Four Irish listed in Forbes ’30 under 30′ to watch in 2013

Patrick Collison

Four Irish listed in Forbes ’30 under 30′ to watch in 2013
Pictured: Patrick Collison

Four young Irishmen have made it into US business magazine Forbes’ ‘30 under 30’ to watch in 2013, which includes figures such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

They are Limerick entrepreneurs Patrick and John Collison, computer programmer James Whelton and advertising guru Jonathan Cloonan.

The list, which began last year, aims to highlight the “young disrupters, innovators and entrepreneurs’ that are changing the world.

The Collisons were named for their work in the technology sector, having sold their business Auctomatic in 2008 for an estimated €3m. They are now based in Silicon Valley and running an online payments company called Stripe, which analysts estimate to be valued at between €500m and €1bn.

Whelton set up CoderDojo a year ago aimed at getting more school children to learn how to programme and write computer code. He now heads up a group with co-founder Bill Liao that runs 130 ‘dojos’ in 22 countries, teaching 10,000 children to code for free every week.

Based in Singapore, Cloonan brokers multi-million-dollar TV deals in Asia and the Pacific region for GroupM, which is part of the biggest advertising group in the world WPP.