Stripe, Inc.

Patrick Collison was 22 and John Collison was 19 when they founded Stripe in 2010. Their pitch was simple: accepting payments online required integrating with banks, payment processors, and fraud systems — a process that took weeks and required a lawyer. Stripe reduced it to seven lines of code. PayPal had been trying to solve this problem for a decade. Two brothers from Dromineer, a village in rural Ireland, solved it in a weekend.

Stripe was accepted into Y Combinator in 2011. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Sequoia Capital all invested in the seed round. Thiel later said it was one of the most obvious investments he had ever seen — the problem was real, the solution was elegant, and the founders were exceptional. The initial valuation was $100 million, which many investors considered aggressive for a company with almost no revenue.

By 2016, Stripe was processing payments for Amazon, Google, Shopify, Lyft, and hundreds of thousands of other businesses. The company had quietly become the plumbing of the internet economy — invisible to consumers but essential to every online transaction. Patrick Collison described Stripe's ambition as raising the GDP of the internet.

In March 2021, Stripe raised funding at a $95 billion valuation — making it the most valuable private company in the United States. The Collison brothers, both still in their early thirties, were each worth approximately $11 billion. Neither had any intention of taking the company public, citing a preference for the long-term focus that private ownership allowed.

In 2023, Stripe laid off 14% of its workforce and raised new funding at a $50 billion valuation — a 47% reduction from its 2021 peak. The company acknowledged it had over-hired during the pandemic boom. Despite the cut, Stripe remained one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world, processing hundreds of billions of dollars in payments annually.