“Silicon Valley does not breed great technology. Instead, the smartest people from around the world tend to move to Silicon Valley” says Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe

Patrick Collison is an Irish-American entrepreneur. He is the CEO and Co-founder of a $9.2 billion startup called Stripe. With a net worth of $1B, business insider listed Mr. Collison on the elite list of youngest billionaires in the world.

Patrick began to learn computer programming at an early age and went on to receive the young scientist of the year award at the age of sixteen in 2005. During the first year of his college, Patrick started a firm called Auctomatic and joined Y Combinator as an intern, but the beginnings didn’t last long. At the age of 19, after incorporating Auctomatic, the firm was purchased by Canada’s Live current media for a whopping $5M, where Patrick was given the director’s position.

 After becoming millionaires overnight, Patrick and his brother, John started to brainstorm and work out about Stripe. Patrick was working alongside on different projects and found out the problem of payments on the web. He and John started to find solutions and eventually after spending six months on it, they started Stripe (online payment platform).

In a span of two weeks, the platform carried out its first transaction with a Y Combinator company, 280 North. Soon the company’s founder, Ross Butcher joined Stripe as one of the first workers. Initially, Collison brothers were not sure about the market size and whether they would be able to provide a seamless user’s experience. They were also having doubts over addressing issues like fraud, non-US transactions and attending problems that PayPal did it in a friendly manner.

“In 2007, there weren't any other accelerators, at least that I was aware of. We were almost the prototypical Y Combinator founders: We were highly technical but had never done a startup before. We also didn't know anyone in the Valley - investors, other entrepreneurs, potential hires. YC seemed like a great way to bootstrap that network,” said Patrick Collison.

Originally, Stripe collaborated with a payments company but when the two brothers began to accelerate and took things under control the way they wanted to put things in order, the company was fully owned by them in the fall of 2010. After that, John became the President and Patrick the CEO. Once they started to work as full time for the company both the brothers had the freedom to create the user experience that they wanted.

The company was little puzzled up, but both Patrick and John started to realize the potential of investors who would help them in terms of institutional credibility as a payment start-up.

Currently, Stripe is located in San Francisco, USA. The company was ranked first among the top 100 cloud computing companies by Forbes Cloud in 2017 and was ranked 4th by Forbes Magazine Cloud 100 in 2016.