The world’s youngest self-made billionaire John Collison is a tech genius from a tiny village in Ireland aged just 27
Irishman John Collison founded the tech firm Stripe, which is worth nearly £7billion, with his 29-year-old brother Patrick
AN Irishman aged just 27 has become the world's youngest self-made billionaire.
John Collison founded the tech firm Stripe, which is worth nearly £7billion, with his 29-year-old brother Patrick in 2011.
The online payment processing company is used by 100,000 companies, including takeaway firm Deliveroo.
The pair, who excelled at school and both went to prestigious universities in the US, are now worth more than a billion dollars each.
But John, who is from a small village in County Tipperary, says his extraordinary wealth has not changed him.
He told the BBC: "People now ask this a lot and I feel like they always want some really interesting answer - and I have nothing for them."
He added: "People ask 'how has your life changed?', and they want me to have taken up some elaborate new hobby, like Faberge egg collecting or yacht racing."
Instead, he prefers the simple pleasure of a run near his San Francisco home.
In October the uber-talented pair said that because their dad ran a hotel and their mum had a home business, they never baulked at the idea of owning their own company.
Minted Patrick told Bloomberg Businessweek: "Entrepreneur is a long, fancy French word, but it didn't seem like something you aspire to. It seemed normal, because whatever your parents do seems normal."
The brothers, who grew up in the small village of Dromineer, both excelled in school from a young age.
Patrick - who used to read his own books in class when he was bored - first showed off his talents by winning the BT Young Scientist competition in 2005 for creating an improved version of a 50-year-old programming language.
After school he moved to the US to study at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
And while there as an 18-year-old, he set up auctions payment firm Shuppa with John, who was 16 at the time.
It was a huge success and later made them €3.8million when it was sold off.
Later, with John studying at Harvard, they came up with an idea to simplify online payments — resulting in Stripe.
It launched in 2011 and was a huge hit with online companies delighted by how easy it was to implement.
And as Stripe took off, they both quit college to work full time on the project.
The lads' company employs 750 people in their new San Francisco offices.
Before moving in, they tore out the old tech firm's Lego room, recording studio, bar and restaurant in favour of one standard cafeteria for workers.
And they even use an algorithm to select lunch buddies for their employees.
Stripe board member Mike Moritz says being Silicon Valley outsiders has helped them.
He said: "They're more humble and well-rounded. There's such an improbability to their story."
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