Today while I was browsing around online, I came across Stripe CEO Patrick Collison’s profile and then ended up on his blog.
Screenshot is below. There’s a sidebar on the right, content on the left. Simple HTML, he’s even put the style code straight into the head. I’m a big fan of this kind of plainness and simplicity.
If you launched a personal blog like this in Turkey, most people would probably look at it and say, “you’re doing all this work and you couldn’t even get a proper design done?” But that’s not the point at all.
Think of it this way: you’re very wealthy and can afford any clothes you want. But you still walk around in a plain t-shirt and sandals. To me, that’s not “taking the easy way out”, it’s a deliberate positioning choice. He knows he could have the fanciest version if he wanted, but he doesn’t.
In my personal reading of it, the message here is this: the information I’m putting here is so valuable that I didn’t care about anything else. There’s a very sharp statement being made about what truly matters.
PS: He’s listed the books he recommends. There are close to 200 books, maybe more; I was only familiar with 3–5 of them. Just imagine what kind of drive to read and learn this guy has—he’s gone very deep. Completely different level.
