Multi-billionaires by 30 — the rise and rise of the Collison Brothers

Six years ago Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison were sharing a pokey flat. Last week, their company Stripe was valued at $95 billion

Online sales is big business; in 2020 alone, US e-commerce grew by 44 percent, accounting for 21.3 percent of total American retail sales for the period.

In other words, there’s a lot of money in money. 

It’s something Patrick and John Collison (32 and 30) know well. The Irish entrepreneurs founded Stripe in 2010 after receiving $2 million worth of investment from some of the biggest names in tech.

Flash forward a decade Stripe’s most recent round of funding saw the company raise $600 million after an incredible $95 billion valuation – an increase of almost 300 percent in less than a year. 

Amazingly, this makes Stripe the world’s second most valuable venture-backed company behind ByteDance, the $180 billion company behind TikTok.

A financial services and software as a service company, Stripe has found fortune by revolutionising and updating how online transactions are carried out. 

Prior to services like Stripe, the technology underlying e-commerce was dated, with companies required to go through a rigorous and timely process before they could start trading. 

Stripe simplified this by allowing merchants to accept credit card payments directly to their apps or websites.

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