|
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 Palm Pilot payments and cryptography company. Company 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 be a name with broader long-term potential than Confinity or PayPal. However, su ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PayPal
PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as checks and money orders. The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites and many other commercial users, for which it charges a fee. Established in 1998 as Confinity, PayPal went public through an IPO in 2002. It became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay later that year, valued at $1.5 billion. In 2015 eBay spun off PayPal to its shareholders, and PayPal became an independent company again. The company was ranked 143rd on the 2022 Fortune 500 of the largest United States corporations by revenue. History Early history PayPal was originally established by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek in December 1998 as Confinity, a company that developed security software for hand-held de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elon Musk
Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; and president of the philanthropic Musk Foundation. With an estimated net worth of around $139 billion as of December 23, 2022, primarily from his ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX, Musk is the second-wealthiest person in the world according to both the ''Bloomberg Billionaires Index'' and ''Forbes'' real-time billionaires list. Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa and briefly attended at the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada at age 18, acquiring citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. Two years later, he matriculated at Queen's University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he received bachelor's degrees in economics and physics. He moved ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Thiel
Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. , Thiel had an estimated net worth of $7.19 billion and was ranked 297th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He worked as a securities lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell, as a speechwriter for former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett and as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse. He founded Thiel Capital Management in 1996. He co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin and Luke Nosek in 1998, serving as chief executive officer until its sale to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. After PayPal, he founded Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund based in San Francisco. In 2003, he launched Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company, serving as its chairman since its inception. In 2005, he launched Founders Fund with PayPal partn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Levchin
Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchin ( uk, Максиміліан Рафаїлович Левчин; 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, 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] |
University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University of Illinois system and was founded in 1867. Enrolling over 56,000 undergraduate and graduate students, the University of Illinois is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the country. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". In fiscal year 2019, research expenditures at Illinois totaled $652 million. The campus library system possesses the second-largest university library in the United States by holdings after Harvard University. The university also hosts the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and is home to the fastest supercomputer on a university campus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Software Industry
The software industry includes businesses for development, maintenance Maintenance may refer to: Biological science * Maintenance of an organism * Maintenance respiration Non-technical maintenance * Alimony, also called ''maintenance'' in British English * Champerty and maintenance, two related legal doct ... and software publisher, publication of software that are using different business models, mainly either "license/maintenance based" (on-premises) or "Cloud computing, Cloud based" (such as SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, Mobile backend as a service, MBaaS, MSaaS, DCaaS etc.). The industry also includes software services, such as training, software documentation, 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 pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" and one of the world's most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and technological advantages in the area of artificial intelligence. Its parent company Alphabet is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were PhD students at Stanford University in California. Together they own about 14% of its publicly listed shares and control 56% of its stockholder voting power through super-voting stock. The company went public via an initial public offering (IPO) in 2004. In 2015, Google was reor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Companies Based In Champaign County, Illinois
A company, abbreviated as co., is a legal entity representing an association of people, whether natural, legal or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members share a common purpose and unite to achieve specific, declared goals. Companies take various forms, such as: * voluntary associations, which may include nonprofit organizations * business entities, whose aim is generating 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 duty according to the publicly declared incorporation, or published policy. When a company closes, it may need to be liquidated to avoid further legal obligations. Companies may associate and collectively register themselves as new companies; the resulting entities are often known as corporate groups. Meanings and definitions A company can be defined as an "artificial pe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Financial Services Companies Established In 1998
Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of financial economics bridges the two). Finance activities take place in financial systems at various scopes, thus the field can be roughly divided into personal, corporate, and public finance. In a financial system, 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. A broad range of subfields within finance exist due to its wide scope. Asset, money, risk and investment management aim to maximize value and minimize volatility. Financial analysis is viability, stability, and profitability asse ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 Mafia. Many of PayPal's founding employees went on to start other companies like LinkedIn, Tesla Motors, 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." ''Reason Magazine'' said that it "reads like a spy novel." ''Tech Central Station'' said that "It's rare that a business book is a page turner, but ''The PayPal Wars'' is." Tom Peters said ''The PayPal Wars'' "gives the best description of 'business strateg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
EBay
eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble. eBay is a multibillion-dollar business with operations in about 32 countries, as of 2019. The company manages the eBay website, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a wide variety of goods and services worldwide. The website is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged fees for listing items after a limited number of free listings, and an additional or separate fee when those items are sold. In addition to eBay's original auction-style sales, the website has evolved and expanded to include: instant "Buy It Now" shopping; shopping by Universal Product Code, ISBN, or other kind of SKU number (via Half.com, which was shut down in 2017); and othe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nasdaq
The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US 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 also owns the Nasdaq Nordic stock market network and several U.S.-based stock and options exchanges. History 1971–2000 "Nasdaq" was initially an acronym for the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations. It was founded in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), now known as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). On February 8, 1971, the Nasdaq stock market began operations as the world's first electronic stock market. At first, it was merely a "quotation system" and did not provide a way to perform electronic trade ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
_(cropped).jpg "Click for more on -> Peter Thiel")
