Easy Online Transactions With Stripe

Born and raised in an Irish county called Tipperary, brothers John and Patrick Collison learned to code at a young age after Patrick received a computer as a present one year. When they were in their teens, John and Patrick started Auctomatic, an auction marketplace system that focused on local users. They sold the startup within a year and subsequently left Ireland to go to college in the US. John studied physics at Harvard, while Patrick studied math at MIT. During the fall term, the brothers began working on Stripe, a simple web-based tool that allows individuals and companies to accept payments online.

Though a “fairly lightweight commitment” at first, Stripe eventually became a full-time venture for the Collisons. Today, Stripe handles the online payment processes of various Fortune 500 companies, startups, non-profits, and side projects in the US and Canada. The San Francisco startup is backed by investors such as PayPal co-founders Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin.