John Collison was born in Limerick in August 1990 and raised in Dromineer, County Tipperary. In 2007 he and his brother Patrick founded Shuppa in Limerick.
Shuppa merged with Auctomatic, a Y Combinator-backed company that built tools for eBay sellers. Auctomatic was acquired for $5 million in March 2008, when Collison was 17.
He finished secondary school at Castletroy College in 2009 with eight A1 grades. He enrolled at Harvard that September and left a year later to start Stripe with Patrick.
Stripe was backed by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Sequoia Capital. In 2016 the brothers became the world's youngest self-made billionaires after a round valued Stripe at $9.2B. In 2025 Collison started a podcast called A Cheeky Pint. He is a pilot and a pianist.