Stars of Stripe: The online payments company is set to float, but how will it go and what does it mean for the Collison brothers?

Patrick and John Collison once boasted they ‘could increase the GDP of the internet’. Now they stand on the cusp of an IPO which could value their company at up to $200 billion.

Patrick and John Collison, founders of Stripe who have started the ball rolling on a public listing for Stripe that could value the company at close to $200 billion. Picture: Pamela Littky/CPi Syndicationl

Patrick Collison made his first appearance at the Sun Valley conference, known as “billionaire summer camp”, in 2013. There are several pictures from his time there. They show a man just turned 24, the co-founder of a promising payments platform called Stripe, still slightly awed by his surroundings.

That’s understandable. The Sun Valley conference is a low-key version of the Davos event in Switzerland. The difference is that while the billionaires go to Davos to ...