Patrick Collison

Current Company

Stripe — Co-Founder & CEO

Building the Economic Infrastructure of the Internet

Patrick Collison co-founded Stripe in 2010 with his brother John, building a payments platform that has become the financial infrastructure behind millions of internet businesses. Born in Dromineer, Ireland, Patrick Collison was a programming prodigy who won the Young Scientist of the Year award in Ireland at age 16 and was accepted to MIT. He dropped out to build his first startup, Auctomatic, which was acquired in 2008 when Patrick Collison was 19.

Patrick Collison’s insight with Stripe was that accepting payments online was still far too difficult. Despite the growth of e-commerce, integrating payment processing into a website required weeks of work and negotiations with banks and payment processors. Stripe reduced that to a few lines of code. Under Patrick Collison’s leadership as CEO, Stripe has grown into one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world, processing hundreds of billions of dollars in payments annually for companies from startups to Amazon and Google.

The Long Game in Fintech

Patrick Collison has built Stripe with a distinctly long-term orientation. Rather than rushing to an IPO, Patrick Collison has kept Stripe private, reinvesting in product development and global expansion. Stripe now offers a full suite of financial services beyond payments: billing, invoicing, fraud detection, banking-as-a-service, climate initiatives, and startup incorporation through Atlas. Patrick Collison’s vision is to increase the GDP of the internet by making it easier for businesses anywhere in the world to participate in the digital economy.

Patrick Collison is also known for his intellectual curiosity beyond technology. He co-founded Fast Grants, which provided rapid research funding during the COVID-19 pandemic, and has been a vocal advocate for scientific progress and institutional reform. Patrick Collison’s combination of technical depth, business acumen, and civic engagement makes him one of the most distinctive founders in Silicon Valley.