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Founders Fund
Founders Fund is a San Francisco based venture capital firm formed in 2005 and has roughly $11 billion in total assets under management as of 2022. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Palantir Technologies, and early investor in Facebook. The firm’s partners, including Peter Thiel, Ken Howery and Brian Singerman, have been founders, early employees and investors at companies including PayPal, Google, Palantir Technologies, and SpaceX. History The firm was organized by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek in early 2005 and raised its first fund of $50 million from individual entrepreneurs and angel investors in January of that year. Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster and ex-president of Facebook, joined in 2006. In 2007, the firm raised a new fund of $220 million. In 2010, the firm raised its third fund, with $250 million in committed capital, and in 2011, a fourth fund with $625 million of committed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Venture Capital
Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which have demonstrated high growth (in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc). Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing risky start-ups in the hopes that some of the firms they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. The start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are usually from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology. The typical venture capital investment occurs after an initial "seed funding" round. The first ro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sean Parker
Sean Parker (born December 3, 1979) is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, most notable for co-founding the file-sharing computer service Napster, and serving as the first president of the social networking website Facebook. He also co-founded Plaxo, Causes, Airtime.com, and Brigade, an online platform for civic engagement.Bertoni, StevenSean Parker: Agent of Disruption. ''Forbes''. September 21, 2011.Kirkpatrick, DavidWith a Little Help From His Friends. ''Vanity Fair''. October 2010.Adegoke, YinkaNapster founders reunite with social video service. ''Reuters''. June 5, 2012. He is the founder and chairman of the Parker Foundation, which focuses on life sciences, global public health, and civic engagement. On the ''Forbes'' 2022 list of the world's billionaires, he was ranked No. 1,096 with a net worth of US$2.8 billion. Early life Parker was born in Herndon, Virginia, to Diane Parker, a TV advertising broker, and Bruce Parker, a U.S. government oceanographer and c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neuralink
Neuralink Corporation is a neurotechnology company that develops implantable brain–computer interfaces (BCIs). Founded by Elon Musk and a founding team of seven other scientists and engineers, the company's headquarters is in the Pioneer Building in San Francisco sharing offices with OpenAI. Neuralink was launched in 2016 and was first publicly reported in March 2017. Since its founding, the company has hired several high-profile neuroscientists from various universities. By July 2019, it had received $158 million in funding (of which $100 million was from Musk) and was employing a staff of 90 employees. At that time, Neuralink announced that it was working on a "sewing machine-like" device capable of implanting very thin (4 to 6 μm in width [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wish (platform)
Wish is an American online e-commerce platform for transactions between sellers and buyers. Wish was founded in 2010 by Piotr Szulczewski (former CEO) and Danny Zhang (former CTO). Wish is operated by ContextLogic Inc. in San Francisco, United States. The platform personalizes the shopping experience visually for each customer, rather than relying only on a search bar format. It allows sellers to list their products on Wish and sell directly to consumers. Wish works with payment service providers to handle payments and does not stock the products themselves or manage returns. History Wish was started by Piotr Szulczewski, a former Google engineer, as a software company called ContextLogic. In September 2010, ContextLogic received $1.7 million in investments and involved Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. In May 2011, Szulczewski invited college friend Danny Zhang to relaunch the company as Wish. It was created as an application that allowed shoppers to create wish lists of their favori ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stripe (company)
Stripe, Inc. is an Irish-American financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company dual-headquartered in South San Francisco, California, United States and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment processing software and application programming interfaces (APIs) for e-commerce websites and mobile applications. History Irish entrepreneur brothers John and Patrick Collison founded Stripe in Palo Alto, California, in 2009. In 2011, the company received investment of $2 million including from PayPal co-founders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Irish entrepreneur Liam Casey, and venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel. In March 2013, Stripe made its first acquisition, Kickoff, a chat and task-management application. In 2012, the company moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco. In October 2019, the company announced that it would be moving from the South of Market area to Oyster Point in the neighbouring city of South San Fra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spotify
Spotify (; ) is a proprietary Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 456 million monthly active users, including 195 million paying subscribers, as of September 2022. Spotify is listed (through a Luxembourg City-domiciled holding company, Spotify Technology S.A.) on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of American depositary receipts. Spotify offers digital copyright restricted recorded music and podcasts, including more than 82 million songs, from record labels and media companies. As a freemium service, basic features are free with advertisements and limited control, while additional features, such as offline listening and commercial-free listening, are offered via paid subscriptions. Users can search for music based on artist, album, or genre, and can create, edit, and share playlists. Spotify is available in most of Euro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flexport
