Patrick Collison

Patrick Collison was born in County Tipperary, Ireland, in 1988 and grew up in a family that encouraged his interest in computing and entrepreneurship. As a teenager he co-founded his first company and later attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he studied but did not complete a degree before pursuing startups full time. Early in his career he and his younger brother John built Auctomatic, a company providing tools for eBay sellers, which was sold in 2008 and made the brothers early millionaires. In 2010 Patrick and John Collison co-founded Stripe in San Francisco to simplify online payments by providing developers with a straightforward API and infrastructure for accepting payments. Stripe grew rapidly by focusing on developer experience and tackling the complex regulatory and banking integration challenges required to scale payments internationally; the company expanded to support businesses in many countries and launched products such as Atlas to help entrepreneurs incorporate and access banking and payments services. Under Patrick’s leadership as CEO, Stripe raised multiple venture rounds from prominent investors and scaled into one of the world’s highest-valued private fintech companies, serving startups and large enterprises alike while broadening its product set beyond simple payments into broader economic infrastructure for the internet. Patrick has spoken and written publicly about technology policy, innovation, long-term thinking, and the role of infrastructure in economic growth, and he participates in programs and initiatives that support entrepreneurship outside the U.S., including partnerships in Europe. More recently, Stripe has undergone operational adjustments including workforce reductions tied to changing macroeconomic assumptions and the company’s evolving priorities; Patrick has publicly acknowledged responsibility for strategic decisions during those periods as Stripe repositions for future growth.