The World of PayPal and Silicon Valleyinnovative innovations by a bunch of geeks

Amonolithic company formed out of desire and passion by a bunch of geeks- Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is the journey from nothing into a whole diverse entrepreneurial world. The tale of PayPal finds a mention in the book of Jimmy Soni- the Founders, a book that tells the story of PayPal to the world as a tech phenomenon that later became a tale of human endeavor with expanding heights.

Unlike Amazon, Google, Facebook, or YouTube, PayPal wasn’t founded by one but by a group of individuals who joined hands to re-define the usage of the internet in a better version of this entrepreneurial world. The tale began in Ukraine where Max Levchin was born and taught computer code. He soon left his country and shifted to the US. Emerging there from the University of Illinois with an engineering degree, Levchin founded a photo-sharing website called Slide where he came closer to another entity named Peter Thiel. The former shared his opinion of building a world currency and they later worked on it to name it Fieldlink which initially began as a palm pilot-based application. Using it, one could send money to kith and kin by pointing the infrared ports of phones to each other. Later, this software supported the transfer of money to anyone using a mail id.

Theil was an early investor in his set-up and gradually they hired hundreds of investors from engineering backgrounds together they joined hands with Elon Musk’s company which was a finance startup name startupX.com. This was later renamed PayPal. Most of its employees then left eBay and went to build various businesses ranging from philanthropies to investment firms and from digital companies like Tesla, Space X, Palantir, and Facebook to lots of other enterprises with a total net worth higher than the GDP of New Zealand.

Digging deep into facts about how PayPal succeeded slowly but gradually into a global currency-sending and converting site, is quite interesting. Elon Musk who hails from South Africa came to Canada to connect with people who are resourceful and so he began going through newspaper articles for any innovative information. One such person was Dr. Nicholson, a banker with Scotia with a lot of interests. He drew Musk’s involvement into the world of currency and finance. Inspired by his thoughts, Musk started to work on several ventures leading him to build out Zip2 which was later sold at a profit, and then X.com was built as a payment portal and gateway. Eventually, Peter Theil’s Confinity merged with his company to establish PayPal.

No Silicon Valley success story is possible without an Indian touch. The most prominent Indian writer Sanjay Bhargava joined X.com and later co-founded ‘Captcha. It is a sort of pre-verification while registering or adhering bank accounts to a specific service portal and comes in the form of a code to the linked phone number to verify the user is a human being and not a robot. Jimmy also highlighted in his book that the University of Illinois has contributed a lot in fetching alumni who have created start-ups like YouTube and PayPal. Today, behind PayPal there is a hired mixture of genuine intellectuals who put their combined effort into its creation, innovation, and presentation. Multilingual individuals from various communities took up an effort to form this highly competitive currency-sharing international market. The success of Silicon Valley has also come out from startups by eminent personalities who have passed from Stanford, MIT, Havard, etc.

PayPal went public in 2002 and the app since then has acquired a path-breaking record amongst other third-party money transaction platforms by its relentless network and technical proficient base. Thus, the names like Thiel or Musk have today become household names with their extraordinary entrepreneurial journey.