1
DROMINEER
EXT. DROMINEER VILLAGE, COUNTY TIPPERARY, IRELAND — DAY — 1998
A tiny village on the shores of Lough Derg. Population: a few hundred. Green hills. Stone walls. Sheep. This is not Silicon Valley. This is not even Dublin. This is the kind of place the world forgets exists.
Inside a modest house, LILY COLLISON homeschools her two sons. PATRICK, 9, and JOHN, 7, sit at a kitchen table covered in textbooks, circuit boards, and a chunky desktop computer.
LILY COLLISON
The school in the village is fine, but it's not enough. You two are different. You need to go at your own pace.
PATRICK
((not looking up from the computer))
Mam, I figured out how to make the program sort numbers faster. It's called a binary search.
LILY COLLISON
You're nine, Patrick.
PATRICK
So?
INT. COLLISON KITCHEN — NIGHT — 2003
PATRICK, now 14, is teaching himself Lisp — a programming language most professional developers find impenetrable. JOHN, 12, watches over his shoulder.
JOHN COLLISON
Why Lisp? Nobody uses Lisp.
PATRICK
That's exactly why. The languages nobody uses are the ones that teach you to think differently. Paul Graham says Lisp is the language that makes you a better programmer in every other language.
JOHN COLLISON
Who's Paul Graham?
PATRICK
He started Y Combinator. It's a thing in America where they fund startups. We should apply someday.
JOHN COLLISON
((laughing))
We're in Tipperary.
PATRICK
For now.
INT. BT YOUNG SCIENTIST EXHIBITION, DUBLIN — DAY — 2005
PATRICK COLLISON, AGE 16, WINS THE BT YOUNG SCIENTIST AWARD
Patrick stands on a stage in Dublin. He has just won Ireland's most prestigious science competition for young people — for creating a new programming language called Croma. He is the youngest winner in the competition's history.
PATRICK
((at the podium))
I built a programming language that makes it easier to write artificial intelligence programs. I call it Croma. Thank you.
He steps off stage. The applause is polite. Nobody in the room understands what a sixteen-year-old from Tipperary has just accomplished. Patrick doesn't mind. He's already thinking about what comes next.
2
AUCTOMATIC
INT. MIT CAMPUS, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — DAY — 2006
PATRICK, 17, walks through MIT's campus. He has been admitted early. He is one of the youngest students. His dorm room already has three monitors and a whiteboard covered in diagrams.
PATRICK
((V.O.))
MIT was incredible. But I couldn't shake the feeling that I was learning about building things instead of actually building things.
INT. PATRICK'S DORM ROOM — NIGHT — 2007
Patrick and John (now 16, visiting from Ireland) are on a video call. They've been building a tool called Auctomatic — software that helps eBay power sellers manage their auctions.
JOHN COLLISON
We have five hundred users. They're paying us. This is an actual business.
PATRICK
It's more than that. It's proof that two kids from Tipperary can build software that Americans will pay for. From Ireland.
INT. CONFERENCE ROOM — DAY — MARCH 2008
AUCTOMATIC ACQUIRED BY LIVE CURRENT MEDIA FOR $5 MILLION
Patrick and John sit across from a table of suits. Patrick is 19. John is 17. They have just sold their first company for five million dollars. Patrick is still enrolled at MIT.
PATRICK
((after signing))
That was interesting. But the real question is: what's the biggest problem we can solve next?
3
SEVEN LINES OF CODE
INT. PATRICK'S APARTMENT, CAMBRIDGE — NIGHT — 2009
Patrick has dropped out of MIT. He sits with John, now 18, who has moved to America. They're both trying to accept payments for a side project and hitting the same wall every developer hits.
JOHN COLLISON
I've been filling out this PayPal integration for three days. There are fourteen API calls just to process a credit card.
PATRICK
It's insane. Accepting money online — the most fundamental thing a business does — requires a merchant account, a payment gateway, a processor, PCI compliance, and weeks of integration. It's 2009. This should be seven lines of code.
Silence. They look at each other.
JOHN COLLISON
Why isn't it?
PATRICK
Because no one's built it yet.
Patrick opens his laptop. Creates a new repository. Names it: /dev/payments. This is the moment Stripe is born.
INT. Y COMBINATOR OFFICE — DAY — 2010
Patrick and John pitch at Y Combinator. The pitch is devastatingly simple. Patrick opens a laptop, shows a blank web page, types seven lines of JavaScript, and refreshes.
PATRICK
That page can now accept credit cards. Visa. Mastercard. Amex. Seven lines of code. No merchant account. No gateway. No paperwork.
