Biography|Patrick Collison — Four Months at MIT, Then Out

Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepted Patrick Collison at seventeen, before he had sat a conventional Irish Leaving Certificate on the usual timetable.

He arrived on the Cambridge, Massachusetts campus around 2006. A 2008 Vancouver Magazine profile, written while the Auctomatic sale was still news, said he lasted four months before leaving to build a company.

The pin is the public Institute, not a dorm room. Killian Court and the Great Dome on 77 Massachusetts Avenue are the front the visitor actually finds.

He had already built Shuppa in Limerick with his brother John in 2007, a name that plays on the Irish word siopa, shop.

Enterprise Ireland did not fund it. Y Combinator in California did, after Paul Graham steered the Irish teenager toward two Oxford graduates, Harjeet and Kulveer Taggar, who were building a related eBay tool.

The merged company was Auctomatic. In late March 2008 Live Current Media of Vancouver bought it. Contemporary Irish papers put the price around $5 million, or about €3.2 million; no official closing statement is on the public record.

Patrick was nineteen. John was seventeen and still at Castletroy College.

MIT is where the American chapter begins, and also where it first stops. He did not graduate.

Photo: Patrick Collison at Northern Voice, 2008, randy stewart, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons