are often overstated. Payments had every reason to be locked up by incumbents—and yet Stripe still emerged.

“Most products and most businesses can just be done much better.”

What mattered wasn’t defensibility on paper. It was caring deeply about the problem, building with craft, and organizing talent effectively over time.

This is a critical lesson for early founders who delay starting because they think an idea is “already taken.” In practice, execution quality—and cultural seriousness—matter far more than theoretical barriers.

Multi-Decade Thinking in a Short-Term World

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Collison’s worldview is his obsession with time horizons.

At Stripe, teams are encouraged to design “multi-decadal abstractions”—systems and APIs that could still make sense 20 or 30 years from now. That level of ambition often sounds unrealistic to younger builders.

Collison disagrees.

“That’s actually just what happens when you get this stuff right.”

The implication is subtle but profound: short-term thinking isn’t pragmatic—it’s expensive. Long-term clarity enables speed, reliability, and compounding advantage.

For wantrepreneurs, this reframes patience as a strategic asset, not a weakness.

A Different Kind of Career Advice for Your 20s

Collison is careful not to prescribe a single path. Startups matter. Entrepreneurs matter. Information dissemination matters.

But his advice carries a clear undercurrent:

If you’re drawn to fields that require deep expertise—science, engineering, infrastructure, research—you may want to optimize for learning, not launching.

That might mean:

• Joining institutions with world-class standards
• Seeking mentors instead of visibility
• Choosing obscurity over status, temporarily
• Accepting that your most important work may peak later than Silicon Valley mythology suggests

The world doesn’t just need more founders. It needs people willing to master domains so thoroughly that breakthroughs become possible.

And those paths rarely go viral.

Final Thought for Wantrepreneurs

Patrick Collison’s message isn’t anti-startup. It’s anti-shallow ambition.

In a culture obsessed with speed, he’s arguing for something quieter—and harder: depth, standards, and long-term seriousness.

For many in their 20s, the most contrarian move might not be starting a company.

It might be deciding to become exceptionally good first.