“You can poke your brains against a wall, looking for a good idea. Or you can find one in a book.”
tells you Patrick Collison33-year-old billionaire and founder ofStripe unicornit is to be believed.
At school, Patrick, he has never followed a lesson to the end. She only read the books he loved. And what books. The biographies of IT pioneersfor example: that of the engineer Douglas Engelbart who invented the mouse in 1968, or that of MIT professor John McCarthy who in 1955 coined the term “artificial intelligence”.
Even at home the boy was breathing continuously math and physics. His father was an electrical engineer, his mother a microbiology. In the family, in addition to the sciences, he was also cultivated for a certain period entrepreneurial spirit: dad Denis ran a small hotel, mom Lily a company that offered business training.
Young Collison dreamed big, even if he lived in one tiny Irish town: Dromineer.
“It took us at least 40 minutes to go to school and there were less than twenty children in each class,” recalled Patrick. “For two children like us, born and raised in Ireland, it seemed impossible to create a company that had customers all over the world,” he added.
And instead.
In Dromineer, overlooking Lake Derg, 175 km west of Dublin, Patrick Collison learned to code when he was just a kid. In the house he had nove computer. Her parents paid $ 100 a month for a satellite connection.
A pc may be enough to feel in the Silicon Valley, if you have the right ideas. But a crumb of a globe like Dromineer is not enough to make it happen.
The Collison brothers, still teenagers, founded a startup that produced software, Shuppa, but failed to access Irish government funds. And so they flew in earnest to California, where the accelerator Y Combinator welcomed them with open arms.
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How a $ 95 billion company is born. Stripe history
by Arcangelo Rociola
It worked.
Patrick was 17, John 15. And at that moment Shuppa became Auctomatic, a platform that allowed eBay PowerSellers to organize their inventory and track traffic. Three years later when Live Current Media bought their baby for 5 million dollarsthe two brothers suddenly became rich.
What to do with all that money?
Elon Musk teaches. When you close your first millionaire deal, you have two choices: enjoy life or, as the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX did, aim even higher. After selling his first company, Zip2, Musk continued to invest. And Collison followed his example.
Patrick left the WITHbrother John quit Cambridge. And then they left together with a new startup: Stripe.
“What we quickly learned – Collison said – is that the hardest part of starting a business on the web is not having the idea, transforming it into code or convincing people to invest in it. The hardest part is finding a way to accept customer money. You can share a photo on Facebook in a very simple way. But you can’t move money in the same way. From this point of view, when we thought of Stripe, it felt like we were still in the dark ages. “
In short, the idea was that of revolutionize the world of online payments. To cancel any intermediary. And to enable companies – or individuals – to receive and send payments without risking fraud. That’s what made Stripe possible, with just nine lines of code to copy and paste on your website or app.
Those nine lines of code, obviously written by the Collison brothers, generated a company that is now worth 95 billion dollars and counts 7,000 employees worldwide, with offices in New York, San Francisco and Singapore. And of course in Dublin, Ireland. Companies using its software include Amazon, Slack, Walmart, Etsy, Glovo, and Airbnb. Stripe’s main income comes from economic transactions and currency conversion fees.
Today Patrick Collison is 33 years old and is the CEO of Stripe. Forbes included him this year in the “30 Under 30 – Hall of Fame”, drawn up on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the prestigious list that gathers the stars of entrepreneurship under 30 years old. In the best of the bestin short.
Patrick’s personal fortune, again according to Forbes data, is 9.5 billion dollarslargely determined by the stake in Stripe it owns: 10%.
The young entrepreneur remained a avid reader. He is not surprising – or maybe yes, a little bit – that his company understands a publishing houseStripe Press, founded in 2018 to publish books on economics andtechnological innovation.
Even the shelves in Patrick Collison’s house are curved by the weight of the books: the physics remains his passion, but he also reads texts on feminism e you literary criticism. Certainly Patrick doesn’t watch tv: “If I had infinite time at my disposal – he once said – maybe I could even do it”.
Time is money. And on money Patrick Collins founded his empire.