The best way to get promoted at stripe is just self-marketing and social manipulation. Good engineers are leaving meanwhile tecnical leadership is being replaced with designers and marketers. Internal performance metrics are heavily manipulated as well. Patrick has completely surrounded himself with extreme sycophants at this point - he has no idea what is actually going on in his company beyond curated metrics produced by manipulative sociopaths.

Patrick Collison sounds like a lovely, trusting, scientifically-minded man who needs to learn the constructive power of destruction. The power of rage and contempt for bad solutions and bad communication (regardless of intent).

With a smiley face front-end, of course. Wouldn't want to seem not-nice!