Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe
Limerick man and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, who along with his brother John has built a Silicon Valley software company worth more than US$1bn, has been selected to join prestigious accelerator Y Combinator as a partner.
Y Combinator, named by Forbes as the world’s top accelerator and incubator, has funded more than 500 companies in 30 markets.
Alumni include Airbnb, Dropbox, Scribd, Reddit and Disqus.
Both Airbnb and Dropbox are among a cohort of today’s tech players estimated to be worth around US$10bn apiece.
Yesterday, Y Combinator’s new president Sam Altman named four new partners to the company, including Collison, Science Exchange CEO Elizabeth Iorns, AeroFS CEO Yuri Sagalov and Y Combinator outreach director Kat Manalac.
“Patrick Collison is joining us as part-time partner,” said Altman on the Y Combinator blog.
“Patrick is the co-founder and CEO of Stripe. He knows a lot about every part of running a start-up, but he thinks about hiring and company culture better than anyone else I know. Previously, he co-founded Auctomatic.”
Doing it the Silicon Valley way
E-payments company Stripe, founded by Patrick and John Collison, raised US$80m in January in a Series C funding round that has valued the company at US$1.75bn.
The company, which employs 83 people, raised its first round of funding of US$2m in 2011 from investment veterans Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Further funding of US$18m followed in 2012 by Sequoia Capital, valuing Stripe at US$100m at the time.
Of the 83 staff, 22pc are former founders and 36pc hail from outside the US.
Patrick (25) and John (23) sold their first company Auctomatic to Canadian firm Live Current Media for US$5m (€3.2m) when they were 17 and 19, respectively. More recently, the pair have been listed among five Irishmen on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
