Patrick Collison is an Irish billionaire entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, which he started with his younger brother, John, in 2010. He won the 41st Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005 at the age of sixteen. Collison lives in San Francisco, California. The brothers were worth at least $3.2 billion each after Stripe raised $150 million from CapitalG, an investment division of Google parent's company Alphabet, and General Catalyst Partners. In September 2019, it was announced that Stripe had raised an addition $250 million at a valuation of $35 billion. Together, the brothers hold a controlling interest in Stripe and will be able to retain control should the company go public.
Collison entered the 40th Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition with his project on artificial intelligence, finishing as individual runner-up. He re-entered the following year, and won first place at the age of sixteen on 14 January 2005. His project involved the creation of Croma, a LISP-type programming language. His prize of a €3,000 cheque and a trophy of Waterford Crystal was presented to him by PresidentMary McAleese. His younger brother Tommy participated with his project on blogging in the Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2010.
Auctomatic
After attending Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a time, Collison dropped out. In 2007, he set up software company 'Shuppa' in Limerick with his brother John Collison. Enterprise Ireland did not allocate funding to the company, prompting a move to California after Silicon Valley's Y Combinator showed interest, where they merged with two Oxford graduates, Harjeet and Kulveer Taggar, and the company became Auctomatic. On Good Friday of March 2008, Collison, aged nineteen, and his brother, aged seventeen, sold Auctomatic to Canadian company Live Current Media, becoming overnight millionaires. In May 2008 he became director of engineering at the company's new Vancouver base. Collison attributes the success of his company to his win in the Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition.
Other
Both Collison and his younger brother John were featured on a young Irish persons rich list aired on an RTÉ television show during the 2008 Christmas period. On 18 July 2009, at the age of 20 and following the publication of McCarthy Report, Collison outlined his ideas for the future of Ireland on popular talk-show Saturday Night with Miriam. In 2010, Patrick co-founded Stripe, which received backing from Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Sequoia Capital. In November 2016, the Collison brothers became the world's youngest self-made billionaires, worth at least $1.1 billion, after an investment in Stripe from CapitalG and General Catalyst Partners valued the company at $9.2 billion. According to Collison, he reads books and is interested in a broad range of subjects on history, technology, engineering, fiction, philosophy, and art. He publishes the list of books he read on . In November 2018, Collison published a piece in The Atlantic with Michael Nielsen entitled , arguing that increased investment in science hasn't produced commensurate output. In 2019, Collison published an opinion piece in the same outlet with Tyler Cowen arguing for a new academic discipline called "Progress Studies", which would study the cultural and institutional conditions which lead to the most progress and higher standards of living. In 2018, Stripe, under the direction of the Collison brothers, contributed $1 million to California YIMBY, a pro-housing development lobbying organization. The Collisons are citizens of Ireland. On June 29th 2020, Collison criticized the Chinese governments treatment of Uighurs tweeting: "As a US business community, I think we should be significantly clearer about our horror at, and opposition to, the atrocities being committed by the Chinese government against its own people".
