John Collison of Stripe: ‘I am baffled by companies doing an about-face on social initiatives'

Irish Times

16-05-2025

If you wanted to find an interesting Irish success story,
Stripe
co-founder
John Collison
would be up there with the best. One of the country's youngest billionaires, the entrepreneur cofounded Stripe with his brother
Patrick
, and has transformed it into a global payments giant.
There are few people remaining in Stripe's established markets that will not have used their services in one form or another, even if they don't realise it. The company counts some of the biggest names in the world among its client list, from Ford and Hertz and Amazon to Zoom. At some point, customers have come into contact with Stripe's technology.
Stripe has also captured a decent share of the
artificial intelligence
(AI) market, with OpenAI, Leonardo and Moonbeam among its customers.
Many of them attended Stripe Sessions in San Francisco, where this interview took place. The annual conference is the forum for Stripe to announce new products, float ideas and meet its customers in person.
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In 2019, a few years after the first Sessions was held, there were 1,000 people attending. This year, that had reached 8,000 attendees, up about 30 per cent on 2024. And Stripe plans to keep the event in San Francisco through 2028.
We meet at the halfway point of the event and Collison, the company's president, is in a good mood.
'It has never felt busier in terms of a time in the industry with all the change we were talking about,' he says.
The previous day saw him take attendees through agentic AI, the next wave of the technology , before nudging Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg into revealing his true feelings on his fellow CEOs.
John Collison with Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg
The Collison brothers first hit the headlines in 2008 when their start-up Auctomatic was bought by Canadian company Live Current Media for a reported $5 million (€4.5 million). Not only did it fund their college education in the US – later put on hold as Stripe took off – but it also gave them a quick introduction to the start-up and acquisition process, along with some valuable lessons.
From the start of Stripe, the brothers have said they are in it for the long haul. Fifteen years later, it remains a private company, despite breathless, almost annual speculation that this could be the year that Stripe finally goes public. In February, it emerged that the company was valued at $91.5 billion.
Stripe is dual headquartered in Dublin and the US, and employs around 8,500 globally.
When Stripe was set up in 2010, it had one aim in mind: to make it easier for developers to accept payments online. Fast forward to 2025 and it has significantly expanded its product range to include fraud prevention, invoices and billing, in-person payments and global payouts.
Customers can use the platform to create physical and virtual cards, or just accept payments without any code needed.
Last year at Sessions, the company announced it would no longer require customers to use its payments platform to access the rest of its services, essentially opening up tools such as billing and invoicing, fraud and risk verification, and in-person payments to companies that may not have been ready to shift everything over to Stripe just yet.
Businesses on Stripe are growing faster than the economy as a whole. The S&P 500 revenue growth is five-ish per cent. By comparison, the businesses on Stripe are growing in the 30s
The result, Collison says, has been positive. 'It's working pretty nicely. The particular thing we said was that oftentimes, for enterprises that have pretty complex stacks, if you ask them to change up everything at once – move their billing and their payments and so on – it makes it a really big job for them,' he says.
'It's a way of making the Stripe functionality more adoptable piecemeal, which, especially with larger customers, makes it more practical for them. We've seen really good adoption of like payments and billing within the enterprise since then.'
Last year, the company hit $1.4 trillion in payments volume, continuing its growth trajectory. But although it is a large figure, it is still a small part of the whole payment ecosystem. That may change, with Collison noting the performance of companies using Stripe.
'Businesses on Stripe are growing faster than the economy as a whole. The S&P 500 revenue growth is five-ish per cent. By comparison, the businesses on Stripe are growing in the 30s. The reason for that is because we've lots of high-growth start-ups, and even for the large enterprises running on Stripe, like Fender, they were using it for the really high growth part of their businesses. And so that's what drives it.'
This year, the focus was on two 'gale force tailwinds' for growth:
cryptocurrency
, specifically stablecoins, and AI.
John Collison (left) with his brother and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, chief executive officer and co-founder of Stripe Inc. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Stripe initially dipped its toe in the crypto waters in 2014 when it became the first major fintech platform to support bitcoin. But with bitcoin's volatility, it pulled back on that only four years later, saying the digital currency had become an asset to be traded rather than a means of exchange, and was becoming less useful for payments.
But Stripe didn't abandon crypto, and for the past few years has been working on a way to facilitate crypto-enabled experiences for customers. At Sessions, the talk was all about the potential of stablecoins – cryptocurrencies that are pegged to a fiat currency.
'For the last 10 or 15 years, there's been this popular 'greyhound track' side of crypto, where people are betting on something going up, something going down, all the meme coins and things like that. We don't really like that part of the world. We don't play in it; it's not our thing. But clearly that is a popular space for a different thing. The thing that's really taken off over the past few years is stablecoins,' he says.
Stablecoins are fully backed by a reserve asset or pegged to the value of a fiat currency, and redeemable. Although they have been around since 2014, it is only recently that stablecoins have seen a rise in popularity.
So what has changed?
'Part of it shows the tech getting mature, where the blockchains had to get good enough. Bitcoin, back 10 years ago, was not a scalable or high performance blockchain where you could put a very high transaction load on it. It is different blockchain technology that has led to these kinds of things,' he explains. 'I think it required maturity of the industry, and then people are getting familiar with the products, and that actually just took quite a few years to play out.'
Patrick (left) and John Collison as teenagers
Stripe bought stablecoin platform Bridge earlier this year, and now offers stablecoin services to more than 100 countries where it hadn't launched Stripe previously.
