Books recommended by John Collison

John Collison is an Irish entrepreneur and co-founder of Stripe, a payments infrastructure company that became one of the most valuable startups in the world. Together with his brother Patrick, he built Stripe from a simple idea — making it easier for developers to process online payments — and turned it into a central piece of the global digital economy.

With a background in physics at Harvard (a course he dropped out of to focus on the company), Collison is known for an intellectually curious profile, with interests in science, the history of technology, and engineering. His reading recommendations tend to reflect this breadth: technical and historical books, and works about how complex systems are built.