Patrick Collison wants the internet economy to have better plumbing
Stripe’s co-founder turned a few lines of code into the payments layer for millions of businesses.
In 2010, accepting payments online meant merchant accounts, paperwork and weeks of waiting. Patrick Collison and his brother John, two programmers from Limerick, Ireland, started Stripe on a simple promise to developers: add payments to your site with a few lines of code.
The brothers had already built and sold a startup, Auctomatic, while Patrick was still in his teens. He left MIT to work on Stripe, which became one of the best-known companies to come out of the Y Combinator accelerator.
Developers first
Stripe won early by making its documentation and tools a pleasure to use, then expanded from card payments into billing, fraud prevention, business incorporation and financial services for platforms. In its annual letter, Stripe reported $1.4 trillion in total payment volume for 2024.
The company has stayed private, giving employees and early investors liquidity through tender offers rather than an IPO.
A wider interest
Collison is also known for his interest in how societies make progress. In 2019 he and the economist Tyler Cowen called for a new field to study it, and he co-founded the Arc Institute, a biomedical research organization, in 2021.
What to watch
Stripe is betting that AI agents will start buying and selling online, and that they will need payment infrastructure built for them. Whether and when Stripe goes public remains the question investors ask most.
- Company
- Stripe
- Role
- Co-founder & CEO
- HQ
- South San Francisco & Dublin
- Founded
- 2010
- Section
- Fintech
This profile draws on public reporting and company materials.
Sources: Wikipedia: Patrick Collison · Wikipedia: Stripe
Photo: JD Lasica, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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