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Ireland’s Youngest Billionaires

 

Ever heard of Stripe? If you’ve ever made a payment with your phone or on your computer, there’s a good chance you’ve used Stripe, even if you didn’t see the name. Stripe runs the software behind more than 100,000 businesses; in 2016, it was valued at over $9 billion. That makes the brothers who publicly launched it in 2011 two of the youngest billionaires on the planet.  And they’re from Ireland.

John and Patrick Collison live in San Francisco, California now, but they were born in Limerick, Ireland. Patrick was born in 1988, and John followed in 1990. Their family moved to Dromineer, where their parents ran a lakeside hotel. The brothers went to university in Boston, Massachusetts–Harvard for John (who finished school in Ireland with the highest possible marks on his Leaving Certificate) and MIT for Patrick.

Well . . . they started college, but dropped out after just a year to move to California and focus on their new business idea. They wanted to make it easier for small businesses to accept payments online.  From there, things grew. Rapidly.

Today, Stripe provides software to handle online payments  as well as providing various other services that help make it simple for firms to startup and to run their online businesses. The company currently employs about 750 people all over the world. The European headquarters is in Dublin.

In the UK,  Stripe charges 1.4 per cent of the value of each transaction plus 20p. Firms can be up and running in a couple of minutes because Stripe eliminates needless complexity and extraneous details. The company’s first payment was processed while Patrick and John were on vacation in South America.

Amazingly, Stripe wasn’t their first successful business venture.  Even before starting university, the brothers made their first million dollars with another software startup which helped companies use eBay more effectively.

Who knows what they’ll come up with next?

 

 

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Collison Brothers | Reflection

Junior Cycle Business Studies Specifications

  • Strand two:  Personal Finance
    • Element: Exploring Business
      • 1.8 Compare the services provided by consumer agencies and financial institutions to assist and support customers
  • Strand two:  Enterprise
    • Element:  Managing my resources
      • 2.1 Identify different types of financial, cultural and social enterprise and appreciate the role each plays in society
      • 2.2 Describe the skills and characteristics of being enterprising and appreciate the role of an entrepreneur in an organisation, in society and to the economy

Curriculum Elements of the 8 Key Skills of the Junior Cycle

  • MANAGING MYSELF
    • Knowing myself
    • Making considered decisions
    • Setting and achieving personal goals
  • MANAGING INFORMATION & THINKING
    • Gathering, recording, organising and evaluating information and data
    • Thinking creatively and critically
    • Reflecting on and evaluating my learning
    • Using digital technology to access, manage and share content
  • BEING NUMERATE
    • Estimating, predicting and calculating
    • Developing a positive disposition towards investigating, reasoning and problem-solving
    • Seeing patterns, trends and relationships
  • BEING CREATIVE
    • Imagining
    • Exploring options and alternatives
    • Implementing ideas and taking action
    • Learning creatively
    • Stimulating creativity using digital technology