TWO brothers hailing from Co Tipperary are worth a combined €14 billion after throwing together a prototype for their invention while on holiday.
Stripe, which is an innovative payment platform, makes it easy to pay for goods and services online – and it’s all thanks to an idea concocted by brothers John and Patrick Collison.
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The pair headed over to the USA from their rural home in Dromineer at a young age with an entrepreneurial dream.
Their vision was simple, to create a payment platform that would simplify online payments from anywhere in the world and “increase the GDP of the internet”.
They pitched the idea to Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalists, on why their online payments system was better than PayPal.
But the pair, who were aged just 19 and 21 at the time, had only put together a prototype of the idea whilst on holidays and had no experience in the area.
However, John and Patrick had impressed Thiel with their vision, and he agreed to invest – despite being a founder of PayPal.
Stripe launched publicly in September 2011 after a lengthy private beta period and over a decade later it is now valued at a whopping $65 billion – making it one of the most valuable startups in the US.
The Collison brothers, now aged 33 and 35, were estimated to have a net worth of €7.2 billion each by Forbes in 2024.
Here we take a look at the early life of the brothers and what they have gotten up to since acquiring their jaw-dropping fortune.
Childhood
John and Patrick grew up in the small village of Dromineer in Co Tipperary.
Their father trained as an electrical engineer and worked for Dell before buying a lakeside hotel.
Lily their mother trained as a microbiologist and founded a corporate training company three weeks after giving birth to Patrick.
With both parents being busy running businesses, both of the boys had the freedom to discover their passions.
Education
Patrick, who is the eldest of three boys in the family, took his first computer course when he was eight years old, at the University of Limerick.
It was here that he began to learn computer programming when he turned ten.
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He attended the Gaelscoil Aonach Urmhumhan in Nenagh, before attending Castletroy College in Castletroy, Co Limerick.
He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but eventually dropped out in 2009 after starting businesses.
John, who also attended Castletroy College, received 8 A1 and 2 A2 grades in the Leaving Certificate examination.
He then went on to study at Harvard University in 2009.
Auctomatic
In 2007, whilst John was still in secondary school, the pair set up the software company Shuppa, which was a play on the Irish word siopa.
Patrick dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after starting up the business.
Enterprise Ireland did not allocate funding to the company, prompting a move to California after Silicon Valley showed interest.
They merged with two Oxford graduates, on the business and the company became Auctomatic.
In March 2008, Patrick, aged nineteen, and his brother John, aged seventeen, sold Auctomatic to Canadian company Live Current Media.
The teenage brothers became overnight millionaires after selling their fledgling software company.
In 2010, the Collison brothers co-founded Stripe, which received backing from Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Sequoia Capital.
Marriage to childhood sweetheart
Patrick Collison married his childhood sweetheart, Swiss scientist Silvana Konermann in a romantic private ceremony in Italy in 2022.
The pair met when they were both taking part in the 2005 EU Young Scientist competition in Moscow when they were both 17.
Silvana walked away with the top prize beating her now husband Patrick into second place.
Laois mansion
In 2021, John shelled out €20million on one of the country’s largest and most prestigious manors.
The tech billionaire purchased the 18th century Abbey Leix Estate in, Abbeyleix, Co Laois.
The main house, designed in 1773 by the architect James Wyatt, consists of nine bedrooms, ten bathrooms, 117 windows and an interior space of 27,000 sq ft.
It sits on a 1,120-acre demesne, which includes ten estate houses and cottages, a large area of ancient native woodland and walled gardens.
It also boasts the oldest surviving oak tree in Ireland, along with a stud farm, a quadrangle, and a clock tower fashioned out of local limestone and dating from 1822.
Limerick anger
The brothers slammed Forbes magazine for saying they escaped “stab city” for Silicon Valley in 2021.
John Collison described the article as daft while his brother Patrick said it was mistaken in the idea that they had to overcome Limerick.
The article, which was published in US business magazine Forbes and has since been removed from it’s website, described the success of brothers John and Patrick Collison.
The article said the pair had “escaped” Limerick, which was described as “stab city”, prompting backlash online and from the brothers.
It said: “Limerick is the last place you want your kids growing up.
“But two brothers who went to high school there recently beat the odds.
“Not only did they escape ‘stab city’—they moved to Silicon Valley, founded one of the most disruptive companies on earth, and became two of the youngest self-made billionaires in history.”
The article also described Limerick as a “warzone” and claimed “shootings, pipe bomb attacks and stabbings” were a regular occurrence there.
It continued: “Some bad neighbourhoods are even walled off by a dirty graffitied 10-foot-high barrier, like the Berlin Wall.”
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