Patrick Collison

Patrick Collison is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, the financial technology company that has revolutionized online payments and become one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world. Together with his brother John, Patrick built Stripe from a simple idea — that accepting payments online should be as easy as adding a few lines of code — into a global financial infrastructure company processing hundreds of billions of dollars annually. His combination of deep technical ability, voracious intellectual curiosity, and strategic vision has made him one of the most respected technology leaders of his generation.

Born in Dromineer, a small village in County Tipperary, Ireland, Patrick showed extraordinary intellectual gifts from an early age. He won Ireland's Young Scientist of the Year award at 16, scored a perfect 800 on his SAT math section, and entered MIT at 17. He dropped out to co-found Stripe with John, convinced that the complexity of online payments was one of the biggest bottlenecks to internet commerce. That insight proved profoundly correct: Stripe's elegant APIs and developer-first approach attracted millions of businesses, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Under Patrick's leadership, Stripe has expanded far beyond payments into a comprehensive suite of financial infrastructure tools including billing, fraud prevention, banking-as-a-service, corporate treasury management, and climate action. He has also become known as a passionate advocate for scientific research and economic progress, founding the science-funding organization Arc Institute and supporting numerous initiatives to accelerate scientific discovery. His intellectual ambition extends to understanding how civilizations grow and develop, reflected in his extensive reading and his support for institutions that study and promote human progress.

Patrick Collison was born in 1988 in Dromineer, a small village in County Tipperary, Ireland. Growing up in rural Ireland, he showed extraordinary intellectual ability from an early age. He won the Young Scientist of the Year award in Ireland at age 16 for a project on a new programming language, and scored first in his class in the Irish Leaving Certificate examinations. He enrolled at MIT at 17, studying mathematics, but dropped out after his freshman year to pursue entrepreneurship full-time. Before Stripe, Patrick and his brother John co-founded Auctomatic, a software company that built tools for online marketplace sellers. They sold Auctomatic to a Canadian company for a reported $5 million in 2008, when Patrick was just 19 years old. The experience of building and selling a company as a teenager gave both brothers the confidence and the seed capital to pursue their next — and far more ambitious — venture.