Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen is also a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Facebook. Andreessen was one of six inductees in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame announced at the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web in 1994.
Friendster was a social networking service based in Mountain View, California, founded by Jonathan Abrams and launched in March 2003. Later the company became a social gaming site based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Before Friendster was redesigned, the service allowed users to contact other members, maintain those contacts, and share online content and media with those contacts. The website was also used for dating and discovering new events, bands and hobbies. Users could share videos, photos, messages and comments with other members via profiles and networks. It is considered one of the original social networks.
Peter Andreas Thiel is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. He was ranked No. 4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014, with a net worth of $2.2 billion, and No. 391 on the Forbes 400 in 2020, with a net worth of $2.1 billion. In 2016, Thiel confirmed that he had funded Hulk Hogan in the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit because Gawker had previously outed him as gay. The lawsuit eventually bankrupted Gawker.
Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchin is a Ukraine-born American software engineer and businessman. In 1998, he co-founded the company that eventually became PayPal. Levchin notably made contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts and is also the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA challenge response human test.
Meebo was an instant messaging and social networking service provider. It was founded in September 2005 by Sandy Jen, Seth Sternberg, and Elaine Wherry, and was based in Mountain View, California. Initially the company offered a web-based instant messenger service, extending its offer in more general online chat and even social networking directions. In June 2012, Google acquired Meebo to merge the company's staff with the Google+ developers team.
David Oliver Sacks is an entrepreneur and investor in internet technology firms. He is general partner of Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund he co-founded in late 2017. Previously, Sacks was the founding COO and product leader of PayPal and founder/CEO of Yammer. In 2016, he led the turnaround of Zenefits as interim CEO. In 2017, Sacks co-founded Craft Ventures, an early-stage venture fund, and blockchain startup Harbor as an incubation of Craft Ventures. His angel investments include Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, Airbnb and Houzz.
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.
Founders Fund is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. Formed in 2005, Founders Fund had more than $6 billion in aggregate capital under management as of 2020. 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-born American entrepreneur, notable for being a co-founder of PayPal.
Widgetbox was a San Francisco, California based company that enabled businesses to create and deliver applications to their customers. Widgetbox formally discontinued their service on March 28, 2014.
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, the core business model for internet advertising companies like Google and Facebook.
Flektor was a web application that allowed users the ability to create and “mashup” their own content and share it via email, on social networking websites MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, Digg, eBay or on personal blogs. The company’s website (Flektor.com) launched on April 2, 2007 and over 40,000 people began utilizing its features just one month later. Flektor closed down in January 2009.
Viola Ventures, , established in 2000, is an Israeli venture capital fund with over $1.3 billion under management.
Superpoke! and SuperPoke! Pets were virtual goods apps for Facebook and MySpace originally created by Nikil Gandhy, Will Liu, and Jonathan Hsu. They launched less than one month after the creation of the Facebook Platform. Max Levchin's Slide acquired the application and its creators in 2007, with the application growing to become one of Facebook's most popular applications in terms of monthly active users. The application mimicked Facebook's own "poke" feature, adding new actions like smiles, winks, slaps, and “smacking” Facebook friends. At one point SuperPoke! allowed users to virtually “stab” friends; Facebook later asked Slide to remove this option.
The "PayPal Mafia" is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and 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 at Urbana–Champaign at some point in their studies.
WePay is an online payment service provider based in the United States that provides an integrated and customizable payment solution through its APIs to platform businesses such as crowdfunding sites, marketplaces and small business software companies. It offers partners fraud and risk protection.
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.
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.
Affirm, legally Affirm Holdings, Inc. is a publicly traded financial technology company headquartered in San Francisco, United States. Founded in 2012, the company operates as a financial lender of installment loans for consumers to use at the point of sale to finance a purchase.
