Unless you too achieved billionaire status in your 20s, Patrick and John Collison might make you feel like an underachiever. The Irish brothers’ 10-year-old payments platform, Stripe, today underpins billions of dollars of commerce. But in typical Silicon Valley fashion, Stripe doesn’t just want to be a mega payment company; its mission is “to increase the GDP of the internet” and build the “economic infrastructure” of the online world.
Patrick has said one reason he and his brother became entrepreneurs is because “whatever your parents do, you just think it’s normal.” (The Collisons’ father ran a hotel, and their mother started a corporate training company.) “When John and I used to play outside, we used to play running a company,” he said in an interview with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Today they are running a company with millions of global users, more than 40 of whom do $1 billion-plus a year in transactions using Stripe.
The brothers became two of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs by starting a payments company aimed at pleasing developers—the coding carpenters of the internet’s landscape. Stripe was a hit with startups, soothing as it did the headaches that come with getting paid over the internet. Since then, the company’s pitch has evolved to include multiple services that make it more of a one-stop-shop for running a business. Customers can use Stripe’s credit card fraud detection service, or its Atlas product to form a company in Delaware. This month, Stripe launched its Treasury product in partnership with the likes of Goldman Sachs; platform companies like Shopify, an e-commerce firm, can use it to offer bank accounts to their merchants.
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