Two brothers – 33-year-old Patrick and 30-year-old John Collison – spent their childhood and youth in Ireland, where they were born.
They studied in an ordinary school, but already from the elementary grades they were much ahead of their peers.
“There were always few people in the classes, I was not interested in reading ordinary textbooks, so I sat down so that the teacher did not see me and studied books on programming and mathematics,” says Patrick.
After Patrick was transferred to home schooling, he, having passed all the tests and exams as an external student, at the age of 16, became not only the youngest graduate of the school, but also received the title of “the youngest scientist”. As a teenager, he developed a new programming language and created an artificial intelligence system.
After school, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his brother John a little later – at Harvard, according to lepoint.
After moving to the United States, the brothers began working in the financial and technology sector. We started with developing applications for mobile phones, then turned our attention to developing payment systems on the Internet.
In 2010, the brothers moved to Silicon Valley, and a year later they created the fintech Stripe. Patrick was CEO, John was president. For two years, they themselves built relationships with banks, went to meetings with partners, wrote codes and tested their service. Thanks to their service, companies can now accept payments from credit cards and quickly receive money into their bank accounts.
Stripe has been audited and evaluated for the first time this year. And it turned out that he was worth nothing – not less than $ 95 billion, which made the Collison the youngest billionaires in Silicon Valley.