????Stripe創始人：年輕的兩兄弟顛覆了在線支付，成為最年輕的億萬富豪 ??? John Collison, the Irish cofounder of Stripe, the payments processing company now powering many in-app purchase systems, has been proclaimed the world’s youngest self-made billionaire by Forbes in its new world’s richest list. ????Collison, 26, is worth US$1.1 billion, according to Forbes. ????In November, Stripe raised a US$150 million round of funding to value the company at US$9.2 billion. “The transaction turned Collison into the world’s youngest self-made billionaire,” Forbes said. Collison and his brother Patrick “took up coding as kids, competing against each other to master the craft,” Forbes reported. ????Patrick and John Collison have come a long way from the quiet village outside of Limerick, Ireland, where they grew up. ????With little around except “mooing cows,” the brothers turned to coding to occupy themselves. To access the Internet, their parents had to buy a special satellite. ????In 2011 the Collisons founded Stripe, an online payment processing company whose backers include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. ????Their success is due in large part to an obsession with technology and coding — each of the brothers taught themselves to code before the age of 10. “I went to the bookstore on a Saturday, I bought a book about programing, and I started programing,” Patrick tells The Financial Times. ????Later, they both briefly attended prestigious universities. Patrick dropped out of MIT and John dropped out of Harvard University to co-found their first start-up, Auctomatic, a marketplace management system for companies like eBay. ????They would sell Auctomatic for US$5 million and move on to their next idea, developing an easy way to accept mobile payments online. ????In 2009, the brothers started writing code for what would become Stripe. Soon after, they secured funding from start-up incubator Y Combinator, where they caught the attention of investors Thiel and Musk. ????In 2016, John became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. Today, Patrick is Stripe’s CEO and John is its president. ????When they’re not running the company they co-founded, both are avid readers (the two are said to own more than 600 books) who like to run and travel. ????Along with their talents, the brothers’ trademark humility — despite their billionaire status — has earned them the confidence and enthusiasm of investors and clients. ????(SD-Agencies) | 