For two brothers, Patrick and John Collison, from the Irish village of Drominer, things have taken off over the past twelve years. Unable to find funding back home for their idea of ​​a more effective online payment service for merchants, they moved to Silicon Valley in 2010 and accepted Y Combinator, a renowned startup incubator. PayPalFunded by founders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Since then, her online payment service Stripe has gone through the roof. At a current valuation of $74 billion, Stripe is not only the most valuable company from a European founder in Silicon Valley — it’s also the most valuable in high-tech Valley that has yet to go public. Stripe reportedly had $13 billion in revenue last year and, according to insiders, has been profitable for several years. But now the two brothers – Patrick is the CEO, and his younger brother John is his deputy – are still cutting: they faced mass layoffs of their employees, the first in the history of the company. “We’ve hired too much for the times we’re in now,” Patrick Collison explains to Hard Cut. About 1,100 employees must leave Stripe to reduce it to less than 7,000.