Patrick was born in Ireland in '88, and currently spends most of his life programming (with Lisp and Smalltalk), reading, and cycling. He came second in the Irish Young Scientist contest in 2004, and won the same competition a year later, with a project on a new dialect of Lisp. Later in 2005, he also came second in the European Union Contest for Young Scientists. He started college at MIT in 2006, but deferred to co-found Auctomatic in early 2007 with his brother John Collison, Kulveer Taggar and Harjeet Taggar.