John Collison, the Irish cofounder of Stripe, the payments processing company now powering many in-app purchase systems, was a few months ago proclaimed the world’s youngest self-made billionaire by Forbes in its new world’s richest list.
Collison, 26, is two months younger than Spiegel, the cofounder of Snapchat, which went public recently. Forbes lists Collison’s net worth at $1.1 billion and Spiegel’s at $4.3 billion.
In November, Stripe raised a $150 million round of funding to value the company at $9.2 billion.
“The transaction turned Collison into the world’s youngest self-made billionaire,” Forbes said.
Collison and his brother Patrick “took up coding as kids, competing against each other to master the craft,” Forbes reported.
Before the two brothers came up with the idea for Stripe, they founded a tech startup called Auctomatic, which they sold for $5 million in 2008 when they were still teenagers.
In an interview with Fortune last summer, John Collison talked about what has led the Internet’s biggest players, from Twitter to Pinterest, to use his company’s technology.
“You should not have to go build out everything yourself from scratch,” he said. “Stripe should give you all this infrastructure [for] doing something that, in a way, is pretty complex.”
Spiegel was proclaimed the world’s youngest self-made billionaire in 2015 at the age of 25.
Background
Born in 1990 (age 26–27), Collison is a resident of San Francisco, California, U.S although his nationality is Irish.
In 2007, Collison founded “Shuppa” with his older brother Patrick in Limerick, Ireland. The company later merged with Auctomatic, which was funded by Y Combinator, and Collison moved to Silicon Valley.
Auctomatic was a software company that built tools for the eBay platform.The company was also funded by Chris Sacca.
Auctomatic was acquired for $5 million in March 2008, when Collison was 17.
In 2009, Collison (having returned to finish secondary school at Castletroy College) received 8 A1 and 2 A2 grades in the Irish Leaving Certificate examination. He continued to study at Harvard University, commencing his studies in September 2009. Collison is a pilot and a pianist.
