 | |
| Industry | Financial Services |
|---|---|
| Founded | October 1998 |
| Founder |
|
| Defunct | 2003 |
| Successor | eBay |
| Headquarters | |
Billpoint was the name of a person-to-person money transfer service founded in 1998, and purchased in 1999 by online auctioneer eBay. [1]
| | |
| Industry | Financial Services |
|---|---|
| Founded | October 1998 |
| Founder |
|
| Defunct | 2003 |
| Successor | eBay |
| Headquarters | |
Billpoint was the name of a person-to-person money transfer service founded in 1998, and purchased in 1999 by online auctioneer eBay. [1]
Billpoint was founded in 1998 by S. Young Lee, Hope Chen, Will Chen, Jason May, Ian Flint and Jay Shen, with headquarters in Redwood City, California. The company obtained venture funding from Sequoia Capital in February 1999, [2] and later that year was purchased by eBay; its website was taken offline while integration into eBay's auction service took place. It reappeared in 2000 when it was relaunched as a joint venture with Wells Fargo bank. [3]
During this interval, online payment service PayPal was launched, rapidly becoming popular with eBay's customers. Billpoint and eBay spent much of the next two years trying to overtake PayPal, but with mixed results. [3] [4]
In July 2002, eBay CEO Meg Whitman agreed to the acquisition of PayPal with its CEO Peter Thiel. When the deal was closed in October 2002, eBay began the process of phasing out Billpoint. [4] The shutdown was completed in early 2003. [5]
eBay Inc. is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that brokers customer to customer and retail sales through online marketplaces 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 134 million yearly active buyers worldwide and handled $74 billion in transactions in 2022, 49% of which was in the United States. In 2022, the company had a take rate of 13.25%.
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; it 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.
Pierre Morad Omidyar is a French-born Iranian-American billionaire. A technology entrepreneur, software engineer, and philanthropist, he is the founder of eBay, where he served as chairman from 1998 to 2015. Omidyar and his wife Pamela founded Omidyar Network in 2004. As of 2023, Forbes ranked Omidyar as the 245th-richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $8.7 billion.
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Eric M. Jackson is the co-founder of CapLinked, a project management and business transaction company. He is founder and former CEO of World Ahead Publishing, and is a former vice president of marketing at PayPal. He is one of the PayPal Mafia, a growing number of PayPal alumni who have started new ventures after eBay bought the online payments firm.
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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.
John Joseph Donahoe II is an American businessman who is the CEO of Nike. Early in his career he worked for Bain & Company, becoming the firm's president and CEO in 1999. He is on the board of directors at Nike, The Bridgespan Group and is chairman of PayPal. Donahoe was named president and CEO of ServiceNow, a cloud company, in February 2017. He was on the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College from 2003 to 2012. On January 13, 2020, Donahoe became president and CEO of Nike.
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The "PayPal Mafia" is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and/or developed additional technology companies based in Silicon Valley such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. Most of the members attended Stanford University or University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at some point in their studies.
WePay is an online payment service provider based in the United States. It provides an integrated and customizable payment solution, through its APIs, to platform businesses such as crowdfunding sites, marketplaces and small business software companies. It also offers partners fraud and risk protection.
Braintree is a Chicago-based company that primarily deals in mobile and web payment systems for e-commerce companies. The company was acquired by PayPal on 26 September 2013.
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. In September or October 2023, Eventbrite changed their pricing plans to limit free events to 25 tickets before they would begin to charge organizers fees.
Jeremy Stoppelman is an American business executive. He is the CEO of Yelp, which he co-founded in 2004. Stoppelman obtained a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1999. After briefly working for @Home Network, he worked at X.com and later became the VP of Engineering after the company was renamed PayPal. Stoppelman left PayPal to attend Harvard Business School. During a summer internship at MRL Ventures, he and others came up with the idea for Yelp Inc. He turned down an acquisition offer by Google and took the company public in 2012.
This is a timeline of online money transfer and e-commerce service PayPal, owned by eBay from 2002 to 2015 and an independent company before and after that.
C2it was a person-to-person money transfer service established by Citibank in 2000 as a competitor to PayPal and Billpoint. It was formed as a partnership with AOL, and later with Compuserve and Microsoft.
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