Patrick Collison

Collison grew up in Ireland and attended secondary school at Castletroy College in Limerick. In his advice to young people, he recalls that as a teenager he tried to go deep on languages, programming, writing, physics, and math, and he advises young people to use the internet to befriend people who are great at the things they are interested in, to read a lot, and to make things.⁠[1][2][2][3][3][3][3]

At 16, Collison won the 2005 Esat BT Young Scientist of the Year award for his project “CROMA: A New Dialect of LISP,” a programming language for the internet. He received the award from Irish President Mary McAleese, along with a €3,000 cheque and a Waterford Crystal trophy, and qualified to represent Ireland that September at the European Young Scientists competition in Moscow. That year’s exhibition received 1,064 projects, a record in its 41-year history.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2]

Collison studied mathematics and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology without graduating. While at MIT at 18, he and his brother John Collison set out to build a better eBayeBayeBay Inc. is an online marketplace company headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar; it started out with person-to-person online auctions and listed on Nasdaq in 1998. As of the end of 2025, it had 135 million active buyers, and its platform’s gross merchandise volume in 2025 was nearly $80 billion.Open the full entry tool; after applying to Y Combinator they merged with Kulveer Taggar and Harjeet Taggar to start Auctomatic, which helped sellers transact on sites such as eBay, moved to San Francisco, and raised angel funding, with Chris Sacca and Paul Buchheit among the investors.⁠[4][5][5][6][6]

On March 26, 2008, Vancouver-based Communicate.com (renaming itself Live Current Media) announced a definitive agreement to acquire Auctomatic, with all of its staff, including founders Kulveer Taggar, Harjeet Taggar, and Patrick Collison, joining the company; Auctomatic had existed for only about 10 months before the acquisition, and the founders then moved to Vancouver to build the product. The deal was worth $5 million.⁠[6][6][6][5][7]

In early 2010, the Collison brothers began working on Stripe. The idea came from Patrick’s repeated complaints, while working on several side projects, about how difficult it was to accept payments on the web; the two quickly built a simple solution, processed their first transaction within two weeks, and spent the next six months showing it to friends and iterating rapidly. They initially partnered with a payments company but realized that controlling the whole experience required controlling the entire process, so they brought everything in house; by the fall of 2010, Stripe had become their full-time job. Collison has been Stripe’s cofounder, chief executive, and a board member since 2010.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][4]

After a private beta, Stripe opened to the public in late September 2011 as a developer-friendly online payments platform that required no separate merchant account or gateway and charged 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful charge. Collison confirmed that Stripe had previously received $2 million from investors including Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV AngelSV AngelSV Angel is a San Francisco venture capital firm cofounded in 2009 by angel investor Ron Conway and former Google executive David Lee. It typically writes small follow-on checks in seed rounds and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox; in 2018 it said it would no longer raise new funds from outside investors, and from 2022 it set up growth funds.Open the full entry. In 2012, Collison said at a Startup Grind event that Y Combinator’s founder network is one of its most valuable assets.⁠[7][7][7][7][7][7][5][5]

Collison wrote that Stripe probably could not have been started in Ireland: the company had to convince banks to work with an unproven startup, and when he spoke to banks in Ireland early on it was clear this would be very hard. He argued that the better question is how much harder it is to build a successful startup in Ireland than in Silicon Valley, and that the answer is almost certainly “substantially harder,” partly because the investment climate was still not very strong.⁠[8][8][8][8][8]

San Francisco’s Proposition C would have taxed companies with more than $50 million in annual revenue to fund housing, mental health services, and other measures to ease homelessness. After Stripe opposed it, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff singled out Stripe in an interview with the Guardian, accusing the company, which had made $20 billion in the city, of being unwilling to give back at scale.⁠[9][9][9][9]

Collison then set out Stripe’s position in detail: the company was not dodging higher taxes, since measures introduced by Mayor London Breed were likely to raise taxes anyway; its objection was that Proposition C was likely to make homelessness worse. He wrote that problems as complex as homelessness rarely have clear-cut answers and that anyone could turn out to be wrong, and that the world was being pulled toward polarized, emotionally charged, soundbite discourse, which he said was important to resist.⁠[9][9][9][9][9]

Collison and economist Tyler Cowen published “We Need a New Science of Progress” in the Atlantic, a piece that was in some ways a sequel to an earlier article he had written with Michael Nielsen. It drew many responses and was followed by related projects such as the online magazine Works in Progress, and Mark Zuckerberg interviewed him and Cowen on the topic. He says that he and Cowen helped start Progress Studies.⁠[10][10][10][10][1]

In 2021, Collison cofounded the nonprofit biomedical research organization Arc Institute with Silvana Konermann and Patrick Hsu; the three had previously worked together on Fast Grants, which distributed funding to scientists during the COVID pandemic. Arc works in partnership with Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, San Francisco, training biology AI models and studying complex human diseases; its founding donors include Patrick Collison, John Collison, Vitalik Buterin, the Ron Conway family, and Dustin Moskovitz, among others.⁠[11][11][1][1][11][11]

