John Collison

John Collison is cofounder and president of Stripe, a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for online businesses. He was born and raised in the countryside near Limerick, Ireland, where his parents ran a lakeside hotel. He was born to electronic engineer Denis Collison, and microbiologist and author Lily Collison.John and his brother, Patrick, hatched the idea for Stripe while they were in college at Harvard and MIT, respectively. In 2010, the two Irish brothers pitched their online payments system to Peter Thiel, an early Facebook backer and one of Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists. The company's first payment was processed while both were on vacation in South America. In September 2019, Stripe raised a $250 million funding round with a valuation of $35 billion. John currently lives in San Francisco, California, where one of Stripe's headquarters is located.

Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison

Prior to founding Stripe, when John was fifteen and his brother Patrick was seventeen, they launched two startups: Auctomatic—a software-as-a-service platform for large sellers on eBay to track inventory and traffic—and an iPhone app providing an offline copy of Wikipedia (which they described as “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) on the phone. In March 2008, the brothers sold Auctomatic for $5m to a Canadian company, Live Current Media, where Patrick worked at for a year.

In 2021, Collison was part of a consortium looking to buy Weston Airport near Dublin in Ireland. The Stripe billionaire earlier that year purchased a €20m 1,100 acre estate an hour from the airport. An avid pilot himself, Collison is learning to fly at Weston Airport. In the year before that, he'd chartered a private jet from Stripe’s headquarters in San Francisco back to Ireland, landing at the Dublin Airport. The consortium, led by Irish financier Derick Walshe and several other aviation enthusiasts, hopes to improve Weston Airport for travelers.

Stripe co-founder John Collison on credit business