Russel Simmons | |
---|---|
Born | United States |
Alma mater | University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign |
Occupation | Businessman |
Russel Simmons is an American businessman. He co-founded Yelp, Inc. [1] [2] with Jeremy Stoppelman and served as CTO from July 2004 until he left in June 2010. [2] Prior to co-founding Yelp, Simmons was a co-founder of PayPal, where he was a Lead Software Architect, and has been described as a member of the "PayPal Mafia." [3] [4] In 2014 he founded Learnirvana. [5]
Simmons graduated from University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1998 with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. [6]
Peter Andreas Thiel 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. As of May 2022, Thiel had an estimated net worth of $7.19 billion and was ranked 297th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchin 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.
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.
David Ross Cheriton is a Canadian computer scientist, mathematician, billionaire businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group.
Reid Garrett Hoffman is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman was the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is currently a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners and a co-founder of Inflection AI.
Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Jawed Karim is an American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur of Bangladeshi and German descent. He is a co-founder of YouTube and the first person to upload a video to the site. This inaugural video, titled "Me at the zoo" and uploaded on April 23, 2005, has been viewed over 260 million times, as of March 16, 2023. During Karim's time working at PayPal, where he met the fellow YouTube co-founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley, he had designed many of the core components including its real-time anti-Internet-fraud system.
Murugan Palaniappan popularly known as Murugan Pal was a serial entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, Bay Area, USA.
Founders Fund is a San Francisco based venture capital firm. Formed in 2005, Founders Fund had more than $11 billion in aggregate capital under management as of 2022. The firm invests across all stages and sectors, including aerospace, artificial intelligence, advanced computing, energy, health, and consumer Internet, with a portfolio that includes Airbnb, Lyft, Spotify, Stripe, and Oscar Health. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Palantir Technologies, and one of the earliest investors 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.
Luke Nosek is a Polish-American entrepreneur, notable for being a co-founder of PayPal.
Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. On July 1, 2008, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for an estimated $100 million.
Scott Banister is an American entrepreneur, startup founder, and angel investor. He cofounded the anti-spam company IronPort, and he was an early advisor and board member at PayPal. He invented paid search advertising via keyword auction, a core business model for internet advertising companies.
The "PayPal Mafia" is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and/or developed additional technology companies 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.
Premal Shah is an Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Kiva, a global poverty alleviation non-profit that has raised over $1 billion for low-income entrepreneurs in eighty countries.
Keith Rabois is an American technology executive and investor. He is currently a general partner at Founders Fund. He is widely known for his early-stage startup investments and his executive roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide, and Square. Rabois invested in Yelp and Xoom prior to each company's initial public offering ("IPO") and sits on both companies' boards of directors. He is considered a member of the PayPal Mafia, a group that includes PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, and PayPal employee and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim. Additionally, Rabois has been involved in investments in YouTube, Palantir, Lyft, Airbnb, Eventbrite, Wish, and The Org.
The University of Illinois Department of Computer Science is the academic department encompassing the discipline of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to U.S. News & World Report, both its undergraduate and graduate programs rank in the top five among American universities. The department ranks equally high in faculty submissions to reputable journals and academic conferences, as determined by CSRankings.org. According to Computer Science Open Rankings, the department ranks equally high in placing Ph.D. students in tenure-track positions at top universities and winning best paper awards. From before its official founding in 1964 to today, the department's faculty members and alumni have contributed to projects including the ORDVAC, PLATO, Mosaic, JavaScript and LLVM, and have founded companies including Siebel Systems, Netscape, Mozilla, PayPal, Yelp, YouTube, and Malwarebytes.
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.
Rob Meadows is an American Internet entrepreneur who founded the AI Foundation, Originate, and Lumitrend. He has also served as a CTO and Advisor to several other technology startups and has spoken about artificial intelligence at conferences such as CES and South by Southwest.
Yu Pan is an engineer and entrepreneur mentioned in one source as one of the original six people who started PayPal and the first employee at YouTube, as an early software engineer. He is a former Google employee and also a co-founder of Kiwi Crate, Inc.
Bob Goodson is a British technologist, entrepreneur, and UX designer. The CEO of Quid Inc., an artificial intelligence company, Goodson studied medieval literature at Oxford University, and co-founded Quid based on his interest in applying language theory to semantic search.
The online review site was founded in 2004 by two U. of I. graduates and former PayPal employees, Jeremy Stoppelman (computer engineering, 1999) and Russel Simmons (computer science, 1998).