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Irish Brothers, 30 and 32, Now Own Company Worth £70 Billion

Irish Brothers, 30 and 32, Now Own Company Worth £70 Billion

The pair set up the company in 2010 and have seen it grow exponentially

Claire Reid

Claire Reid

A couple of brothers who grew up in a rural village in Ireland are now the owners and founders of Silicon Valley's most valuable private technology company. Not bad, eh?

Patrick and John Collinson co-founded digital payment company Stripe in 2010 and a little over 10 years later it's worth a whopping £70 billion ($95 billion).

Patrick Collinson.
Stripe

Patrick, 32, and John, 30, grew up in a small village called Dromineer and despite going on to own one of the biggest tech companies out there, the pair didn't even have the Internet at their home for the first decade of their lives.

Speaking to the Financial Times back in 2014, John said: "I often wonder if it's desirable to grow up somewhere boring because you're forced to find your own interests."

The ambitious pair launched their first tech start-up Shuppa in 2007, before relocating to San Francisco, the Daily Mail reports.

Just one year later they both became teenage millionaires after flogging Shuppa - which was renamed Auctomatic - for $5 million (£3,598,875).

The high-achieving brothers went to university in the US, with Patrick opting for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his brother attending Harvard.

Stripe

But before completing their studies they both dropped out, deciding they wanted to have another go at setting up their own business.

And, so Stripe was born. If you haven't heard of Stripe, there's still a very good chance you've used it without knowing, as it works as an online payment procurer, allowing companies to access customers' payments quickly.

Thanks to the lockdown, Stripe has seen business boom - and that's putting it mildly.

The company saw its valuation triple in the past year and, according to John is now bigger [by payment volumes] than the entire ecommerce market' was when they started working on it.

The brothers each own around 12 percent of the company, meaning their personal wealth has jumped to more than £8 billion ($11.5 billion) this year and landing them a place in the top 200 richest people in the world.

John Collinson.
Stripe

Speaking about the company in 2014, Patrick said: "We were the first people to work on Stripe, and chronologically that's interesting but so much of the great work that we do now, we're a piece of it but we're not the most important piece of it."

Featured Image Credit: Stripe

Topics: Ireland, Inspirational, Technology