There are myriad reasons why 99.99 per cent of the population are not record-beating billionaire entrepreneurs with fortunes that dwarf the GDP of some countries.
A lack of obsessive focus and relentless drive, for starters. The requisite brainpower, energy and ambition also elude most of us, along with the bizarre level of self-belief possessed by the truly successful. Not forgetting that totally brilliant idea we all wished we’d thought of but, of course, did not.
So it goes without saying that Patrick and John Collison, two fresh-faced brothers from Tipperary who set up Stripe — the online payments processor which is now the most valuable private company Silicon Valley has ever produced — have never really blended in.
Not as boys when, rather than playing cops and robbers with their pals, they engaged in complex games in which they imagined running their own corporation as cows grazed around them.
Patrick and John Collison discovered the internet through reading books before teaching themselves coding
And certainly not now as adults — aged only 32 and 30 respectively — so anxious to succeed and exceed that for a while Patrick kept a countdown clock as the wallpaper to his computer screen, eternally ticking down the 50-odd years he imagined he had left on planet Earth, to remind him not to waste a single second of it slobbing around like the rest of us.
‘When you talk to people who are old, some wish they had enjoyed themselves more, but not many wish they had wasted more time,’ he once said.
All of which perhaps explains why the Collison brothers — and not us — now own a company worth £70 billion, which boasts former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney on its board and has £430 million of new equity from such financial hitters as Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency, Allianz, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, AXA and Sequoia Capital.
Founded in 2010, Stripe’s valuation has almost tripled in the past year, surpassing anything achieved by companies such as Facebook or Uber before they went public, and, according to John Collison, the company is now ‘bigger [by payment volumes] than the entire ecommerce market’ was when they started working on it.
For those not in the know — though most of us probably use it without even knowing — Stripe is an internet payment procurer which allows companies to process online payments from customers quickly.
Handling almost 5,000 transaction requests a second, it takes a cut of around 1.4 per cent and a flat fee of 20p per transaction and, thanks to lockdown, has been going completely bananas.
Which is all very enviable. After all, who wouldn’t want to give Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos a run for their gargantuan sums of money?
But perhaps more impressive is the fact that, instead of being hot-housed by pushy parents in Silicon Valley, Seoul, Singapore, Shanghai or any other of the world’s great tech centres, Patrick and John grew up in Dromineer, a tiny hamlet in rural Ireland — surrounded by fields and, as they put it, ‘nothing but mooing cows’ — which was so remote they couldn’t get a phone line for the internet.
Patrick and John Collison set up Stripe — the online payments processor which is now the most valuable private company Silicon Valley has ever produced
Instead, they read constantly; at home, on the school bus, in lessons — books propped up just out of sight of their teachers who, on the headmaster’s instructions, turned a blind eye.
Every day, they’d each check out at least two books from the local library, on everything and anything, which they’d devour in a night and return the next morning.
Until one day Patrick selected a couple of books about the internet and computer programming — and that was that.
An obsession was born.
‘Instead of using the internet, I used to borrow books from the library about the internet,’ he once said. ‘I read everything I could find. It was like staring through the glass to this amazing world out there, but none of it was available.’
Until, that is, aged 13 and 11, Patrick and John researched, prepared and delivered a formal pitch to their parents proposing that they buy a special German satellite connection that would finally give them access to the World Wide Web.
Patrick has since described it as more stressful than pitching to Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s biggest venture capital firms (and now one of their investors).
‘After that, we were off down a rabbit hole!’ says Patrick.
Suddenly, every minute of their spare time was spent programming, teaching themselves coding and, for a bit of extra fun, hacking each other’s websites to reinforce the importance of cyber security.
Meanwhile, their parents, both originally from scientific backgrounds and, by then, entrepreneurs busy with their own projects — their father ran a 24-room hotel and their mother set up a corporate training company — were brilliantly laissez-faire, leaving them to blossom.
After being ranked runner-up when he was 15 in 2004, Patrick was crowned Young Scientist of the Year in 2005 for developing a programming language and artificial intelligence system.
Keen to get ahead, he skipped the last two years of school entirely. Instead of sitting the usual 30 exams required by the Irish Curriculum over two years, he sat the whole lot in 20 days, aced them all, ran a marathon to celebrate and enrolled at the prestigious MIT in Boston, aged just 16.
John, eager to keep up, followed him across the Atlantic a couple of years later — winning a place at Harvard — and, together again, they spent their spare time developing iPhone apps and working on a software company.
But even at the very top level, organised education was not for them. And so, with their parents’ blessing — following another formal presentation to convince them — they dropped out of college to concentrate on Auctomatic Inc, a software company that built tools for eBay. They sold it in 2008 for $5 million — aged just 19 and 17!
Two years later, having spotted a gap in the market, they set up Stripe which, within a couple of years, was being touted by developers and investors in Silicon Valley as the company to watch.
The brothers make billionaire Bill Gates look like a slouch, boasting a £70 billion company
While Patrick insists they didn’t set out to build a large company, just solve a problem — the lack of a global payment mechanism for internet trading companies — Stripe has far exceeded all expectations.
Owning roughly 12 per cent of the company each, the brothers’ individual wealth has leapt to more than £8 billion this year, making them both among the top 200 richest people in the world.
But success did not satisfy the siblings’ relentless thirst for knowledge, or for cramming life full to the brim.
So they employed a string of personal tutors in everything from law to physics and immersed themselves in issues as far-ranging as Turkish politics, San Francisco’s water supply and philosophy. They even took flying exams — and are now qualified pilots. John excelled at the piano and guitar. They ran competitively and obsessively — in 2015 John had a rule that he ran at least three miles every day of the year — invariably recording their times on social media.
They lived together, worked together, finished each other’s sentences, are deeply private and never frittered away valuable time.
‘It’s not that I don’t enjoy TV,’ Patrick once said. ‘If I had infinite time, I would watch it. This might be the entirely wrong optimisation.’
Yes, you’re right. Patrick doesn’t always speak quite like the rest of us. Of the home-made apple cake their mother posted over from Limerick on their birthdays, he once said: ‘I had a unique appreciation for its merits’.
And when he got engaged in June 2019, he announced it on Twitter with a beaming photo of him and his unnamed fiancée and the line: ‘We hit our engagement metrics this weekend!’
Naturally, John picked up and ran with the joke with his reply. ‘Oof, ratioed.’
Meanwhile, as Stripe has boomed, the brothers have become a thing of tech legend.
But perhaps their biggest achievement — other than retaining their lovely Irish accents — has been remaining relatively unchanged throughout.
A bit nerdy, yes. Extraordinarily close. Funny, bright, fast-talking, often described as ‘humble’ and ‘well-rounded’, still relentless in their thirst for knowledge and not a bit like the rest of us.
There is plenty we mere mortals can all learn from Patrick and John — follow your passions. Stay true to yourself. Dare to be different!
But perhaps more reassuring is the realisation that, while we are not likely to launch a billion-dollar business any time soon, unlike the Collisons we do have the ability to put our feet up, switch on the telly and embrace a wee bit of down time.