Irish brothers John Collison and Patrick Collison dropped out of college to found their online payment solution in 2010. Just two years earlier, the young software coders sold their first company Auctomatic, which simplified the process of price management for auctioneers on websites like eBay, for $5 million. Experiencing first-hand the limitations of online payment staple PayPal, the brothers set out to create a simpler, less restrictive online payment vehicle. John and Patrick legendarily built their now ubiquitous payment system on just seven lines of code.
With $2 millions of funding from venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, Stripe’s early success was spirited by word of mouth between developers, new e-commerce companies and businesses competing in the sharing-economy marketplace. Today, Stripe processes billions of dollars in payment transactions for companies in over 120 countries, such as Lyft, Facebook, DoorDash, Salesforce, Shopify, Indiegogo, Booking.com and Amazon. An estimated 65 per cent of Internet users in the UK and 80 per cent of users in the US have made a purchase through a business using Stripe’s payment process. Patrick Collison serves as the private company’s CEO, which has over 1500 employees and continues to shake up the arena of digital payments.
