Patrick Collison, one of the world's richest young entrepreneurs, is a name not widely recognized despite leading a financial giant, Stripe, which is predicted to join companies like Google and Amazon in market influence. Collison, with his brother, has been involved in multiple ventures since his teenage years, demonstrating both grit and brilliance. From developing in the Irish countryside to diving into the Silicon Valley startup Ecosystem, Patrick Collison's journey is one marked by remarkable achievements and inevitable controversies.

Stripe, the brainchild of Patrick and his brother John Collison, has revolutionized the payment processing industry, quickly valued as the world's most promising startup. Despite its rise, the company and Collison face challenges, especially criticism for supposedly Monopolistic practices targeting startups in Silicon Valley. As Stripe works towards global expansion, Patrick Collison's leadership style and strategic business moves will define the company's resilience in a volatile financial market.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. Behemoth [bɪˈhiːmɒθ] - (n.) Something enormous in size or power.

He has held the prestigious title of the world's youngest self-made billionaire, and he presides over a finance Behemoth that many predict to join the ranks of Google.

2. Virtuous [ˈvɜːtʃuəs] - (adj.) Having or showing high moral standards.

Many people believe that behind the Virtuous mask is a ruthless shark that is not playing a fair game.

3. Illustrative [ɪˈlʌstrətɪv] - (adj.) Serving as an example or explanation.

His journey is one marked by remarkable achievements and Illustrative talents.

4. Monopolistic [məˌnɒpəˈlɪstɪk] - (adj.) Dominating the market, reducing or eliminating competition.

Criticism for supposedly Monopolistic practices targeting startups in Silicon Valley.

5. Ecosystem [ˈiːkəʊˌsɪstəm] - (n.) A complex network or interconnected system.

Limerick is now the breeding ground for Silicon Valley's next power players, and Patrick knows that there's no time to waste.

6. Accusation [ˌækjuˈzeɪʃən] - (n.) A charge or claim that someone has done something illegal or wrong.

Ryan Breslow has publicly accused the Collison brothers of ruling Silicon Valley like mob bosses.

7. Domination [ˌdɒmɪˈneɪʃən] - (n.) The exercise of control or influence over someone or something.

Stripe is on course to dominate the online Ecosystem.

8. Economic headwinds [ˌiːkəˈnɒmɪk ˈhɛdwɪndz] - (phr.) Challenges or opposing forces in the economic sphere.

Navigating the dire Economic headwinds before for him.

Patrick Collison: Unveiling the Stripe Dynasty

He is one of the richest men on the planet, and due to his young age, he is likely to become one of the most powerful men in the coming decades. He has held the prestigious title of the world's youngest self-made billionaire, and he presides over a finance Behemoth that many predict to join the ranks of Google, Meta, or Amazon in terms of market cap and influence very soon. And yet, many of you don't even know who he is. Patrick Collison, along with his brother, started businesses as a hobby. He became an overnight millionaire at the age of 19. And of course now his only mission is to do good things for the world with his company's tribe.

Like, if we can just have a sort of very small part to play in, you know, making it possible for more entrepreneurs to get started or more of these businesses to exist, you know, that's going to be a cool thing. But some people are not convinced. Some say he is controlling Silicon Valley like a mob boss, buying up all the small startups that might eventually become competition and preventing VC firms from investing in anything else beside his own company. Many people believe that behind the Virtuous mask is a ruthless shark that is not playing a fair game.

Who is the man without whom you would not be able to pay for your Spotify account? Who is the guy Elon Musk relies on in order to charge eight us dollar for a blue Twitter checkmark? Who is 31% 24-year-old Patrick Collison and his finance Behemoth, Stripe? And why have you never heard of him? Half of all Americans who bought something online in the last year did so without knowing. Via Stripe.

It is Ireland, 1988. Born in the middle of nowhere, somewhere deep within the Irish countryside, Patrick Collison is gifted, gifted with two very intelligent parents. That is his mother Lily, a microbiologist, and father, Dennis, an electrical engineer. The pair are involved in running their own businesses, which will become a recurring family theme, as you will soon discover. We grew up in the countryside, right? And so it was like a 40 minutes drive to get to school in the morning, and none of the friends we went to school with lived anywhere close to us. And so when we came home from school, we couldn't go and run around and play with them, and so we had to run outside and play with each other. All else there was to do was to go and read books.