The move to stablecoins is also in line with Stripe's original purpose: to make it easier for businesses to take payments online.
'That's not lost on us. It is two separate approaches to the same vision, in a way, where we just want to make it easy to move money around the world,' Collison says.
'I feel like the last place they will see adoption is in a purely domestic context. The place where we're seeing all the adoption right now is some kind of international or cross-border use case.'
He compares stablecoins to WhatsApp (owned by Meta), where people used it internationally to avoid text fees, but it has now become almost the default method of communication in many markets.
Stripe is heavily involved in environmental projects through its Frontier fund, at a time when US President Donald Trump's administration has caused others to row back on diversity and inclusion initiatives, and deprioritise climate strategies.
'I am baffled by all the companies doing an about-face on their social initiatives right now. Did you not actually mean it in the first place? Either don't do it, or do it and stay doing it, but don't do this 'DEI is cancelled now',' he says. 'It's very odd to me.'
It is continuing to offer Stripe Climate to customers, which allows them to direct a portion of their revenue to carbon removal initiatives.
'We always had a narrow, specific notion on the climate side of things, which was that climate change is a solvable problem, and we all need to band together and solve it, like we did with lots of other things, like depletion of the ozone layer. We've solved big problems, collectively as humanity before. We thought everyone is sleeping on the carbon removal space, and so we want to encourage that,' he says.
'It's still the case that we need to stimulate the carbon removal space. There can be whatever political winds you want out there in the wider world. It's still a thing that needs to happen. I'm just baffled by all the people doing these, like giant swings.'
Spending so much time in Silicon Valley, it was inevitable that he would take on some of the trappings.
'I am a sucker for the fancy coffee here. I think it's really good. I like that now there's a movement back home with a lot of what I associate with very west coast American phenomena that have made their way back to Ireland,' he says.
'We make IPAs in Ireland now, so finally, when you go to a bar in Ireland, now we have actual craft beer. There's a bunch of these west coast notions that I've got a soft spot for.'
Collison hasn't gone completely native though. He has invested in everything from a mansion in Co Laois to a
Dublin 4
embassy row pile and Weston Airport, which caters for light aircraft.
The Laois property was the former ancestral home of the de Vesci family, and was bought in 2021 for about €20 million. Collison has since invested in restoring the estate, and has continued a tradition of opening its doors to the public as part of a charity event in recent years.
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Stripe cofounder John Collison buys Abbey Leix estate for €20m
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Collison is part-owner of
Weston Airport
, the facility that straddles the border between Dublin and Kildare. The deal came about in 2021, when Brian Conneely sold a majority stake in the business to a group of investors. Collison was part of a group that also included John Brennan, Catherine Greene and Gerald Dundon. An aviation enthusiast, it seemed a natural fit for him.
Weston Airport, near Lucan in Co Dublin. Photograph: Colin Keegan/Collins Dublin
There are
big plans for the facility
, with Collison saying they want to make it the hub for all general aviation in Dublin and the east coast of Ireland. That means flight training, private and corporate traffic, alongside public service uses. Weston is one of the new bases for the Coast Guard's AW189 helicopters.
'Infrastructure needs long-term investment. I've been interested in aviation for a long time, but I view myself as a steward of this pretty important piece of infrastructure,' he says.
'What's notable is that in no city does it make sense to, or do they just try to, smush everything into one airport. You can't have someone who's learning to fly, landing and tying up the runway, with commercial flights barrelling down on top of them. It's not that way in London, it's not that way in Paris, not that way anywhere in Europe.
'But somehow in Dublin, we've ended up, historically, in this place, where we're just putting more and more pressure on Dublin Airport with mixed results. We just want to be the reliever airport, the hub for general aviation, and so we're going to invest in it.'
The nagging question on Stripe persists: when will it go public?
The company is often described as the biggest privately owned fintech, and as it stands, there are no plans to change that.
Stripe may be a technology company, but it is also a financial services provider. Collison points to companies such as Visa and Goldman Sachs, who stayed private for decades before finally floating on the stock market.
'Tech companies sometimes want to float as quickly as humanly possible, and that's their way of working, sometimes because they're more capital intensive. In financial services, the norms are a little bit different.'
There are good reasons to stay private, other than the financial DNA. Stripe has a lot to get done, Collison says, with AI and stablecoins expected to supercharge the payments sector in the coming years.
'We're a private company growing quickly, and it's the busiest time we've had in a long time. There's a whole thing happening with AI and stablecoins, and so we have a lot to do.
'Companies are required to be public if they want to sell large amounts of equity, like sell large amounts of their stock to a retail investor base. That's not a thing we're looking to do. Stripe is a profitable business and we intend to run it that way for a long time. And so it's more that it would be an opt-in project. We've enough work to do,' he says.
'We've now done three completely unrestricted employee share sales, where people can sell, you know, anywhere between zero and 100 per cent of their shareholdings. We tend to flip it on its head where, yeah, I think in Silicon Valley, people want to float the company as quickly as possible, whereas we say, look, there's a whole bunch of actual priorities on the product side in this incredibly fast moving space, and we don't need an opt-in extra project.'
CV
John Collison
Job:
Co-founder and president of Stripe
Age:
34
Something you expect:
He is proud of his Irish heritage and, along with brother Patrick, called Forbes magazine out over an article that claimed the brothers had 'escaped' Limerick, describing it as 'stab city'.
Something that might surprise:
He is a trained pilot. In 2017, he flew a small plane across the Atlantic, with 27 hours of flying over three days.