Patrick Collison

Patrick Collison
Collison in 2015
Patrick Collison
Born	9 9, 1988
Birthplace	Dromineer, County Tipperary, Ireland
Nationality	Irish
Occupation	Technology executive, entrepreneur
Known for	Stripe, Fast Grants, Arc Institute
Education	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Awards	BT Young Scientist of the Year (2005)
Website	[[patrickcollison.com patrickcollison.com] Official site]

Patrick Collison (born 9 September 1988) is an Irish entrepreneur and technology executive who serves as the co-founder and chief executive officer of Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for internet businesses. Born in the rural village of Dromineer in County Tipperary, Ireland, Collison demonstrated exceptional aptitude for science and technology from an early age, winning Ireland's prestigious BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005 at the age of sixteen. He went on to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before dropping out to pursue entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. Together with his younger brother John Collison, he founded Stripe in 2010, building it into one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world. Beyond Stripe, Collison has pursued philanthropic and scientific initiatives, co-founding Fast Grants in 2020 to accelerate funding for COVID-19-related research and co-founding the Arc Institute, a nonprofit research organization, in 2021. In 2025, he was named to the TIME100 Philanthropy list and was elected to the board of directors of Meta Platforms.

Early Life

Patrick Collison was born on 9 September 1988 in Dromineer, a small village on the shores of Lough Derg in County Tipperary, Ireland. He grew up in a rural setting, attending Gaelscoil Aonach Urmhumhan, an Irish-language primary school, before moving on to Castletroy College for his secondary education.

Collison showed an early interest in computers and programming. As a teenager, he entered Ireland's BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, one of the country's most prominent science competitions for secondary school students. In January 2005, at the age of sixteen, he won the 41st edition of the competition with a project related to programming and artificial intelligence. Reports from RTÉ noted that Collison had also participated in the 2004 edition of the exhibition.

His achievements at the Young Scientist competition brought him early national recognition in Ireland. The Evening Herald profiled Collison as a teenager who was already making an impact on the web, describing him as a "million dollar boy who changed the face of the web." He was also featured on RTÉ television, appearing on the Miriam show in 2009.

His younger brother, John Collison, also demonstrated entrepreneurial and technical abilities from a young age. The two were profiled together in Irish media as entrepreneurs to watch. Their shared interest in technology and business would later lead them to co-found Stripe.

Education

Collison attended Gaelscoil Aonach Urmhumhan for primary school and Castletroy College for secondary school, both in Ireland. Following his successes at the Young Scientist competition and early entrepreneurial ventures, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.

Collison did not complete his degree at MIT. He left the university to focus on building technology companies, a path that would eventually lead to the founding of Stripe. His departure from MIT to pursue entrepreneurship placed him among a cohort of prominent technology founders who left elite universities before graduating.

Career

Early Ventures

Before founding Stripe, the Collison brothers were involved in earlier entrepreneurial projects. In 2008, BBC News reported on Patrick Collison's business activities, noting the young Irish entrepreneur's growing profile in the technology sector. RTÉ also covered Collison's early ventures, reporting on his activities in March 2008.

The brothers' early work attracted attention in Ireland, where they were identified as emerging figures in the technology industry. A 2009 profile in InsideView listed the Collison brothers among entrepreneurs to watch in the Irish technology sector.

Founding of Stripe

In 2010, Patrick and John Collison founded Stripe, initially operating in stealth mode. The company's premise was to simplify online payments for developers and businesses by providing a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that could be integrated with just a few lines of code. The company emerged from stealth in 2011, when TechCrunch reported on the payment startup, drawing comparisons to PayPal while noting Stripe's developer-first approach.

A 2017 Bloomberg feature detailed how the Collison brothers built Stripe from what was described as "seven lines of code" into a $9.2 billion startup. The article chronicled the company's growth trajectory and the brothers' approach to building financial infrastructure for the internet economy.

Stripe's core product allowed businesses to accept payments online by integrating Stripe's APIs into their websites or applications. The simplicity of this approach—contrasted with the complexity of existing payment processing systems—helped Stripe gain adoption among developers and startups, and eventually among large enterprises. The company processed payments for businesses of varying sizes and expanded its product offerings over time to include billing, fraud prevention, and financial reporting tools.

Growth and Valuation

Stripe grew rapidly throughout the 2010s, securing successive rounds of venture capital funding at increasing valuations. In November 2016, Forbes reported that a new investment round had made Patrick Collison the world's youngest self-made billionaire.

By September 2019, Bloomberg reported that the Collison brothers had become Ireland's richest self-made billionaires, a reflection of Stripe's continued growth in valuation.

The company attracted customers ranging from startups to major technology firms. Wired UK profiled Stripe's relationships with companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, highlighting the platform's role in powering payments for some of the world's largest internet companies.

Stripe in the 2020s

Under Collison's leadership as CEO, Stripe continued to expand its product suite and geographic reach into the 2020s. The company maintained its position as a significant player in the financial technology sector.