In the tiny town of Dromonier, the stage is set for an Irish wonderkind to make his appearance. Patrick is the eldest of three brothers. Patrick, John, and Tommy make up a band of brothers that will grow up together and grow startups together. Second in command is Jon, the co-founder of Stripe. But more on that later.

It is clear Patrick is bright from a young age and at the age of eight he enrolls in his first computer course. While all of you are still in full goo-goo gaga mode, this young man begins what will be an illustrious coding career. I read about the Internet for years before we had the Internet, got a programming book and read it and thought it seemed awesome and built my first little janky website and was very proud of myself.

At the ripe old age of ten, Patrick begins to attend a computer programming course at the University of Limerick. UL, as it is known locally, is very close to where Patrick Patrick attends high school at Castle Troy College. Limerick is now the breeding ground for Silicon Valley's next power players, and Patrick knows that there's no time to waste because Patrick Collison starts early, I mean very freaking early.

While in school, our young hero enters the Young Scientist of the Year technology exhibition. Artificial intelligence is the project he is working on. Named Isaac after his hero, Isaac Newton, Patrick places a shameful second in the competition. You are forgetting what the Olympics are all about. Giving out medals of beautiful gold, social silver and shameful bronze not put out by this poor display.

He re-enters the tournament the next year. Now called the BT Young Scientist of the year awards, Patrick redeems himself and comes out victorious. He is 16 years old. The winning project is the creation of Chroma, a Lisp type programming language. Lisp. It is a family of programming languages and a distinctive fully parenthesized prefix notation. Lisp is the second oldest high level programming language still in use and it has a very big fanbase online. The price is 3000 euro and a kiss from the president, Mary Mcelice.

But kissing the Irish president only marks the beginning of Collison's remarkable reign. Finishing high school, Patrick attends the prestigious Massachusetts Techno University, or MIT as it is known to you millennials. Patrick, being a boy genius and all, naturally grows tired of this nonsense and drops out in 2009 to focus on his business ventures.

The thing that ledge was dropping out was kind of the realization that what we initially conceived of as being sort of a slightly niche product for developers or something, solving a narrow problem or something like that was actually, you know, this kind of lake was actually an ocean. According to Collison. Ebay sucks.

But obviously ebay just sucks. So he and his younger brother John start building a better version of the famous auction website rejected by Enterprise Ireland. The brothers have only one option. It could mean that you can't actually do it or the idea is a bad idea or whatever, right? Or it might not. Right.

Under the COVID of darkness, the Collison brothers packed their bags and moved to Silicon Valley. It is there that the boys joined the notorious Silicon Valley startup program y Combinator. Y Combinator is an American technology startup accelerator. It has funded many hot, successful companies such as Airbnb, Reddit, and Coinbase.

In a small apartment in San Francisco, the two brothers disappear and get to work. That's right, we moved out here and we got this small little apartment in San Francisco and went to work, basically. And that was sort of really the, that was my first time spending any significant amount of time on the west coast and learning how startups work.

Patrick and John soon join forces with another band of brothers. They meet up with Oxford students Harjit and Kulvir Tagar and merge their two budding companies. What actually ended up happening is we merged with another company started by two guys, Harjan Kovir Tagar, who had built a student marketplace in the UK and kind of basically also wanted to build a better version of eBay. So the four of us came together in May of 2007 to work on octomatic.

And yeah, the goal was to build a better eBay. The four lads build an online marketplace start to finish, and within ten months, octomatic is born. On one of the holiest days of the year, Good Friday of March 2008, the boys sell the company for a cool $5 million to famous Canadian company Live current media.

The brothers Collison become millionaires overnight. And Patrick is making the epic journey from young scientist to young millionaire. And this is where the megalomaniacs separate themselves from the above average. The stage is set and this young buck is about to make an absolute killing.

Annoyed by inefficient payment options available, we started working on it, I mean, literally because we were frustrated and surprised it didn't exist. And I think something that's maybe somewhat important is we actually didn't think was that big a deal. We were working on some iPhone apps on the side at the same time. We kind of kept working on both working on the iPhone apps and working on stripe or as it was known at the time, and slash dev payments. We were great brand, excellent at branding.

Without hesitation, Patrick and his brother disappear once again and head down to Buenos Aires. The two sit in a room for the next few months and coat until they are blue in the face. The only days of building just weren't that glamorous it was. It was myself and John programming all day, every day.

