[27.03.2008 first posted on silicon republic]
Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison have become millionaires overnight after the tech firm Auctomatic, of which they are co-founders, sold to Canadian firm Live Current Media for a figure not far off €10m.

Auctomatic had its beginnings in early 2007 when the Collisons, now aged 19 and 17, started an auction site called Shuppa which soon merged with Boso, a similar UK site for buying and selling items, run by cousins Harj and Kul Taggar.
The merger was to produce Auctomatic which had already received over US$400,000 in funding by July 2007 from Silicon Valley investors, including Paul Buchheit who created and developed Google’s Gmail.
The Collisons, who had enough of a stake in Auctomatic to make them each millionaires in their own right, concentrate on the technical end of things and Patrick, who was CTO in Auctomatic will now join Live Current as director of engineering.
Patrick says of Auctomatic’s success: “Obviously we thought there was a chance of it going well or we wouldn’t have pursued it but in one sense we did kind of go out on a limb. John took six months out from school and I deferred my degree at MIT.
“We did go in with the intent of making money but if you had asked me 10 months ago to put money on it I’m not sure what I would have done.”
While John will remain in Ireland to finish his Leaving Certificate, Patrick is soon off to Vancouver in his new role as director of engineering, to be joined by John at a later stage.
Patrick’s advice to young technology entrepreneurs in Ireland is: “Go out and launch it, these days it takes no money at all. It is possible to build something that really takes off.”
By Marie Boran