The 29-year-old CEO of Stripe reveals what it's really like running a $12.4 billion startup

• Stripe, the payments company founded eight years ago by two Irish brothers, is now worth $US9.2 billion ($AU12.4 billion).
• Patrick Collison, the 29-year-old CEO of Stripe, says he still wakes up 20 emails in his inbox telling him all the things Stripe is doing wrong.
• On an episode of NPR’s podcast “How I Built This” with Guy Raz, Collison shared what it’s really like running a unicorn startup.

Patrick Collison, 29, and his brother John, 27, famously turned seven lines of code into a startup called Stripe, which has been valued in fundraising at $US9.2 billion ($AU12.4 billion).

According to Collison, who was recently named to Business Insider’s list of rising stars in tech, running a successful startup doesn’t get any easier.

On an episode of NPR’s excellent podcast “How I Built This” with Guy Raz, the Collison brothers shared the story of how they founded and sold their first company before they turned 20 and went on to build Stripe, a software company that uses just a few lines of code to power the payment systems of companies like Target, Lyft, and Kickstarter.

When Raz asked when did Collison sit back and realise Stripe was a huge success, Collison said that “there’s never really been time for that.” Read more

Melia Robinson - Business Insider Australia - 19 June 2018