A few months and seven lines of code later, the startup company stripe is born. Well, not quite with his brother John. Well, actually we started working on it full time in 2010. But actually, to your comment just there about companies launching, it took us quite a while to launch because we got all these banking partnerships in place and so on, and so we didn't launch until September 2011.

We've been working on it for almost two years at that point, and every time we saw a PG or really anyone else from YC, all they would ask us is why we had not launched yet. Stripe is a Behemoth financial SaaS startup with headquarters in San Francisco and Dublin. The giant unicorn offers payment processing software to e-commerce websites and your favorite mobile apps.

Put simply, Stripe allows you to pay for your Tinder Gold membership. Never once to miss an opportunity, the PayPal mafia soon turns up at Stripe's front door. It is none other than the infamous Peter Thiel, whom we have also portrayed on this channel, and the man himself, Elon Musk, pumping in a cool $2 million.

Not to be outdone, the big boys of venture capital soon show up. Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and BV angel cut in for a slice of the piece. Irish entrepreneur Liam Kessie throws his name into the hat and Stripe has a few million to play with. Kicking off speaking of kickoff, this task management app becomes Stripe's first acquisition.

Stripe then acquires reco accounting platform, adding to their suite of financial services. Stripe is now a player, a major player, putting pen to paper and inking. Major deal after major deal. 2022, Stripe enters a five-year partnership with a Ford Motor company. At the same time, the company also partners with hit music sensation Spotify to help artists monetize their profiles.

April 2022, Twitter announces a deal with Stripe to handle all cryptocurrency payments. Wait, what? Do people use crypto as a payment method? Our determination was that bitcoin was not a good payment method. I didn't think so.

The brothers' company is now valued at a whopping 95 billion, making it the most valuable startup in the world. We just had another hundred thousand dollar day with a 10% stake. Our boy Patrick is now one of the richest people in the world. But recently things have taken a turn for the worse.

Reports from the Wall Street Journal suggest that the internal share price of Stripe has dropped significantly, falling from forty dollars to twenty-nine dollars per share. Not ideal. However, this does not put off Stripe's grandiose plans for global Domination. Southeast Asia, Africa, and India are all on Collison's radar.

With Patrick at the helm, Stripe is on course to dominate the online Ecosystem. But is it really all going well for the benevolent Saint Patrick? As Stripe grows larger, so too does the influence of its co-founder and CEO.

In the wake of the pandemic, Collison, along with economist Tyler Cohen, set up fast grants. This is a story of how a tech entrepreneur and an economist wrapped rapidly funded some of the most innovative solutions to fight Covid-19, a charity providing rapid funding to scientists working on medical research.

Fast grants receive funding from the likes of the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, along with other industry giants such as Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, and Tobias Lutke. Patrick's level of power is increasing, and as we all know, remember, with great power comes great responsibility. Thanks, Uncle Ben.

Due to his newly found influence, Patrick Collison has been involved in a few notable dust-ups already. In a bold move that many consider dangerous, Patrick has first taken aim at China, not only for economic reasons, but for what he deems a moral obligation, criticizing the Chinese government regarding certain activities in the Far East and criticizing the big tech community for keeping hush about said activities.

The beef with China is also reflected in how Patrick does business. Stripe currently has no base in China. Because of your choice or because of their choice. We enable people who use Alipay and WeChat payments, wepay to transact with businesses outside of chat. And so we do business with, I guess, Chinese consumers.

But sort of, you know, Stripe Inc. Has no presence in China and we don't work with any businesses in mainland China today. Look, it's, it's complicated. China is not a free country.

In 2021, Forbes published a now infamous article about Patrick and brother John. In the article, Forbes claimed Limerick City is the murder capital of Europe and that stabbings happen there every night. The article also makes claims that certain neighborhoods are walled off by a ten-foot-high barrier similar to the Berlin Wall.

The article receives a lot of backlash. What the hell is that? Patrick slams Forbes, tweeting not only mistaken about Limerick, but the idea of overcoming anything is crazy. We are who we are because we grew up where we did. Forbes is forced to remove the article and apologizes in an embarrassing U-turn.

Another of Stripe's detractors is Ryan Breslow, the billionaire founder of Bolt, an $11 billion Miami startup competing with Stripe for fast one-click payments. My motivation here was to open people's eyes to what goes down in Silicon Valley, where it's not all sunshine and rainbows. It is very fierce, and there's fierce competition, and there's also games that are played with powerful institutions and, you know, groups of people who, you know, help each other.

