Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison speaks to YSTE alumnus Jack O’Reilly Kennedy | Stripe YSTE 2026

Well, there's the sort of personal reasons and then there's the Stripe reasons. The Young Scientist was a huge event and a huge kind of presence in my life and in John's. It was the first time, I think, that school is great but it's a prescribed set of train tracks, right? And it's hard to do something wholly unorthodox. The Young Scientist was the first time where I feel like I had the chance to do something of my own volition, something that I thought was interesting just for its own sake, and then to have other people take it seriously. That was, you know, just for me, that was a very big... and so I feel it changed my life. I don't think I'd be where I am without it. It's because of the Young Scientists that I had the chance to first travel to the US back in 2005, and then everything kind of followed from that. And then from a Stripe point of view, I mean, we work with the most innovative people and innovative companies around the world. And it's the most fun, rewarding part of Stripe. And we think that Ireland has so much potential. And so it's why we do immersive software engineering at UL. And if anyone in the room is not familiar with it, you should check it out. It's a great course. It's why we're so excited to work with Patch. And it's why we're here at the Young Scientists. I think that Irish talent and Irish people compare, you know, very favorably with any other country, any other place in the world. I've traveled a lot around the world and I now say that with conviction and confidence. And so for us, it's a huge honor to be able to support it.

Well, look, there's always, I'm sure, some amount of luck. But I definitely worked harder the second time. The first time I didn't know anything about it. I didn't really know what to expect. It was kind of hard to calibrate. And the second time I feel I had a better sense for what the standard was. And I think in many things hard work is not sufficient in that there are lots of other factors that go into success including luck. But in most domains that I've looked at I think it is necessary. And second time round I worked really hard.

Sure. So you know Stripe works as you just heard in software technology and financial services but I love science. And when I was in school I thought I'd become a scientist. Fast Grants was a project that we started during COVID to rapidly distribute funding to scientists who are trying to repurpose their work for things relevant to the pandemic. And we started because the traditional legacy institutions, the funding bodies that would normally support this kind of work, they were sort of too slow to adapt. And so the premise of Fast Grants is we made funding decisions in 48 hours rather than in the months that one of these existing bodies would normally take. And we ended up funding a bunch of work that ended up being quite important. I mean my favorite one is you know in the beginning we were getting these swabs tickling our brain cells. One of the projects that Fast Grants funded showed that saliva tests work just as well. And so we were able to switch to those. And then the Arc Institute which I founded with my wife, who by the way I met at the European Young Scientist competition, is a nonprofit organization focused on biology. And there's kind of two ideas behind it. One, we're trying to bring the possibilities of AI to biology which requires kind of different ways of organizing. And then secondly, we're trying to cure a complex disease. You know, we don't have time to go into all the details, but you can kind of divide human diseases into three categories. There's infectious diseases like COVID, the flu, the cold, you know, whatever. There are monogenic diseases, they're called, like Huntington's. There's like one genetic variant. You can screen for those. And then pretty much everything else is a complex disease. There's some interaction between the environment and your genes. And you know, some complicated process. So most cancers, most neurological diseases, most autoimmune diseases, etc. Humanity has never cured a complex disease. You know, we've worked really hard. We've made amazing breakthroughs in medicine. We've never cured a single complex disease. And so with ARC, we're I mean, obviously don't know if we're going to make any if it's going to work, but the goal is to try. And we started it four years ago. And so, you know, check back in year 10 maybe and we'll be able to give a proper update.

I mean look there's so many. I mean I think the thing that's so... the sort of the mental model that I had when I was in school was you know we kind of understand all the things and it's really fun to learn about them and to maybe come to understand how our understanding developed. But you know we've largely sort of checked the boxes. Whereas because when you get deeper into it, I think that it's much closer to we don't know anything. We don't know why people sleep. We don't know how sleep works. Like you know, it's one of the most basic phenomena in the existence of humanity. We spend a third of our time doing this thing and we don't know what's going on. I was recently thinking about thunderstorms and I just realized that I didn't have a great understanding of what exactly is going on in a thunderstorm. And as you dig into it you realize like you start reading some papers we don't really know exactly why thunderstorms form and you know we can see all these things about static electricity and lightning and all the rest but like if thunderstorms didn't exist we don't know enough to predict them. So I think the right mental model is sort of much more this beginner's mind. Humanity is still much closer to the starting line. Maybe it's bad news in the sense that if you you know the cold, we haven't solved the cold. One of the most basic afflictions of our existence. So you know it's kind of bad news that we're still in the starting blocks. But then the good news is if you're ever worried well all the big problems has been solved. No absolutely not. Nothing's been solved. Everything is still in play.