Business
Irish Rover
By Jonathan Graham published Jul 1, 2008
Patrick Collison is a kid in motion. The 19-year-old Irish entrepreneur ran his first marathon in Copenhagen at 16. He’s since switched to long-distance biking, and this summer he’ll ride the entire 460-kilometre length of Ireland in a day. An avid skier, he’s sped down the Austrian Alps—“Fast movements down the hill are all I’m interested in,” he says. And now he’s climbing to the upper peaks of the tech world. In March, Auctomatic, the company he helped found a year ago, accepted a $5-million buyout from Live Current Media, a Vancouver Web-development firm, making Collison and his two partners, plus his younger brother, millionaires.
In April, Collison came to town for a few days to attend meetings and set up his desk before officially starting work in the Vancouver office in June. He first visited Vancouver last spring, and was charmed by the sun rising above snow-capped mountains, the scene framed by gleaming high-rises. He’d board the Aquabus and spend the day at Stamp’s Landing, working to the “gentle tinkle” of False Creek’s sailboat masts. “How can you not fall in love with a place like this?” he asked.
Skinny, with a lightly freckled face and cropped red hair, Collison doesn’t talk much about his finances. Over whiskey and salad, he launched instead into an earnest discussion of national identity. He considers it “pretentious” to call himself an international citizen, but this son of Limerick has already lived in Boston and San Francisco.
If he had his way, citizens would migrate at will around the globe, unrestricted by anachronistic and arbitrary borders. His friends and co-workers bounce between cities, keeping in touch through Twitter and Facebook. “If you ask me now where I live, I wouldn’t know what the answer is,” he said. Like millions of Irish expats before him, Collison is mindful of losing his national identity, and his accent, in this shiny cosmopolitan future; yet he can imagine never returning to live in Ireland, where he had trouble finding venture capital. In many ways, he embodies the way this city sees itself: wealthy, athletic, tech-savvy, and young. He’s also unencumbered by history, at liberty to move in whichever direction he wants.
