Precocious? Not half. But for the Collisons, this kind of fearless ambition was par for the course. In 2005, at the age of just 16, Patrick had won first place at the Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. And in 2016, just six years after founding Stripe, John became the youngest self-made billionaire in history.
The brothers now live in San Francisco – but they haven't left Ireland behind. John, for instance, has funded university programs in his native country, while both Collisons backed a think tank to tackle Ireland's housing crisis.
Adrienne Gormley
Adrienne Gormley's CV reads like a who's who of global tech. The veteran Irish businesswoman has held leadership positions at cloud storage pioneer Dropbox, challenger bank N26 and electronics company Creative Labs. She also spent the best part of a decade at Google.
More recently, Gormley has lent her talents to cloud-powered companies at the vanguard of sustainability and ecology.
From January to December 2024, she was COO of Sylvera – a London-based carbon data provider that helps organisations measure and deliver against net-zero targets.
She's also spent more than two years as an independent board director at Monta. This Danish software company builds solutions to help EV drivers and infrastructure providers make the most of this growing technology.
It's cloud computing for the greater good – and we're all for it.
PJ Hough
PJ Hough was born in Manchester, England, to Irish parents. However, he spent the bulk of his career at Microsoft's offices in Redmond, Washington.
He earns a spot on our list, though, for his tenure as CPO of Citrix – a software company best known for its virtualisation solutions.
Virtualisation is one of the core technologies behind modern cloud computing. And while Citrix isn't as well-known as market leaders like VMware and Oracle, it still netted a not-too-shabby $3.2 billion in revenue in 2021.
While at Citrix, Hough helped develop the company's machine learning capabilities – technologies that are now redefining the digital landscape at large. Hats off to Hough.
Hazel Murray
Hazel Murray has many strings to her digital bow. This Cork-based academic has worked as a cybersecurity lecturer at MTU and a visiting cryptography researcher at the University of Chicago, among other things.
She's also the brains behind QCloud – a visionary new project that provides scalable access to quantum computing resources through the cloud.
Funded by the EU OCRE initiative, QCloud is open to researchers throughout Ireland and is free to use. This means research teams can explore the potential of quantum computing without the need for big bank accounts or bleeding-edge hardware.
The project is powered by Amazon's AWS cloud platform. As Murray
told CyberInnovate, "The AWS infrastructure and the research environment developed as part of this project will not only improve the quality of Irish quantum research but will also provide ease of collaboration between national and international distributed research teams, promoting cross border collaboration and resource sharing".
