[뉴스人사이드]Musk also invested… Geek brothers who were already billionaires in their twenties

Brothers John Collison and Patrick Collison, founders of Stripe

[아시아경제 권재희 기자] A startup invested by Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, who is competing for the world’s top 1st and 2nd place.

It is the payment platform’Stripe’, which is used by 8 to 9 out of 10 Americans. Stripe, one of the most valuable startups in Silicon Valley, has recently attracted a total of $95 billion (approximately 107 trillion won) with investments worth $600 million from the Irish Financial Management Agency, Allianz Insurance, Fidelity Securities, AXA Insurance, and Sequoia Capital, a private equity firm. The enterprise value is being evaluated. This is a whopping three-fold increase in over a year from the $36 billion assessed at the beginning of last year. It has already surpassed the corporate valuation that Facebook ($80 billion) and Uber ($72 billion) achieved just before listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Elon Musk’s private space exploration company, SpaceX, which was valued at $74 billion last month, also surpassed it.

Stripe is an online and mobile payment platform established in Silicon Valley by brothers Patrick Collison (32) and John Collison (30) from small towns in Ireland in 2010. Although it has been in service for only 11 years, more than 80% of Americans have used Stripe. Thanks to that, Stripe has already achieved Decacon (a startup with a corporate value of over $10 billion) in 2017, and is currently the most expensive ransom among unlisted U.S. startups. Among the world’s unlisted startups, only China’s Bite Dance (about $180 billion) and Ant Group (about $108 billion) have higher value than Stripe.

The younger brother of the founder Collison’s brother, John Collison, was already the youngest self-made billionaire at the age of 26, overtaking Evan Spigel, one of the founders of Snapchat, in 2017.

Since childhood, these brothers have boasted of extraordinary cotyledons. The Collison brothers were born in Limerick, a small town in the Midwest of Ireland, a small rural village with only 100 inhabitants in total. Born to a father who majored in electrical engineering and a mother who studied microbiology, he showed genius in science. Patrick, the eldest of three brothers, entered a computer course at Leemery University at the age of eight and learned programming at the age of 10. In 2005, when he turned 16, he won first place in an artificial intelligence project competition and was eventually selected as Ireland’s’Young Scientist of the Year’ by developing a computer programming language. The following year, at the age of 17, he entered the University of Massachusetts (MIT) in the United States. The second, John, also finished high school at the age of 16, hitting the highest score on the university entrance exam in Ireland, and went on to Harvard University.

After his brother Patrick entered MIT, he created software for eBay sellers, an e-commerce site. This is the first start-up. When he couldn’t find an investor in his home country, Ireland, he entered Silicon Valley to find an investor. Eventually, John, who attracted investment from the United States, founded a company called Auctomatic, and later sold it to a Canadian company for $50 billion, becoming a millionaire at the age of 19.

This experience led the Collison brothers to work together to fix the complex American online payment system. The result is stripes.

The secret of Stripe’s success lies in dramatically reducing the number of complex online payment systems. Existing online payment systems such as PayPal go through 9 steps of payment, but Stripe reduced it to 3 steps. From the standpoint of corporate customers such as shopping malls, they can easily use their services by adding a few lines of API provided by Stripe without developing a separate server. It was as simple as fetching a YouTube video, and it gained sensational popularity with e-commerce companies.

In the case of PayPal, sellers had to spend a lot of time and money to apply PayPal’s complex system to their online shopping malls, and consumers had to create a separate PayPal account and experience the hassle of going back and forth between the shopping mall and the PayPal site for each online payment. Is solved.

The low cost is also a factor in the success of the Stripe. PayPal and other general US credit card companies’ fees are around 4-5%, but Stripe significantly lowered this and received only 30 cents for each transaction by 2.9%.

As expected, Stripe quickly gained popularity and quickly recaptured the market where PayPal had eroded. Apple, Facebook, Twitter, TED, Target, Amazon, Uber, Rift, Airbnb, Pinterest, Spotify, Kickstarter, Door Dash, and other big companies as major customers were secured as major customers.

In particular, last year, it benefited from the rapid growth of the e-commerce market due to the Corona 19 pandemic. Since the outbreak of Corona 19 last year, more than 200,000 new companies in Europe have joined the platform. Founder John Collison said, “Last year, we have processed nearly 5,000 transaction requests per second.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Michael Moritz, who is said to be a legend of venture investment, all invest their personal property, and Stripe has established itself as a successful startup. Peter Till, founder of rival PayPal, is also known as an early investor in Stripe.

As Stripe’s ransom rises, some observers say that IPO is imminent in the industry. Last year, Divya Suryadevara General Motors (GM) Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Amazon Web Services former Mike Clayville, followed by Mark Carney, former British bank governor, this year is also contributing to such observations. It is because startups usually see it as a precursor to IPOs to expand financial resources. But Brother Collison did not publicly comment on the IPO plan, saying “I will stick to the basics.”

Stripe, which currently provides services in over 130 currencies in 110 countries, plans to hire 1,000 more people in Dublin alone over the next five years. It also plans to launch businesses in Brazil, India, and Indonesia at the end of this year.

Even on weekends, they hire private teachers to study law and physics, read books and ride light aircraft. They have already achieved a lot at a young age, but they continue to learn and challenge endlessly, saying, “I don’t have time to waste in my short life.”

Reporter Kwon Jae-hee [email protected]