Patrick Collison

Patrick Collison (born 1988) is an Irish entrepreneur who, with his brother John, co-founded Stripe in 2010, building it into one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world and a backbone of online payments. A former teenage programming champion, Collison is also known for his interest in scientific progress, co-founding the “progress studies” movement and the biomedical research organisation Arc Institute.

A gale-force tailwind

At Stripe’s annual Sessions conference in May 2025, Collison described AI and stablecoins as “not one, but two, gale-force tailwinds, well off the Beaufort scale, dramatically reshaping the economic landscape around us.” Stripe sits on a rich vantage point: it processes payments for a huge slice of the internet economy, including a wave of AI startups. Collison has pointed to those cohorts reaching millions in revenue faster than any prior generation of companies as evidence that something structural has changed.

By 2026 his optimism had sharpened into one of the boldest claims from any mainstream CEO — that the acceleration in AI-native businesses might, in hindsight, mark the beginning of the singularity. Skeptics read Stripe’s own transaction data as a partial view (fast-growing AI firms are exactly the customers Stripe courts), but few founders have as direct a window into how quickly new companies are being built and scaled.