Patrick Collison
timesonline.co.uk
From "PC wizard who taught himself how to be a teenage millionaire" by Tom Lyons in the Business section of The Sunday Times, 4 January 2009:
At the age of just 20, Patrick Collison has made millions from selling his internet software business and now holds a dream job in Vancouver working for Live Current Media, the international technology and media company.
Last year, Live Current Media paid Collison and his co-founders $5m (€3.2m) in cash and shares for Auctomatic, a web-based software for heavy users of the eBay auction site.
Collison is restrained on the subject of the deal. "People get good ideas in technology and they sell them," he said. "It's not that unusual."
Collison started work at Live Current Media soon afterwards, The company hopes to recruit his brother, John, who is two years younger, as soon as he finishes school in Ireland.
By most standards, Collison has made it already, with a decade of computer programming under his belt. It's hard not to conclude, though, that there is a lot more success ahead for the Limerick-born computer code wizard.
When he was 10, Collison started to study textbooks on computer languages. I taught muself about programming, not school," he said. What he was working on was an idea beyond most college students, never mind school pupils.
At 16, he developed Croma, a new programming language for creating web applications. He had been working on building websites for local businesses but was frustrated that nothing was quite good enough for what he wanted to do.
"I wanted to make something better," he said. Croma was so good that he won Ireland's BT Young Scientist of the Year and came in second in the EU Contest for Young Scientists.
"It was great to win the young scientist," he said. "It opened doors and I got to know some great people."
The year before he won, his entry on artificial intelligence called Emulating Human Response had earned him second prize in the Irish awards. Collison didn't let the awards go to his head. He ignored advances fro IT firms and instead checked into Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the hothouse in Boston, at 17.
After a year he dropped out to found his first business with John and two American friends. "We were using eBay and could just see that there was a way to better organise things for people who were using it a lot," Collison said.
The result was Auctomatic. It allows millions of users of eBay to track what they sell and how they do it. It also lets them track traffic on their online auctions so they can work out the best selling strategy.
The technology was better than anything else on the market. Overnight, the Collison brothers found themselves at the centre of a bidding war between three firms. Not bad going for a company just 10 months old. Live Current Media emerged victorious.
It realised that the ideas behind Auctomatic could be used not just for eBay but also in other online businesses, and was prepared to pay to acquire the company and Collison's brains. As part of the deal, Collison moved to Vancouver to work for Auctomatic's new owner.
Auctomatic is a "fun" place to work, says Collison. It's hard not to believe him as he describes life in an apartment near his new employers' headquarters. "The only bad thing is how freezing it gets during the winter," he said.
He is working on developing better ways of interacting better ways of interacting with online communities across a portfolio of websites managed by Live Current. These include such names as Perfume.com, the discount fragrance seller, and Cricket.com, an online fantasy cricket website.
"It's interesting working with online communities," he said. "You can really try out new things."
This curiosity can be seen in everything he doesn and is most clearly revealed in his postings on the internet.
Like any good techie, Collison has his own homepage and regularly updates a blog with reams of compuer language that is broken up with quotes from people who inspire him, such as Myron Scholes, the Nobel prize-winning financial economist.
His title at Auctomatic is "chief bottle washer", although he also goes by the official title of director of engineering with Live Current. Media coverage of his achievements can be accessed through his homepage by clicking on the word "narcissim".
In his spare time, Collison has run a marathon and enjoys long-distance cycling. Even this isn't enough, however. "I am learning to fly at the moment," he said.
He also expects that he will spread his wings again by starting a new business in the future.
"I really like where I am working. We have a great team," he said but added: "I was always going to start a business and I have always been interested in business. I love starting new things."
For the moment, though, his focus is very much on the job.
The Young Scientist Exhibition opens on Tuesday at the RDS, Dublin, Ireland.
The preceding item was written by Tom Lyons in the print edition of The Sunday Times, January 4, 2009.