Patrick Collison
'May the wind be always at your back' is the Irish blessing for a swift journey. It evidently worked for Patrick Collison, whose rise from schoolboy coder in rural Ireland to Silicon Valley tech founder and billionaire philanthropist has been rapid. Collison, now 36, launched his first startup in 2007 at 18, and by 21 had co-founded the business-payments platform Stripe, recently valued at around $91.5 billion.
Speed is also the byword for Collison's approach to philanthropy, which is focused on accelerating scientific progress. In 2020 he co-launched Fast Grants, a rapid-funding system for scientists researching solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic. The following year he co-founded the nonprofit Arc Institute, launched with an initial endowment of $650 million from Collison and other donors including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Good Ventures co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna. Arc, collaborating with top universities such as Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley, aims to empower and expedite the work of scientists researching complex diseases by providing them with no-strings-attached, multi-year funding, freeing them from the grind and uncertainty of applying for external grants.
In January, Arc announced a partnership with Nvidia to fast-track scientific research by developing and publicly sharing powerful computational models and tools that advance biomedical discovery—including its recently launched open-source model, EVO 2, which combines AI and biology to help researchers uncover potentially life-saving targeted therapies. The goal: 'to accelerate scientific progress, understand the root causes of disease, and narrow the gap between discoveries and impact on patients.'
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