John and Patrick Collison: the nerds who conquered Silicon Valley

John and Patrick Collison, a genial pair of young Irish brothers from a humble background, had a simple idea – to launch the next PayPal. Just ten years on, they’re now worth about $10bn each after founding Stripe.

John and Patrick Collison
Patrick and John Collison: boredom propelled them to great heights
(Image credit: © Stripe)

“There isn’t much information out there about Stripe,” wrote Michael Arrington on TechCrunch in 2011, when word of a mysterious new payments start-up was doing the rounds of Silicon Valley. But the general vibe was encouraging. “How is it different than PayPal or Google Checkout?” he asked someone who’d seen the product. “It doesn’t suck,” they replied.

If details were thin on the ground, the one thing everyone knew about Stripe was the remarkable facility of its youthful founders – a pair of Irish brothers then just 21 and 19 – to extract cash from some of the Valley’s most courted investors. In their first venture round, John and Patrick Collison garnered around $2m from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and, most remarkably, PayPal’s founders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Then located in Palo Alto “in a small office hidden by hanging leaves that passersby might confuse for a misplaced country cottage”, there was a romantic simplicity about this genial pair from Limerick, noted Fast Company. But they made no bones about their “not-so-humble mission: to become the next PayPal”.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.