The Brothers Stripe, Richest Self-Made Irish Billionaires
By Charles Kelly
Author of Yes, Money Can Buy You Happiness and creator of Money Tips Podcast
Yesterday we talked about Airbnb rise from zero to $31 billion. Today I want to talk about a similar sized company in terms of valuation which could be floated on the stock market.
If you’ve ever sold goods or services online, you may have come across a payment system called Stripe. I had never heard it of it until I started using click funnels but it seems to work very well.
The people behind Stripe are John and Patrick Collison who sold their first company for $5 million when they were still teenagers. Now, a little more than a decade later, their second start-up is valued at $35 billion, making them Ireland’s richest entrepreneurs, Bloomberg reports.
The latest valuation for their online payment processor, Stripe Inc., gives John, 29, and Patrick, 31, an estimated net worth of $4.2 billion each, according to calculations by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, enough for inclusion in the 500-member ranking. Stripe declined to comment.
Did they build this company up organically using their own money or remortgaging their houses? No, they used other people’s money, such as investors and capitalists.
This week, Stripe announced that it had raised $250 million in its latest funding round, giving the San Francisco-based company a valuation of $35 billion. The only U.S. start-ups that had higher valuations this year are vaping giant Juul Labs Inc. and We Co., the parent of office-sharing real estate firm WeWork.
However, the valuations for both of those companies are now in doubt. A growing number of vaping illnesses and deaths has prompted some governments to ban Juul’s products, and Wall Street estimates for We’s valuation have tumbled following scrutiny of co-founder Adam Neumann’s unorthodox financial dealings with the firm.
The Irish brothers’ fortunes exceed those of fellow countrymen Denis O’Brien, the telecom tycoon, and financier Dermot Desmond. The Collisons’ wealth ranks alongside Silicon Valley peers such as Uber Technologies Inc. co-founder Travis Kalanick and ahead of Airbnb Inc.’s Brian Chesky, Snap Inc.’s Evan Spiegel and Spotify Technology SA’s Daniel Ek, according to calculations.
I often watch a show called Dragons den, shark tank in America, where entrepreneurs pitch their ideas before a panel of multimillionaires. I’m often dismayed at how the panel dismiss ideas so carelessly, often on the basis that “it has been done before” and the competition is too tough for a new start up to get a foothold.
If the brothers behind Stripe had that attitude, they would never have started the company on the basis that the market had been sewn up already by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and so on.
New businesses do not have to reinvent the wheel or come up with a completely new invention. You don’t even have to find a cure for baldness to become a billionaire! Amazon were not the first company to sell products online and they won’t be the last. Uber was not the first company that run a fleet of cabs and Airbnb were not the first rent to rent accommodation provider. What all of these companies were did was to put a twist on an existing idea or find a new way to solve a problem using existing innovation and technology.
Word of the Day
Floatation
Flotation is the process of converting a private company into a public company by issuing shares available for the public. It allows companies to obtain financing externally instead of using retained earnings to fund new projects or expansion. Source: Investopedia
There are more examples and practical steps to getting rich and being happy in my book, Yes, money can buy happiness, I cover the 3 R’s of Money Management, the Money B.E.L.I.E.F System and much more. Check it out on Amazon http://bit.ly/2MoneyBook.
If you would like more information about the Cyprus ‘Golden Visa’ investment programme, email charles@charleskelly.net
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