Confinity
Confinity Inc. was an American software company based in Silicon Valley, best known as the creator of PayPal. It was founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek, initially as a PalmPilot payments and cryptography company. Company The company was launched in 1998 as Fieldlink and later renamed Confinity. Many of Confinity's initial recruits were alumni of '' The Stanford Review,'' also co-founded by Thiel, and most early engineers hailed from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recruited by Levchin. Early investors included Nokia Ventures, Deutsche Bank, and William N. Melton, the founder of CyberCash. Confinity's second office, 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, California, is also known for being the former office of Google and Logitech. Confinity launched its milestone product, PayPal, in late 1999. Confinity merged with X.com, founded by Elon Musk, in March 2000. The merged company became known as X.com because this was thought to ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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PayPal
PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support E-commerce payment system, online money transfers; it serves as an electronic alternative to traditional Banknote, paper methods such as cheque, checks and money orders. The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites and many other commercial and company users, for which it charges an international addition bank charges fee. Established in 1998 as Confinity, PayPal went public through an initial public offering, IPO in 2002. It became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay later that year, valued at $1.5 billion. In 2015 eBay corporate spin-off, spun off PayPal to its shareholders, and PayPal became an independent company again. The company was ranked 143rd on the 2022 Fortune 500, ''Fortune'' 500 of the largest United States corporations by revenue. Since 2023, PayPal is a member of the MACH Al ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Peter Thiel
Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. According to ''Forbes'', as of May 2025, Thiel's estimated net worth stood at US$20.8 billion, making him the 103rd-richest individual in the world. After graduating from Stanford, Thiel began his career as a clerk for Judge James Larry Edmondson, worked as a securities lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell, a speechwriter for former U.S. secretary of education William Bennett, and a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse. He founded Thiel Capital Management in 1996 and co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin and Luke Nosek in 1998. He was the chief executive officer of PayPal until its sale to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Following PayPal, Thiel founded Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund based in San Francisco. In 2003, he launched Palantir Tec ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Elon Musk
Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman. He is known for his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has been considered the wealthiest person in the world since 2021; ''Forbes'' estimates his net worth to be . Born to a wealthy family in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk emigrated in 1989 to Canada. He received bachelor's degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 before moving to California, United States, to pursue business ventures. In 1995, Musk co-founded the software company Zip2. Following its sale in 1999, he co-founded X.com, an online payment company that later merged to form PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002. That year, Musk also became an American citizen. In 2002, Musk founded the space technology company SpaceX, becoming its CEO and chief engineer; the company has since led innovations in reusable rockets and commercial spaceflight. Musk joined ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Max Levchin
Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchin (born July 11, 1975) is a Ukrainian-American software engineer and businessman. In 1998, he co-founded the company that eventually became PayPal. Levchin made contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts and was the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA challenge response human test. He founded or co-founded the companies Slide.com, HVF, and Affirm. He was an early investor in Yelp and was their largest shareholder in 2012. He left a leadership role in Yelp in 2015. Levchin was a producer for the movie '' Thank You for Smoking''. Early life and education Born in Kyiv, then part of the Ukrainian SSR, to a Ukrainian-Jewish family, Levchin moved to the United States and settled in Chicago in 1991. [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Software Industry
The software industry includes businesses for development, maintenance and publication of software that are using different business models, mainly either "license/maintenance based" (on-premises) or " Cloud based" (such as SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, MBaaS, MSaaS, DCaaS etc.). The industry also includes software services, such as training, documentation, consulting and data recovery. The software and computer services industry spends more than 11% of its net sales for Research & Development which is in comparison with other industries the second highest share after pharmaceuticals & biotechnology. History The first company founded to provide software products and services was Computer Usage Company in 1955. Before that time, computers were programmed either by customers, or the few commercial computer vendors of the time, such as Sperry Rand and IBM. The software industry expanded in the early 1960s, shortly after computers became widely available. Demand for software was created b ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city of Palo Alto was incorporated in 1894 by the American industrialist Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Stanford, when they founded Stanford University in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr. Palo Alto later expanded and now borders East Palo Alto, California, East Palo Alto, Mountain View, California, Mountain View, Los Altos, California, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, California, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, California, Stanford, Portola Valley, California, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park, California, Menlo Park. As of the 2020 United States census, the population was 68,572. Palo Alto has one of the highest costs of living in the United States, and its residents are among the most educated in the country. However, it has ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Companies Based In Champaign County, Illinois
