Patrick Collison

Getting a website able to take a customer's credit card meant separately negotiating with a bank, a payment processor, and a payment gateway, and it could take weeks. Patrick Collison and his brother John got it down to seven lines of code.

Collison is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, a company that builds the software infrastructure businesses use to accept payments and run other financial operations online. Stripe processes payments for millions of companies, from small online stores to large enterprises, and has expanded from a simple payments API into a broader platform covering billing, corporate cards, tax, fraud prevention, and stablecoin-based transfers. Collison founded Stripe in 2009 with his younger brother John and has served as its CEO since.

Background

Collison was born on September 9, 1988, in Limerick, Ireland, and grew up in Dromineer, a small lakeside village in County Tipperary. His father, Denis Collison, was an electronic engineer who later ran a hotel; his mother, Lily, was a microbiologist. Patrick and his brother John were largely self-taught, reading extensively because internet access in rural Tipperary was poor and unreliable. At sixteen, Collison won Ireland's Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, the country's national science fair, for Croma, a LISP-family programming language, with the prize presented by the President of Ireland.¹ He had cold-emailed the programmer and investor Paul Graham as a teenager and later met him in person. Collison sat the SAT at age thirteen and used the score to gain admission to MIT, where he enrolled but did not complete a degree, leaving to pursue his companies.¹

Getting started

In 2007, while still in his teens, Collison and John founded a company (first called Shuppa, then Auctomatic) built around tools for eBay power sellers, joining Y Combinator's Winter 2007 batch. Auctomatic was acquired by the Canadian firm Live Current Media in 2008 for roughly 5 million dollars, making Patrick a millionaire at nineteen and John a millionaire at seventeen.¹ The payments obstacle came out of building Auctomatic and other small internet businesses, where they kept hitting it. Patrick has said the hardest part of starting an internet business was not the idea, the code, or the marketing, but finding a way to accept money from customers.¹ That observation became the basis for Stripe, which the brothers began building in 2009.

What he built

Stripe launched with the idea of reducing payment integration to a handful of lines of code, and its early version let a developer add working checkout to a website in minutes rather than weeks. The company went through Y Combinator's Summer 2010 batch and launched publicly in September 2011. Its first investors included Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel. In its early days, when a company agreed to try Stripe, Patrick or John would often ask for the person's laptop and set up the integration on the spot rather than sending a signup link, a habit Paul Graham later called the "Collison installation" and cited as an example of doing things that do not scale to win early users.¹

Stripe grew from a payments API into a wider platform, adding products for billing and subscriptions, corporate card issuance, tax calculation, fraud detection (Radar), and infrastructure for other companies to launch their own financial products (Stripe Treasury and Connect). The company stayed private far longer than most companies of its size, repeatedly raising capital through private funding rounds and employee tender offers instead of going public. A November 2016 funding round valued Stripe near 9 billion dollars, making Patrick and John, in their twenties, among the youngest self-made billionaires in the world at the time. Valuations rose and fell with market conditions afterward; a tender offer in February 2026 valued Stripe at approximately 159 billion dollars, up from roughly 92 billion dollars a year earlier, funded largely by existing investors including Thrive Capital, Coatue, and Andreessen Horowitz. Stripe's total payment volume grew 34 percent to roughly 1.9 trillion dollars over the prior year, according to the founders' 2026 annual letter.¹ In 2024 and 2025, Stripe acquired Bridge, a stablecoin infrastructure company, and Privy, an embedded-wallet provider, extending into crypto-based payments and treasury operations.²

How he operates

Collison has described Stripe's hiring philosophy as favoring people who would want to work there regardless of whether it was the most fashionable company in Silicon Valley at the time, arguing that applicants drawn mainly by prestige tend to be lower-value hires. He and John built a company culture around long, written, footnoted memos rather than meetings, a habit Collison has said reflects how the brothers already communicated with each other before Stripe existed. Collison has repeatedly stated that Stripe does not need to go public, describing an IPO as "a solution in search of a problem" for a business that is profitable and can fund its own growth.¹ Beyond Stripe, Collison co-founded Fast Grants in 2020 with economist Tyler Cowen to rapidly fund COVID-19 research, and co-founded the Arc Institute, a biomedical research organization, in 2021. The pattern holds across the company: neutral infrastructure other builders route their businesses through, rather than a single consumer product.

Where things stand

As of the mid-2020s, Collison remains CEO of Stripe, which stayed a private company despite persistent market speculation about an IPO, most recently trading at a valuation near 159 billion dollars after a February 2026 employee tender offer. He has continued to expand Stripe's product line into stablecoins and agentic commerce infrastructure, framing crypto and conventional payment rails as converging rather than separate systems.² He joined the board of Meta Platforms in 2025. He also hosts interviews for Stripe examining how its acquisitions use stablecoins in practice, and remains involved with the Arc Institute and Fast Grants outside of Stripe.

Key facts

• Born September 9, 1988, in Limerick, Ireland; raised in the village of Dromineer, County Tipperary.
• Won Ireland's Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition at sixteen for Croma, a LISP-family programming language.
• Sold his first company, Auctomatic, to Live Current Media in 2008 for about 5 million dollars, becoming a millionaire at nineteen.
• Co-founded Stripe with brother John in 2009; the company went through Y Combinator in summer 2010 and launched publicly in September 2011.
• Became one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires in 2016 after a funding round valued Stripe near 9 billion dollars.
• Stripe was valued at roughly 159 billion dollars in a February 2026 tender offer, with total payment volume around 1.9 trillion dollars for the prior year.