A Forbes article described the Collison brothers as having “escaped” Limerick, called “stab city,” and was later removed from the site. Patrick Collison responded that the article was not only mistaken about Limerick but that the idea of “overcoming” anything was crazy: “We are who we are because we grew up where we did.” Limerick Mayor Michael Collins also denounced the article.⁠[12][12][12][12]

In an email to employees, Collison announced that Stripe was reducing its team by about 14%, calling it the hardest change the company had made to date and saying that he and John were fully responsible for the decisions leading up to it. He explained that ecommerce surged at the start of the pandemic, more than tripling Stripe’s revenue and payment volume, but that stubborn inflation, higher interest rates, and sparser startup funding in 2022 marked the beginning of a different economic climate; the company had “overhired for the world we’re in” and needed to reduce costs.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13]

Nature published two papers on bridge editing, a new genome engineering technology from Arc Institute. Collison said he was excited about its potential, and he gave Arc’s blog post to Claude 3.5 and had it write an accessible introduction.⁠[8][8][8]

Meta announced that Collison and Dina Powell McCormick had been elected to its board of directors, effective April 15; Collison had been a member of Meta’s advisory group from 2024 to 2025. Mark Zuckerberg said Collison is deeply committed to expanding economic opportunity. Collison said that, between WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, Meta is one of the internet’s most important platforms for businesses and that he looked forward to helping them navigate the opportunities ahead. He serves on Meta’s board as an independent director.⁠[14][4][14][14][4]

Collison highlighted three new discoveries Arc Institute published in a single week, including the world’s first functional AI-generated genomes: Arc scientists used Evo 2, the biology model released with NVIDIA that February, to generate entirely new phage genomes, then synthesized them experimentally and showed that the phages effectively kill E. coli bacteria; another was Germinal, an AI system for designing antibodies cheaply and quickly.⁠[8][8][8][8][8][8]

Stripe published its 2025 annual letter and announced agreements with investors including Thrive Capital, CoatueCoatueCoatue is a technology- and innovation-focused investment management firm founded by Philippe Laffont in 1999, operating in both public and private markets. Its current website lists Thomas Laffont as co-founder and chief investment officer of private investments; a Form ADV filed on July 29, 2026, disclosed regulatory assets under management of $92,705,722,582.Open the full entry, and Andreessen Horowitz to provide liquidity to current and former employees at a $159 billion valuation, with Stripe also using some of its own capital to repurchase shares. In 2025, businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume, up 34% year over year and roughly 1.6% of global GDP. In the letter, the Collison brothers wrote that Stripe powers more than 5 million businesses directly or through platforms, including all of the top AI companies and 90% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, that 25% of Delaware corporations are now created with Stripe Atlas, and that the company remained robustly profitable.⁠[15][15][15][15][15][15][15]

Collison invested as an angel in the first funding round of AI lab Conway ResearchConway ResearchConway Research is an artificial intelligence lab founded by Sigil Wen that works on efficient models, inference engines, and personal AI that runs on devices users already own; its first product is Underdog, a locally run personal assistant. In October 2026, Andreessen Horowitz announced that it was leading the company’s first funding round.Open the full entry, completed in April 2026. The company’s personal AI assistant, Underdog, plans to take a tiny percentage of the transactions it completes for users, using Stripe’s payment rails.⁠[16][16][17][17]

The New Aesthetics grant program that Collison started with Tyler Cowen published its list of recipients, funding 28 grantees; he said applications far exceeded expectations and had to be closed after a few weeks, that many applicants expressed dissatisfaction with the status quo in art, and that beauty as a goal and ways of channeling pre-modern styles into new work were drawing growing interest. He explained that his interest in aesthetics stems from the fact that many things today are far uglier than they used to be, and that modernism largely repudiated cultural continuity.⁠[1][8][8][8][8][8][8][8]

At Meta’s 2026 annual meeting, Collison was re-elected as a director with about 4.919 billion votes for and about 49.42 million against; all 12 director nominees were elected to serve until the next annual meeting.⁠[18][18][18]

As of October 2026, Collison lives in California and works mainly on Stripe. On his personal website he lists the topics he is interested in: economic growth, entrepreneurship, capital, Europe falling behind the United States, aesthetics and architecture, urbanism, religion, climate, policy, books and ideas, and science funding. He believes US outperformance after the global financial crisis relative to the rest of the OECD is substantially attributable to more abundant capital; he is an investor in California Forever and Esmeralda, which seek to build pleasant new cities; on climate, Stripe started the carbon removal purchasing coalition Frontier; and in publishing, Stripe Press and Works in Progress both focus on economic and technological progress.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

He maintains long-running lists on his website of questions and materials that interest him, such as why costs in health care, education, and construction have risen far faster than inflation, why major projects seemed to be completed faster in the past, and how to help more experimental cities get started; he has also collected examples of ambitious projects completed quickly, such as the P-80 fighter delivered in 143 days and Apollo 8 launched 134 days after the decision to go to the moon, along with reading lists on research labs such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. As of mid-2026, his bookshelf catalog had not been updated in about ten years.⁠[19][19][19][20][20][21]

Personal website: https://patrickcollison.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[22]

X: Public account: https://x.com/patrickc (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

GitHub: Public account: https://github.com/pc (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Stripe: Official website: https://stripe.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[23]

Arc Institute: Official website: https://arcinstitute.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]