 First edition cover | |
| Author | Eric M. Jackson |
|---|---|
| Publisher | World Ahead Publishing |
Publication date | September 20, 2004 |
| ISBN | 9780974670102 |
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.
The PayPal Wars is an insider's perspective on the people and events that helped create the company, and its acquisition by eBay in 2002. The book recounts PayPal's clashes with lawyers, regulators, and the Mafia. [1] Many of PayPal's founding employees went on to start other companies like LinkedIn, Tesla Motors, YouTube, and Yelp, Inc.; [2] they would become known as the PayPal Mafia.
The PayPal Wars received acclaim for its writing style and personal narrative. The Washington Times said the book is "an absorbing insider's story." [3] Reason Magazine said that it "reads like a spy novel." [4] Tech Central Station said that "It's rare that a business book is a page turner, but The PayPal Wars is." [5] Tom Peters said The PayPal Wars "gives the best description of 'business strategy' unfolding in a world changing at warp speed." [6]
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.
Peter Andreas Thiel is an American 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 July 2024, Thiel had an estimated net worth of $11.2 billion and was ranked 212th 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.
Ronald Bailey is an American libertarian science writer. He has written or edited several books on economics, ecology, and biotechnology.
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.
Billpoint was the name of a person-to-person money transfer service founded in 1998, and purchased in 1999 by online auctioneer eBay.
David Oliver Sacks is a South African-American entrepreneur, author, and investor in internet technology firms. He is a general partner of Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund he co-founded in late 2017. Additionally, he is a co-host of the All In podcast, alongside Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg. Previously, Sacks was the COO and product leader of PayPal, and founder and CEO of Yammer. In 2016, he became interim CEO of Zenefits for ten months. In 2017, Sacks co-founded Craft Ventures, an early-stage venture fund. His angel investments include Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and Airbnb.
Founders Fund is an American venture capital fund formed in 2005 and based in San Francisco. The fund has roughly $12 billion in total assets under management as of 2023. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Palantir Technologies, and an early investor in Facebook. The firm's partners have been founders, early employees and investors at companies including PayPal, Palantir Technologies, Anduril Industries and SpaceX.
eBay Enterprise, Inc. was a multinational e-commerce corporation that specialized in creating, developing and running online shopping sites for brick and mortar brands and retailers. The company also provided a variety of marketing, consumer engagement, customer care, payment processing, fulfillment, fraud detection, and technology integration services.
William Albert Ackman is an American billionaire hedge fund manager who is the founder and chief executive officer of Pershing Square Capital Management, a hedge fund management company. His investment approach has made him an activist investor. As of June 2024, Ackman's net worth was estimated at $9.3 billion by Forbes.
Badoo is a dating-focused social network founded by Russian entrepreneur Andrey Andreev in 2006. It is headquartered in Limassol, Cyprus and London, United Kingdom, with offices in Malta, Russia and the United States. It operates in 190 countries and is available in 47 languages, making it the world's most widely used dating network. The app is available on iOS, Android, and the web. Badoo operates on a freemium model, whereby the core services can be used without payment.
Scott Thompson is an American businessman, and currently CEO of Tuition.io. Previously, he was chief executive officer of ShopRunner.
AdMob is a mobile advertising subsidiary of Google, originally founded by the Syrian entrepreneur Omar Hamoui. The name AdMob is a portmanteau for "advertising on mobile". It was incorporated on April 10, 2006 while Hamoui was in business school at Wharton School. The company is based in Mountain View, California. In November 2009, it was acquired by Google for $750 million. The acquisition was completed on May 27, 2010. Apple Inc. had also expressed interest in purchasing the company the same year, but they were out-bid by Google. Prior to being acquired by Google, AdMob acquired the company AdWhirl, formerly Adrollo, which is a platform for developing advertisements in iPhone applications. AdMob offers advertising options for many mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, webOS, Flash Lite, Windows Phone and all standard mobile web browsers.
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.
Keith Rabois is an American technology executive and investor. He is a managing director at Khosla Ventures. He was an early-stage startup investor, and executive, at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide, and Square. Rabois invested in Yelp and the Xoom Corporation prior to each company's initial public offering (IPO). For both investments he insisted on being a board of directors member.
Yishan Wong is an American engineer and entrepreneur who was CEO of Reddit from March 2012 until his resignation in November 2014. With Niniane Wang he is also co-founder of the Mountain View coworking space Sunfire Offices, and was an advisor at Quora. Wong was briefly a contributing blogger to Forbes magazine.
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.
Deborah Liu is an American technology executive and the CEO of Ancestry.com since 2021. Liu serves on the board of Intuit and Women in Product.
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