Patrick Collison was born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1988 and won the country's young scientist competition at 16 before studying briefly at MIT. He co-founded Stripe with his brother John in 2010, on the premise that accepting payments online should be reducible to a few lines of code rather than a six-month bank integration project.
Stripe has since become the payments and financial-infrastructure layer for a generation of internet companies and, increasingly, for established enterprises and platforms. The company processes trillions of dollars in annualized payment volume and has expanded into adjacent areas including billing, fraud, tax compliance, capital and stablecoin settlement.
Collison is also a prolific essayist on long-term scientific and economic progress, a co-founder of the Arc Institute biomedical lab and a vocal advocate for what he and others have called the 'progress studies' agenda — the question of why some societies and centuries produce dramatically more breakthroughs than others.