Patrick Collison

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe — the developer-first payments company that became the financial infrastructure of the internet, valued ~$159B (2026) and processing ~$1.9T a year.

Patrick Collison (born 1988, Limerick, Ireland) is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe. A teenage prodigy who won the 2005 BT Young Scientist and briefly attended MIT, he sold his first startup, Auctomatic, at 19, then co-founded Stripe with his brother John in 2010. Stripe collapsed the ordeal of accepting online payments into a few lines of developer-friendly code and grew into the payment rails beneath much of the internet economy — ~$1.9T in annual volume and a ~$159B valuation (Feb 2026), still privately held. Collison is also a noted advocate of "Progress Studies" and the founder of Stripe Press.

Notable achievements

• Co-founded Stripe (2010) and built it into the financial infrastructure of the internet — ~$1.9T in annual payment volume.
• Pioneered developer-first, API-as-product payments — the "seven lines of code" that replaced weeks of bank paperwork.
• Grew Stripe to a ~$159B valuation (Feb 2026), recovering past its 2021 peak, while keeping it private and profitable.
• Sold his first company, Auctomatic, at 19; with brother John, became one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires (2016).
• Co-coined "Progress Studies" (with Tyler Cowen, 2019), co-founded Fast Grants and the Arc Institute, and founded Stripe Press.

Find them online