Art by Clark MillerPatrick Collison Dreams of an Abundance-Verse
The Stripe billionaire has helped spread a political philosophy that envisions enormous economic growth propelled by technology and regulatory reform. Can it go mainstream?
Nearly every summer in recent years, Patrick Collison, Stripe’s 36-year-old Irish billionaire co-founder, has hosted a multiday summit on the West Coast with a bold underlying intention: unlock a more abundant future.
The very first such conclave happened in 2018 when Collison and several other co-founders, including his brother John and GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, gathered about 200 scientists, economists, investors and entrepreneurs in a Sebastopol, Calif., field. Some attendees brought sleeping bags and pitched tents, staying up late to solve complex math problems and play social-strategy games like Werewolf and The Resistance: Avalon. Over the years, the event has attracted people like Figma founder Dylan Field, author Neal Stephenson and Andrej Karpathy, the former OpenAI and Tesla executive (who coined tech’s phrase du jour: “vibe coding”).
Initially, Collison called the gathering Borlaug Camp after Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, an agronomist whose research on high-yield wheat varieties helped revolutionize global food production and save about a billion lives. The group has since switched to a less wonky name, Frontier Camp, but the event’s mission remains the same—and it’s one Borlaug would appreciate: Develop and spread a new political philosophy that’s pro-tech and pro-growth, one that can drastically alter U.S. policy and gain bipartisan support.