Patrick Collison

Patrick Collison
Born	9 9, 1988
Birthplace	Dromineer, County Tipperary, Ireland
Nationality	Irish
Occupation	Technology executive, entrepreneur
Known for	Co-founder and CEO of Stripe, Fast Grants, Arc Institute
Education	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (attended)
Awards	BT Young Scientist of the Year (2005)
Website	[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, the financial infrastructure and payments company he launched in 2010 alongside his younger brother, John Collison. Raised in the rural village of Dromineer in County Tipperary, Ireland, Collison showed an early aptitude for science and computing, winning Ireland's prestigious Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005 at the age of sixteen. He went on to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before leaving to pursue entrepreneurial ventures in Silicon Valley. Under his leadership, Stripe grew from a small startup offering a few lines of code for online payments into one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world. Beyond Stripe, Collison has been involved in scientific philanthropy, co-founding Fast Grants in 2020 to rapidly fund COVID-19-related research alongside economist Tyler Cowen, and co-founding the Arc Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research organization, in 2021. In April 2025, he was elected to the board of directors of Meta Platforms. Collison has also been recognized for his philanthropic contributions, being named to the TIME100 Philanthropy list in 2025.

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, and his early education included attendance at Gaelscoil Aonach Urmhumhan, an Irish-language primary school, followed by Castletroy College, a secondary school in County Limerick.

Collison demonstrated a precocious talent for science and technology from a young age. In January 2005, at the age of sixteen, he won the 41st BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, one of the most prestigious science competitions for secondary school students in Ireland. He had previously participated in the competition in 2004 as well. The award brought national attention to the teenager from rural Tipperary and signaled the beginning of a trajectory that would take him from the Irish midlands to the center of the global technology industry.

Collison's brother, John Collison, who is approximately two years younger, would later become his business partner and co-founder at Stripe. The two brothers shared an interest in programming and technology, and their collaborative working relationship began during their teenage years in Ireland. The Collison brothers were featured in Irish media as notable young entrepreneurs and technologists, with outlets describing them as figures to watch in the Irish technology scene.

By the time he was a teenager, Collison had already begun coding and developing software projects. His technical abilities, combined with his success at the Young Scientist competition, marked him as one of Ireland's most promising young minds in technology. Irish media covered his achievements extensively, including appearances on RTÉ television.

Education

Collison attended Gaelscoil Aonach Urmhumhan for his primary education and Castletroy College for his secondary schooling, both in Ireland. After completing his secondary education and gaining recognition through the Young Scientist competition and early entrepreneurial work, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.

Collison ultimately left MIT to focus on his entrepreneurial ventures. His departure from the university followed a path taken by several other notable technology founders who left elite institutions to pursue startup opportunities in Silicon Valley. Despite not completing a degree, his time at MIT exposed him to the intellectual and entrepreneurial culture of the Boston and wider American technology ecosystem, which would prove instrumental in the founding of Stripe.

Career

Early Ventures

Before founding Stripe, Collison and his brother John engaged in early entrepreneurial projects during their teenage years. In 2008, the Collison brothers gained attention in Irish and British media for their work in technology. The BBC reported on the brothers' activities in the business and technology space. The Irish Independent profiled Patrick as a young entrepreneur who was reshaping aspects of the web.

Their early work attracted notice in the Irish startup community and provided the brothers with experience in building and selling software products. These formative entrepreneurial experiences laid the groundwork for what would become a far more ambitious undertaking in the payments industry.

Founding of Stripe

In 2010, Patrick and John Collison founded Stripe, a technology company focused on building economic infrastructure for the internet. The company's core product was a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allowed businesses to accept payments online. The founding premise was that integrating payments into a website or application was unnecessarily complex and that developers needed a simpler, more elegant solution. The initial version of Stripe's product allowed developers to begin accepting payments by integrating just a few lines of code into their websites.

Stripe emerged from stealth mode in 2011, attracting early attention from the technology press. TechCrunch covered the company's early emergence, noting its ambition to challenge established payment processors including PayPal. The company quickly gained traction among developers and startups who valued the simplicity and reliability of its API-first approach to payments processing.

Bloomberg later described the origin of Stripe as a story of "two brothers who turned seven lines of code into a $9.2 billion startup," underscoring the elegance of the product's initial design and the rapid growth trajectory that followed.

Growth of Stripe

Under Patrick Collison's leadership as CEO, Stripe expanded rapidly from its initial payments product into a broader suite of financial infrastructure tools. The company attracted significant venture capital investment and grew its customer base to include some of the largest internet companies in the world, as well as millions of smaller businesses.

A major milestone came in 2016, when a new investment round valued Stripe at a level that made Patrick Collison one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the world. Forbes reported on the funding round and its implications for the Collison brothers' personal wealth.

By 2019, continued fundraising and growth had further increased the valuation of Stripe and the personal wealth of its founders. Bloomberg reported that the Collison brothers had become Ireland's richest self-made billionaires.

Stripe's product line expanded over the years to include tools for billing, fraud prevention, corporate card issuance, business incorporation, and financial reporting. The company also expanded internationally, building infrastructure to support payments in dozens of countries. Wired profiled Stripe's work with major technology platforms including Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, highlighting the company's central role in global internet commerce.

