The deal closed on Good Friday 2008, and one of the two brothers who had just sold their company was still seventeen with an exam ahead of him. John Collison had not yet sat his Leaving Certificate. His brother Patrick, nineteen, was about to move to Vancouver as a director of engineering. The buyer was a Canadian firm, Live Current Media, and the price reported by the Irish broadcaster RTE was more than three million euros.
It had been a year of refusals and leaps. In early 2007 the brothers had started a company in Limerick that made software for heavy eBay users. They called it Shuppa. They asked Enterprise Ireland, a state agency, for money. It said no. Y Combinator showed interest instead, and that summer they moved to California. On their American investors' advice they merged with a similar UK start-up, built by the Oxford graduates Harjeet and Kulveer Taggar, and the result was Auctomatic. Its whole life lasted about ten months.
They processed their first transaction within two weeks of starting to build their own system.
Patrick had grown up in Dromineer, County Tipperary, with a microbiologist mother and an electronic engineer father. He took his first computer course at eight, was programming at ten, and at sixteen won Ireland's BT Young Scientist exhibition with a language called Croma. He started at MIT and left in 2009. John scored eight A1s in the Leaving Cert, started at Harvard in September 2009 and left within a year.
Then came Stripe. It began in 2010 in Palo Alto with Patrick complaining, as one profile tells it, about how hard it was to take payments on the web. They processed their first transaction within two weeks of starting to build their own system. More than a thousand developers were on a waiting list before the public launch in September 2011. In May 2011 they raised $2 million from Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia, SV Angel and Andreessen Horowitz. In 2016 a round valued Stripe at $9.2 billion, and by March 2021 at $95 billion.
Then the market turned. The valuation was cut to $50 billion in the March 2023 round. In November 2022 Stripe laid off 14 percent of its staff, and in January 2025 about 300 more, with criticism of a cartoon sent to those people. A tender offer in February 2026 valued the company at $159 billion, and it said it handled $1.9 trillion in payments in 2025.
What the brothers show is that a no from the wrong door is only information. In 2007 a funding agency passed on them. A year later they had sold their first company and were already planning the next one.