Taking money over the internet used to require months of integration work and a tolerant bank. Patrick and John Collison founded Stripe in 2010 to replace all of that with a few lines of code, which sounds modest until you consider how many businesses could not launch before it existed.

Stripe became infrastructure. Startups, marketplaces and very large enterprises run their payments through it, and the product has widened into a full set of financial tools for anyone operating online.

They asked why accepting money online was so hard, then spent a decade making it invisible.

It is also one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world, and still independent — a combination that almost nothing at this scale manages to hold on to.

Collison himself is known for interests well outside payments: scientific progress, economic history, why institutions stop working. The building style follows from that — first principles, long horizons. Most people have never heard of him and use his work daily.

Patrick Collison grew up in Dromineer, County Tipperary, and won Ireland's BT Young Scientist Exhibition in 2005 for work on a programming language. He went to MIT and his brother John to Harvard, and both dropped out. Their first company, Auctomatic, which built tools for online sellers, was acquired in 2008 for about five million dollars.

Stripe went through Y Combinator and was backed early by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Sequoia. Its first big customers were start-ups that later became large companies themselves, and its products spread from card payments into billing, fraud detection, company incorporation through Stripe Atlas, and banking services for platforms. Patrick is chief executive and John is president.

The brothers have used the company's resources for long-horizon projects. Stripe Climate, launched in 2020, buys carbon removal from early-stage suppliers. Patrick co-founded the Arc Institute, a biomedical research organisation in Palo Alto, in 2021, and in 2019 co-wrote an essay in The Atlantic calling for a new field of 'progress studies'.