DURBAN - 27-year-old John Collison is the youngest self-made billionaire in the world and has attributed his success to luck and his employees.
He and his brother Patrick, 29, are the co-founders of payments company Stripe, that has been valued in fundraising at $9.2 billion (more than R123 million).
In a recent podcast with NPR, the Collison brothers spoke about their journey of how they started and sold their first company before they were 20. They would then Stripe, a company that operates the payment system of companies like Kickstarter and Target.
Patrick and John Collison Photo: Facebook
In the interview, John was asked how much of the company's success can be attributed to skill and intelligence and how much of it can be attributed to luck.
He said, "I think the question is less about, you know, how much can be attributed to my skill and intelligence and instead to the skill of the hundreds of people that have gotten Stripe to where it is".
John added, "I guess I would say that skill and intelligence and especially, most importantly, intense application and hard, I think all those things are necessary."
On luck, John said "I think that had they not been there, had there not been so many people who just came up with so many smart ways of doing things and, you know, in many cases toiled at such length there's not a chance, not a sliver of a chance that we would be here. But I also that the luck was required too. There are, again, groups of people who are smarter and harder-working than us who just didn't get the same good fortune."
According to Forbes, John is worth at $1 billion (R13,6 billion. John's brother Patrick is has the same net worth, $1 billion (R13,6 billion).
Stripe
According to the Stripe website, Stripe is a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the Internet. Businesses of all sizes use Strip software to accept payments and manage their business online.
Recently Stripe along with DBS and Visa have partnered with Carousel to create CarouPay. Carousel operates an online marketplace and CarouPay is a mobile payment service that will allow users to make payments without having to rely on third-party transfer platforms.