A company, abbreviated as co., is a legal entity representing an association of legal people, whether natural, juridical or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members share a common purpose and unite to achieve specific, declared goals. Over time, companies have evolved to have the following features: "separate legal personality, limited liability, transferable shares, investor ownership, and a managerial hierarchy". The company, as an entity, was created by the state which granted the privilege of incorporation. Companies take various forms, such as: * voluntary associations, which may include nonprofit organizations * business entities, whose aim is to generate sales, revenue, and profit * financial entities and banks * programs or educational institutions A company can be created as a legal person so that the company itself has limited liability as members perform or fail to discharge their duties according to the publicly declared incorporation pu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Financial Services Companies Established In 1998
Finance refers to monetary resources and to the study and discipline of money, currency, assets and liabilities. As a subject of study, is a field of Business Administration wich study the planning, organizing, leading, and controlling of an organization's resources to achieve its goals. Based on the scope of financial activities in financial systems, the discipline can be divided into personal, corporate, and public finance. In these financial systems, assets are bought, sold, or traded as financial instruments, such as currencies, loans, bonds, shares, stocks, options, futures, etc. Assets can also be banked, invested, and insured to maximize value and minimize loss. In practice, risks are always present in any financial action and entities. Due to its wide scope, a broad range of subfields exists within finance. Asset-, money-, risk- and investment management aim to maximize value and minimize volatility. Financial analysis assesses the viability, stability, and pro ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The PayPal Wars
''The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth'' (2004) is a book by former PayPal marketing executive Eric M. Jackson. Description ''The PayPal Wars'' is an insider's perspective on the people and events that helped create the company, and its acquisition by eBay in 2002. The book recounts PayPal's clashes with lawyers, regulators, and the American Mafia. Many of PayPal's founding employees went on to start other companies like LinkedIn, YouTube, and Yelp, Inc.; they would become known as the PayPal Mafia. Critical reception ''The PayPal Wars'' received acclaim for its writing style and personal narrative. ''The Washington Times'' said the book is "an absorbing insider's story." Radley Balko of ''Reason'' said that it "reads like a spy novel", while David R. Henderson of '' TCS Daily'' said, "It's rare that a business book is a page turner, but ''The PayPal Wars'' is". Tom Peters Thomas J. Peters (born November 7, 1942), an Am ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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EBay
eBay Inc. ( , often stylized as ebay) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that allows users to buy or view items via retail sales through online marketplaces and websites in 190 markets worldwide. Sales occur either via online auctions or "buy it now" instant sales, and the company charges commissions to sellers upon sales. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in September 1995. It has 132 million yearly active buyers worldwide and handled $73 billion in transactions in 2023, 48% of which were in the United States. In 2023, the company had a take rate (revenue as a percentage of volume) of 13.81%. The company is listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market and is a component of the S&P 500 and formerly the Nasdaq-100. eBay can be used by individuals, companies and governments to purchase and sell almost any legal, non-controversial item. eBay's auctions use a Vickrey auction (sealed-bid) proxy bid system. Buyers and sellers may r ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Nasdaq
The Nasdaq Stock Market (; National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the U.S. by volume, and ranked second on the list of stock exchanges by market capitalization of shares traded, behind the New York Stock Exchange. The exchange platform is owned by Nasdaq, Inc. (which the exchange also lists; ticker symbol NDAQ), which also owns the Nasdaq Nordic stock market network and several U.S.-based stock and options exchanges. Although it trades stock of healthcare, financial, media, entertainment, retail, hospitality, and food businesses, it focuses more on technology stocks. The exchange is made up of both American and foreign firms, with China and Israel being the largest foreign sources. History 1972–2000 Nasdaq, Inc. was founded in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), which is now known as the Financial Industry Regulatory A ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bloomberg L
Bloomberg may refer to: People * Daniel J. Bloomberg (1905–1984), audio engineer * Georgina Bloomberg (born 1983), professional equestrian * Michael Bloomberg (born 1942), American businessman and founder of Bloomberg L.P.; politician and mayor of New York City (2002–2013) * Ramon Bloomberg (born 1972), American artist and film director Other uses * Bloomberg L.P., financial news and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg ** Bloomberg News Bloomberg News (originally Bloomberg Business News) is an international news agency headquartered in New York City and a division of Bloomberg L.P. Content produced by Bloomberg News is disseminated through Bloomberg Terminals, Bloomberg T ..., a news agency ** '' Bloomberg Businessweek'', weekly business magazine and website ** '' Bloomberg Markets'', a monthly financial magazine ** Bloomberg Radio, a business radio network ** Bloomberg Television, a business news channel *** Bloomberg TV Canada *** Bloomberg TV ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |