Larry Drebes (born April 20, 1967) is an American businessman and the co-

founder Founder or Founders may refer to: Places *Founders Park, a stadium in South Carolina, formerly known as Carolina Stadium * Founders Park, a waterside park in Islamorada, Florida Arts, entertainment, and media * Founders (''Star Trek''), the ali ...

Janrain Janrain, sometimes styled as JanRain, is a customer profile and identity management (CIAM) software provider based in Portland, Oregon, United States. It was established in 2002. Akamai acquired Janrain in January 2019. History Janrain was foun ...

, Four11 Corporation, and Desktop.com. He was also an early leader of the

OpenID OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party identity provider ...

initiative, which was widely supported by

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. ...

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

, and other providers of online identity.

Career

In 1992, Drebes was a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Four11 Corporation, the parent company of Rocketmail, an early webmail provider. Four11 was acquired by

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

in October 1997 for $97 million, and RocketMail became

Yahoo! Mail Yahoo! Mail is an email service launched on October 8, 1997, by the American company Yahoo (2017–present), Yahoo, Inc. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. Business email was previously av ...

. Drebes then founded Desktop.com in 1999 and secured $29 million in financing. The company was shut down in 2001 after giving back about half the venture capital it received. In 2002, Drebes began working closely with the early proponents of the

protocol. In response to his work, he founded Janrain in 2002 to build software for user management based on OpenID. The company is perhaps best known for its social ID

login In computer security, logging in (or logging on, signing in, or signing on) is the process by which an individual gains access to a computer system by identifying and authenticating themselves. The user credentials are typically some form ...

technology, which allows users of

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

and many other

social networks A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

to log into any

web site A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikipe ...

using previously established social IDs. Janrain has received over $79 million in venture capital funding, including $15.5 million in 2011 $33 million in 2013 and $27 million in 2015.

Personal life and education

Drebes was born in St. Louis. He graduated from St. Paul's School and then earned a BS in Marketing from Maryville University. Drebes is married to Karen Drebes and has three children.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Drebes, Larry 1966 births Living people American computer businesspeople American technology company founders Businesspeople from Portland, Oregon Businesspeople from Wisconsin Businesspeople in software American chief technology officers People from Lake Charles, Louisiana People from Wisconsin Stanford University alumni Tulane University alumni