The room is silent. Then someone says:
DEVELOPER
((from the audience))
That's it? That's all it takes?
PATRICK
That's all it should ever take.
INT. PETER THIEL'S OFFICE — DAY — 2011
PETER THIEL, who co-founded PayPal and knows the payments industry intimately, sits across from the Collison brothers.
PETER THIEL
I built PayPal. I know how hard payments are. What you're proposing — abstracting away the entire payment stack into an API — that's either brilliant or naive.
PATRICK
PayPal solved payments for buyers. We're solving payments for developers. The people who build the internet shouldn't need a finance degree to accept money.
PETER THIEL
I'm in. Two million.
Stripe launched publicly in September 2011. Within months, it was processing payments for thousands of startups. The seven-line integration became legendary — a rallying cry for developer-first design. Companies that would later become worth billions — Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, Shopify — all built their payments on Stripe.
INT. STRIPE OFFICE, SAN FRANCISCO — DAY — 2014
The office has grown. Hundreds of engineers. Patrick walks through, stopping at desks, reviewing code, asking questions. He reads every design document personally.
PATRICK
The API is the product. If a developer has to read documentation for more than five minutes to integrate payments, we've failed. The documentation IS the product.
INT. STRIPE ATLAS LAUNCH — DAY — 2016
Patrick announces Stripe Atlas — a product that lets anyone in the world incorporate a U.S. company and start accepting payments in days.
PATRICK
There are brilliant entrepreneurs in Lagos and Bangalore and Nairobi who can't accept payments because they can't get a U.S. bank account. We're removing that barrier. Atlas incorporates your company in Delaware, opens a bank account at Silicon Valley Bank, and connects you to Stripe — all in one click.
Stripe Atlas has helped incorporate over 50,000 companies from 140+ countries. Patrick Collison didn't just build a payments company — he built the infrastructure for global entrepreneurship.
4
THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE INTERNET
INT. STRIPE ALL-HANDS — DAY — 2019
STRIPE VALUED AT $35 BILLION
Patrick addresses the entire company. Behind him, a map shows Stripe's operations spanning 40+ countries.
PATRICK
We process hundreds of billions of dollars a year. But we're not a payments company anymore. We're the economic infrastructure of the internet. Payments, billing, fraud detection, tax compliance, incorporation, lending — if it involves money moving on the internet, it should run on Stripe.
INT. STRIPE OFFICE — DAY — 2021
STRIPE VALUED AT $95 BILLION — MOST VALUABLE PRIVATE COMPANY IN AMERICA
Patrick sits in his office. Books are stacked everywhere — physics, economics, history, philosophy. He reads voraciously, often recommending books to employees. His desk has no personal photos, just a single monitor with a terminal open.
JOHN COLLISON
((entering))
Ninety-five billion. We're worth more than most of the banks that process our transactions.
PATRICK
Valuation is a distraction. The question is: how much of the internet's GDP runs through us? The answer should be all of it.
INT. STRIPE PRESS OFFICE — DAY — 2023
Patrick reviews galley proofs for Stripe Press — the publishing arm he created to publish books about progress, science, and civilization. Not a typical tech CEO side project.
PATRICK
Most people in tech think about the next quarter. I think about the next century. Stripe Press publishes books about how civilizations grow, how progress happens, how we build things that last. Because payments are just the beginning. The real project is increasing the GDP of the internet.
EXT. DROMINEER VILLAGE — DAY — PRESENT
The village hasn't changed much. Stone walls. Green hills. Sheep. Lough Derg still shimmers. The Collison family home still stands. Inside, LILY COLLISON sits at the same kitchen table where she homeschooled two boys who would become among the youngest billionaires in history.
LILY COLLISON
((to a visitor))
People always ask me how I raised two billionaires. I didn't raise billionaires. I raised two curious boys who asked questions and wouldn't accept "that's just how it works" as an answer. The rest was them.
INT. STRIPE HEADQUARTERS — DUSK
PATRICK sits at his desk. On one screen, Stripe's real-time transaction map — a globe pulsing with thousands of payments per second, every second, across every continent. On his other screen, a terminal window. He's still writing code.
PATRICK
((typing))
Seven lines. It always comes back to seven lines.
He hits enter. Somewhere in the world, a new business accepts its first payment.
Stripe processes over $1 trillion in payments annually. Patrick Collison became a billionaire at 31. He remains CEO, still reviews pull requests, and still believes the best code is the code you don't have to write. The homeschooled kid from a village of 200 people built the financial infrastructure for millions of businesses worldwide. Dromineer still doesn't have a traffic light.
FADE OUT.