Stablecoins and Financial Innovation

In 2025, Collison continued to steer Stripe into new areas of financial technology. In September 2025, he outlined the benefits that businesses were seeing from stablecoins, following the launch of a product called "Tempo" by Stripe in partnership with Paradigm. Yahoo Finance reported that Collison explained the growing interest among businesses in using stablecoins for payments and financial operations. This development represented Stripe's continued expansion beyond traditional payment processing into emerging financial technologies.

Views on Artificial Intelligence

Collison has spoken publicly about the role of artificial intelligence in business and technology. In a 2025 interview reported by Business Insider, he described AI as "terrific" for answering factual questions, noting that he enjoyed using it to explore topics and gather information. However, he expressed a preference for his own writing style over AI-generated text, suggesting a nuanced view of the technology's capabilities and limitations.

In July 2025, Collison participated in the "Hard Fork Live" podcast hosted by The New York Times, where he discussed topics relevant to Stripe's business and the broader technology landscape.

Meta Board of Directors

On 11 April 2025, Meta Platforms announced that Patrick Collison had been elected to the company's board of directors, effective 15 April 2025. He joined the board alongside Dina Powell McCormick, a banking executive and former Republican government official. Reuters and Axios both reported on the appointments, noting Collison's role as CEO of the fintech firm Stripe. The appointment placed Collison in a governance role at one of the world's largest technology companies while he continued to serve as Stripe's CEO.

Public Policy and Housing

Collison has also engaged in public policy discussions, particularly regarding the housing crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2018, he was among several technology CEOs who spoke publicly about the housing affordability challenges facing technology workers and residents of the region. The San Francisco Business Times reported on the involvement of leaders from Stripe, Salesforce, Yelp, and other technology companies in addressing the issue.

Scientific and Philanthropic Work

Fast Grants

In 2020, amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, Collison co-founded Fast Grants with economist Tyler Cowen. The initiative was designed to provide rapid funding to scientists conducting research related to COVID-19, addressing what its founders perceived as the slow pace of traditional grant-making processes during an urgent public health crisis. Fast Grants aimed to deliver funding decisions within days rather than the months typically required by government and institutional funders, enabling researchers to begin or accelerate work on the pandemic without bureaucratic delays.

Arc Institute

In 2021, Collison co-founded the Arc Institute, a nonprofit research organization focused on biomedical science, alongside bioscientists Silvana Konermann and Patrick Hsu. The Arc Institute was established to pursue a new model of scientific research, one that aimed to give researchers greater freedom and longer time horizons to pursue fundamental questions in biology and medicine.

Science Policy and Research Productivity

Collison has expressed interest in the broader questions of scientific progress and research productivity. In 2018, he contributed to discussions about what he and others described as the diminishing returns of scientific research. The Atlantic published an article examining this thesis, exploring the argument that despite increasing investment in research, the rate of breakthrough discoveries may be slowing. These intellectual interests have informed Collison's philanthropic and institutional work aimed at improving the structures and incentives of scientific research.

TIME100 Philanthropy

In May 2025, Time Magazine named Collison to its TIME100 Philanthropy list, recognizing his contributions to scientific funding and research. The publication described his trajectory from "schoolboy coder in rural Ireland to Silicon Valley tech founder and billionaire philanthropist."

Personal Life

Collison is known to be an avid reader and maintains a public bookshelf on his personal website, listing books he has read and recommends. His reading interests span a wide range of subjects including science, economics, history, and philosophy, reflecting the intellectual curiosity that has also shaped his approach to entrepreneurship and philanthropy.

Born and raised in Ireland, Collison moved to the United States for his education and career. He maintains connections to Ireland and has been the subject of extensive coverage in Irish media throughout his career. The Irish Times featured the Collison brothers in a profile examining the legacy of the Young Scientist competition and the paths taken by its winners.

Collison's brother, John Collison, serves as President of Stripe, making the two siblings one of the most prominent brother partnerships in the global technology industry.

Recognition

Collison has received a number of recognitions and awards over the course of his career. His earliest major award was the BT Young Scientist of the Year in 2005, which he won at the age of sixteen at the 41st Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in Ireland.

Forbes identified him as one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires following Stripe's 2016 funding round.

In 2025, he was named to the TIME100 Philanthropy list for his contributions to scientific funding and research through initiatives including Fast Grants and the Arc Institute.

His election to the board of directors of Meta Platforms in April 2025 represented a further marker of his standing in the global technology industry.

Legacy

Patrick Collison's career has been defined by the intersection of technology, finance, and scientific philanthropy. Through Stripe, he and his brother built a company that fundamentally altered how businesses accept payments online, making it possible for millions of companies worldwide to participate in internet commerce with minimal technical friction. The company's API-first approach to payments infrastructure influenced the broader fintech industry and established a model that other technology companies have sought to replicate.

Beyond his work at Stripe, Collison's involvement in scientific funding through Fast Grants and the Arc Institute represents an effort to apply the principles of speed and efficiency that characterized Stripe's approach to payments to the slower-moving world of academic and biomedical research. His public writings and discussions on the topic of scientific productivity have contributed to a broader conversation about how modern institutions support — or fail to support — the pace of scientific discovery.

As an Irish-born entrepreneur who achieved significant success in Silicon Valley, Collison has also become a prominent figure in Ireland's relationship with the global technology industry. His path from winning the Young Scientist competition as a teenager to leading one of the world's most valuable private technology companies has been cited in Irish media as an example of the country's capacity to produce globally significant entrepreneurs.