Flexport Inc. is an American multinational corporation that focuses on supply chain management and logistics, including order management, trade financing, insurance, freight forwarding and customs brokerage. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, has thousands of employees and has annual revenues of more than $3.3 billion. Business Flexport's software integrates and connects ERP data from various companies involved in a supply chain, which allows them to manage information about cargo and streamline freight processing. It has raised $304M as of 2017, including $110M in its latest Series C round. In a 2017 interview to ''Forbes'', Flexport's CEO Ryan Petersen said the company started opening their own warehouses for consolidating cargo customer shipments located in Hong Kong and L.A. with plans "to have a global network where we can load and unload cargo". In 2021, Flexport participated in seed round investment of Pakistan-based trucking startup Bridgelinx. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lyft
Lyft, Inc. offers mobility as a service, ride-hailing, vehicles for hire, motorized scooters, a bicycle-sharing system, rental cars, and food delivery in the United States and select cities in Canada. Lyft sets fares, which vary using a dynamic pricing model based on local supply and demand at the time of the booking and are quoted to the customer in advance, and receives a commission from each booking. Lyft is the second-largest ridesharing company in the United States after Uber. History Lyft was launched in the summer of 2012 by computer programmers Logan Green and John Zimmer as a service of Zimride, a long-distance intercity carpooling company focused on college transport that they founded in 2007 after Green shared rides from the University of California, Santa Barbara campus to visit his girlfriend in Los Angeles and was seeking an easier way to share rides. In May 2013, the company changed its name from Zimride to Lyft. Later that year, Lyft sold the original Zimride ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DeepMind
DeepMind Technologies is a British artificial intelligence subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. and research laboratory founded in 2010. DeepMind was List of mergers and acquisitions by Google, acquired by Google in 2014 and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., Alphabet Inc, after Google's restructuring in 2015. The company is based in London, with research centres in Canada, France, and the United States. DeepMind has created a neural network that learns how to play video games in a fashion similar to that of humans, as well as a Neural Turing machine, or a neural network that may be able to access an external memory like a conventional Turing machine, resulting in a computer that mimics the short-term memory of the human brain. DeepMind made headlines in 2016 after its AlphaGo program beat a human professional Go (game), Go player Lee Sedol, a world champion, in AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol, a five-game match, which was the subject of a documentary film. A more general progr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Airbnb
Airbnb, Inc. ( ), based in San Francisco, California, operates an online marketplace focused on short-term homestays and experiences. The company acts as a broker and charges a commission from each booking. The company was founded in 2008 by Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk, and Joe Gebbia. Airbnb is a shortened version of its original name, AirBedandBreakfast.com. The company has been the subject of criticism for lack of regulations and enabling increases in home rents. History After moving to San Francisco in October 2007, roommates and former schoolmates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia came up with the idea of putting an air mattress in their living room and turning it into a bed and breakfast. In February 2008, Nathan Blecharczyk, Chesky's former roommate, joined as the Chief Technology Officer and the third co-founder of the new venture, which they named AirBed & Breakfast. They put together a website that offered short-term living quarters and breakfast for those who ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bruce Gibney
Bruce Cannon Gibney (born 16 February 1976) is an American writer and venture capitalist. He was one of the first investors at PayPal, and went on to work for PayPal founder Peter Thiel's hedge fund Clarium and his venture capital company Founders Fund. His first book, ''A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America'', was published by Hachette (publisher), Hachette in 2017. Career Gibney started investing when his Stanford University roommate Ken Howery co-founded PayPal, the electronic payments company, and offered Gibney the chance to buy "friends and family" shares. After investing in PayPal, Gibney worked as a litigator but was soon hired by Peter Thiel after Thiel sold PayPal to eBay in 2002. Gibney worked at Thiel's hedge fund, Clarium, until 2008, making occasional private investments including in Palantir Technologies in 2005 and later in DeepMind, which was acquired by Google for around $450 million in 2014. He then moved to Founders Fund Found ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eventbrite
Eventbrite is an American event management and ticketing website. The service allows users to browse, create, and promote local events. The service charges a fee to event organizers in exchange for online ticketing services, unless the event is free. Launched in 2006 and headquartered in San Francisco, Eventbrite opened their first international office in the United Kingdom in 2012. The company has local offices in Nashville, London, Cork, Amsterdam, Dublin, Berlin, Melbourne, Mendoza, Madrid, and São Paulo São Paulo (, ; Portuguese for 'Saint Paul') is the most populous city in Brazil, and is the capital of the state of São Paulo, the most populous and wealthiest Brazilian state, located in the country's Southeast Region. Listed by the GaWC a .... The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange on September 20, 2018 under the ticker symbol EB. History Eventbrite was founded in 2006 by Kevin Hartz (Co-Founder and Executive Chairman) and Julia Hartz (Co-Founde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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