Breslow has publicly accused the Collison brothers of ruling Silicon Valley like mob bosses and shutting down the competition. Stripe has, like, all the big names in Silicon Valley invested in them.

So they've intentionally put every single, you know, tier-one firm on their cap table, and they even stuff them with small checks. They're like, everybody's on their cap table, right. And so, you know, for, and then they say you're conflicted out. Right.

That's a competitor of ours. You're our shareholder. Right, exactly. And I didn't even, you know, consider ourselves a direct competitor at the time.

But I think they're very guarded about anything in their periphery. So I've heard the same story from companies, you know, doing card issuing. I've heard the same stories from companies doing subscription payments. And then Stripe would roll out their own product next.

So it's almost as if they have these feelers out. Anything that's tangential, they make sure that doesn't get off the ground, and then they go and build it.

It is worth noting that Y Combinator rejected Breslow, so maybe he still has a chip on his shoulder. It is inevitable. As Patrick Collison amasses more power, more enemies will crawl from behind the woodwork. Will the tricks this billionaire boy picked up along the way keep his enemies at the bay? As we will see, there is one major challenge Stripe is fighting with right now.

But first, tell me, Kevin, how do I become the dawn of Silicon Valley like my childhood hero, Patrick Bateman, I mean, Collison. Well, luckily for you, Patrick gives you all the advice you need to know on his website, cleverly titled patrickcollison.com. here is a numbed down version for you. Go deep into things, balls deep. Become an expert in as many fields as possible and stick to the ones you enjoy.

Work hard at the things you enjoy and be grateful that you enjoy them. Take full advantage of the fact that you enjoy working on something and continue for as long as you enjoy it. Become friends with people over the Internet who have skills that you want to acquire, for example, by joining the Kevin John Patreon community. The Internet is one of the greatest advantages you have over previous generations.

Leverage it. We've now had the Internet for a couple of decades. The Internet is still young, right? Read a shit ton of books. Above all else, do not judge your success based on your friend group. Make friends, of course. But being weird in your youth is generally a good thing.

Learn how to make good first impressions, learn how to be funny, hey, hey. And get good at speaking in public. Finally, we come to be born to very intelligent parents in rural Ireland and grow up here in the nineties. You must also possess an obsession for progress and improving the status quo.

Not all of you will have this burning desire, but those of you who do will fulfill your destiny and become the new leaders of the free world. But there is one major challenge ahead for Stripe. As we shall see, today is a very sad day for America. In a tragic turn of events, rap superstar takeoff has been shot dead outside a bowling alley.

Now tributes for takeoff as music mourns Migos' youngest member shot dead in Houston at the age of 28. Things are not looking much better over at the Stripe HQ.

Here's the headline from them moments ago. Cutting staff by 14%. It's ready. And for what they call leaner times, the co-founder said this we were much too optimistic about the Internet company's near-term growth in 22 23 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown. And they are not alone, are they?

In a memo to employees, CEO Patrick Collison delivers a message that the entire business world should pay attention to. In a ruthless move typical of the dawn of the Stripe mafia, 14% of the Stripe workforce will be cut, effective immediately. Patrick lays out the reasons for these terminations, and they do not bode well for developed nations.

The world is now shifting again. We are facing stubborn inflation, energy shock, higher interest rates, reduced investment budgets, and sparser startup funding. In technical terms, that roughly translates to the planet is fine, the people are fucked.

Patrick quickly highlights the key mistakes that the Stripe leadership made. Essentially, it boils down to one thing. Patrick and brother John were too bullish a cut of 1000.

But what I'm hearing from venture capitalists on all levels of the curve, from seed through to growth equity stage, is now is the time to be disciplined, preserve cash, do not invest with risk, and be conservative with hiring. And that is exactly what this Stripe story represents.

Just like the Wall Street bets, degenerates still holding onto their GameStop and AMC shares. The party is over, folks. So there you have it. The origin story of Silicon Valley's new mafia dawn.

I wish I could say that this is the part when our hero rides off into the sunset with his lovely new wife. But I am afraid not. As one of the world's most powerful men, this is the time when he will face his toughest challenges to date, navigating the dire Economic headwinds before for him.

Plus defending his throne from the many enemies peering from behind the bushes, just waiting to take a swipe. As the world we live in now enters uncharted territory, there's only one thing that is certain. You will know the name Patrick Collison.

Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Technology, Stripe, Patrick Collison, Silicon Valley