Patrick and John Collison grew up in a small village in County Tipperary, Ireland, teaching themselves to code. Patrick won Ireland's BT Young Scientist competition in 2005; both brothers went on to MIT and Harvard respectively — and both dropped out.
Before they were old enough to rent a car in the U.S., they had co-founded Auctomatic, a tool for online sellers, which was acquired in 2008. Building it taught them how painful it was to accept payments online: weeks of paperwork, merchant accounts and integrations designed for banks, not developers.
Developers first
They started Stripe in 2010 with a simple pitch: a developer should be able to start accepting payments with a few lines of code. Early backers included Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Stripe launched publicly in 2011.
The company became known for the "Collison installation": instead of asking a prospective customer to try Stripe later, the brothers would ask for their laptop and set it up on the spot. It was a small habit that captured the whole strategy — remove friction until there's no reason to say no.
Stripe's mission, as the company puts it, is to increase the GDP of the internet.
Staying private
Stripe expanded from payments into billing, fraud prevention, banking-as-a-service, tax and more. Its valuation peaked at $95 billion in 2021, was cut to $50 billion in 2023, then recovered to $91.5 billion in a 2025 tender offer. In its 2024 annual letter, Stripe said businesses on its platform processed about $1.4 trillion in total payment volume — while the company stayed private.
Lessons
- Pick a painful problem you've lived. Auctomatic showed them exactly what was broken.
- Win the developer, win the company. Great docs and APIs became a distribution strategy.
- Long-term thinking compounds. Staying private let Stripe invest on its own timeline.
