Sarah Clansky

John Collison is President at Stripe, the payments technology company he co-founded in 2010 with his brother Patrick Collison. As president, Collison oversees operations, strategy, and business development, working alongside Patrick, who serves as chief executive officer. Stripe provides financial infrastructure and payments technology, and as of February 2026 carried a valuation of $159 billion.

Collison was born in August 1990 in Dromineer, County Tipperary, Ireland. Before Stripe, he co-founded Auctomatic with his brother Patrick — a software company building tools for high-volume sellers on platforms such as eBay, which was acquired in March 2008 for approximately $5 million when Collison was seventeen. The brothers had participated in Y Combinator through their work on Auctomatic. In November 2016, following a funding round that valued Stripe at $9.2 billion, Collison became the youngest self-made billionaire in the world, with a net worth estimated at $9.3 billion as of 2026 according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Stripe received early backing from Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Sequoia Capital. Collison enrolled at Harvard University in September 2009 and dropped out the following year to build Stripe. He holds a Federal Aviation Administration Aircraft Flight Instructor certification and is also a pianist.

Patrick Collison is CEO and co-founder of Stripe, a technology company that builds programmable financial services, including API-based online payment processing for businesses ranging from early-stage startups to large enterprises such as Ford and Amazon. He co-founded Stripe with his brother John Collison in 2010, with the goal of making it simpler to accept payments on the internet.

Before Stripe, Collison co-founded Auctomatic in 2007 with his brother John, an auction and marketplace management system that was acquired by Canadian company Live Current Media in 2008 for $5 million. In 2021, he co-founded Arc Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research organization focused on curiosity-driven science, operating in partnership with Stanford, UCSF, and UC Berkeley. In 2020, he co-founded Fast Grants with economist Tyler Cowen to fund COVID-19-related science. Collison was born in Limerick, Ireland on 9 September 1988 and grew up in Dromineer, County Tipperary. He attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology before dropping out in 2009. Prior to university, he won the Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005 at age sixteen, with a project involving the creation of Croma, a LISP-type programming language.

Ria Bhutoria is a digital finance expert and general partner at Castle Island Ventures, with a background in fintech equity research at Credit Suisse and experience accelerating stablecoin adoption at Stripe. She holds a degree from NYU Stern School of Business.