In September 2025, Collison discussed the growing role of stablecoins in business payments. Yahoo Finance reported on his explanation of why businesses were increasingly turning to stablecoins, noting that Stripe and Paradigm had launched a product called "Tempo" the day before his remarks.

In July 2025, Collison appeared on The New York Times podcast Hard Fork Live, where he discussed Stripe and broader trends in the technology industry. In the same month, Business Insider reported on Collison's views on artificial intelligence, noting that he described AI as "terrific" for answering factual questions but expressed a preference for his own writing style over AI-generated text.

Meta Board Appointment

On 11 April 2025, Meta Platforms announced that Patrick Collison and Dina Powell McCormick had been elected to the company's board of directors, effective 15 April 2025. Reuters and Axios both reported on the appointment, noting Collison's role as CEO of Stripe and his profile as a leading figure in the fintech industry.

The appointment placed Collison on the board of one of the world's largest technology companies, adding a governance role to his existing responsibilities as Stripe CEO.

Advocacy on Housing and Public Policy

Collison has spoken publicly on issues related to housing policy and the cost of living in San Francisco and the broader Bay Area, where Stripe is headquartered. The San Francisco Business Times reported on Collison alongside other technology CEOs who addressed the housing crisis, noting the growing concern among tech leaders about the effects of housing costs on their employees and the wider community.

Intellectual Interests and Writing

Collison maintains a personal website at patrickcollison.com, which includes a bookshelf page listing books he has read and recommends. The breadth of his reading interests has been noted in media profiles.

In November 2018, Collison co-authored an article in The Atlantic examining the question of whether scientific progress was experiencing diminishing returns. The piece explored trends in research productivity and the pace of scientific discovery. This interest in the mechanisms and pace of scientific research would later inform his philanthropic work, including Fast Grants and the Arc Institute.

Philanthropy and Scientific Initiatives

Fast Grants

In 2020, Collison co-founded Fast Grants with economist Tyler Cowen. The initiative was created to provide rapid funding for scientific research related to COVID-19. The program was designed to address what its founders saw as bottlenecks in the traditional scientific funding process, particularly the lengthy timelines for grant applications and approvals during a public health emergency. Fast Grants aimed to distribute funding within days rather than the months or years typical of conventional grant processes.

Arc Institute

In 2021, Collison co-founded the Arc Institute, a nonprofit research organization, alongside bioscientists Silvana Konermann and Patrick Hsu. The institute was established to support fundamental biological research, with a focus on giving scientists greater freedom and stability to pursue long-term research questions without the constraints of traditional academic funding cycles.

These initiatives reflected Collison's broader interest in accelerating scientific progress, a theme he had explored in his 2018 Atlantic article on diminishing returns in science.

Personal Life

Collison was born and raised in Dromineer, County Tipperary, Ireland. His younger brother, John Collison, is the co-founder and president of Stripe. The brothers have been frequently profiled together in media coverage of Stripe and have been described as Ireland's richest self-made billionaires.

Collison is known to be an avid reader. His personal website features an extensive bookshelf cataloguing his reading habits across a range of subjects, including science, history, philosophy, and economics.

Time magazine described Collison's trajectory as a rise "from schoolboy coder in rural Ireland to Silicon Valley tech founder and billionaire philanthropist."

Recognition

Collison's earliest public recognition came through the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in Ireland. He participated in the 2004 exhibition and won the overall prize in 2005 at the age of sixteen. The Irish Times later reflected on the Young Scientist competition and the achievements of its notable winners, including Collison.

In November 2016, a funding round for Stripe led Forbes to identify Collison as the world's youngest self-made billionaire at the time.

In May 2025, Time magazine named Collison to its TIME100 Philanthropy list, recognizing his contributions through Fast Grants, the Arc Institute, and other philanthropic efforts.

In April 2025, he was elected to the board of directors of Meta Platforms, one of the world's largest technology companies.

Legacy

Patrick Collison's founding of Stripe has had a measurable impact on how businesses process payments online. The company's developer-oriented approach to financial infrastructure helped establish a model in which complex financial services could be accessed through simple software integrations. Bloomberg's 2017 feature on the company highlighted how the Collison brothers' approach—reducing the integration of payments to a handful of lines of code—helped reshape the online payments industry.

Beyond Stripe, Collison's work with Fast Grants and the Arc Institute represents an effort to address structural issues in scientific funding. His 2018 article in The Atlantic on diminishing returns in science provided a public intellectual framework for his later philanthropic initiatives, which aimed to reduce bureaucratic barriers to scientific research and accelerate the pace of discovery.

His appointment to Meta's board of directors in 2025, alongside his continued leadership of Stripe, positions Collison as a figure with influence across multiple sectors of the technology industry. His trajectory from rural Ireland to the leadership of a major fintech company and a board seat at one of the world's largest social media companies has been noted in media profiles as an example of the global reach of the technology sector.

References

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