Investors will learn more about PayPal’s history since it is more complicated. In 2002, the company went public. PayPal nearly completely devoured its checkout page, and as a result, was purchased by eBay a few months later. Investors had to purchase shares in eBay if they wanted to be exposed to PayPal during the summer of 2015. Since PayPal was broken out, the share price has risen, declined, and finally stabilized around a 15% gain. You can easily withdraw from Paypal to MPESA from anywhere in Africa.
Investors should not be surprised by all of this, but here are five less well-known facts about the company’s history regarding the digital payment platform:
1. Wallet Palm Pilot
In the late 1990s, Peter Thiel gave a speech at Stanford University and met Max Levchin. Levchin reached out to Thiel about starting a company to design portable encryption software soon after. They had a company called Field Link, which was headquartered in Silicon Valley.
Encryption failed, and the company went through a succession of name changes and shifts in focus.
They renamed their company, Confinity, and refocused their efforts on the Palm Pilot market, which was flourishing at the time. In planning to build on top of the Palm Pilot platform, the new company intended to launch PayPal, a payment mechanism that would allow Palm Pilot users to transfer money to each other. Three million dollars in investment money was sent from Nokia Ventures to Thiel’s personal Palm Pilot to indicate PayPal’s potential. A report from the magazine “Wired” from the year 1999 claims that the entire process takes only five seconds.
2. The significant email breakthrough
Similarly, the Palm Pilot idea also ultimately fizzled out. In spite of the popularity of portable personal assistant gadgets, just a small proportion of US consumers have one.
Fortunately, online buying began to gain popularity during this time period. Among digital wallet start-ups, the competition was fierce, and to gain an advantage, Creative+ created a new way for consumers to transfer money via email. CyberCash’s digital wallet required pre-funding whereas other digital wallets, such as Beenz.com and Flooz.com, were entirely dependent on new and unproven digital money. It is no coincidence that those businesses failed; they started out like way.
Pre-funding was no longer necessary since confinity allowed people to link their PayPal accounts to their current bank accounts. Since a result, consumers had more trust in the system as it was based on the US dollar, rather than some kind of gimmicky cyber money. PayPal’s confinity service gained traction early on in e-commerce with consumers who used it because it was simple to write checks or send money orders.
3. Elon Musk was the CEO of PayPal
In March of 2000, confinity and X.com, a company that Elon Musk co-founded, combined. As far as the primary service, Musk believed in PayPal so much that he renamed it in 2001. Once again, the company has shifted its focus, this time to the rapidly growing e-commerce sector.
He used every measure possible to encourage the service’s growth, offering small amounts of money to everyone who used it. As a consequence of the company’s marketing efforts, and because of PayPal’s competitive advantages, account growth soared. The number of PayPal accounts doubled from January to August 2000, going from 12,000 to 2.7 million.
4. The PayPal Mafia: The World’s Most Powerful Professional Network?
“PayPal Mafia” is a term that describes the group of persons associated with PayPal before it went public. Thiel thought this group was about 220 people. One of the more successful examples of a start-up that came out of Y Combinator is Tesla, which is now worth over $12 billion. Notable start-ups founded out of Y Combinator include LinkedIn (later acquired by Microsoft), Palantir Technologies (private), Yelp, YouTube (sold to Google for $1.65 billion), SpaceX (private), and Yammer (also acquired by Microsoft).
5. PayPal played an important role in establishing Silicon Valley’s culture
When PayPal, the first major viral program, arrived on the scene, it completely defined Silicon Valley. The system permitted money transfers from nonusers to nonrecipients, but senders were required to set up an account for recipients beforehand. Many early eBay users were able to incorporate PayPal’s logo into auction sites because of this early company that allowed consumers to place a widget on their website. PayPal was able to escape the product-cycle plague by releasing new versions of the product when they were ready, rather than offering a time frame in which they were expected to arrive.
Summing It Up
PayPal started off as a six-person start-up but grew into a mammoth company that employs thousands of people. It is almost impossible to replicate a success story since each narrative has undergone a considerable change to get where it is now. It seems as if PayPal has more to give, and it looks like it will be developing as online transactions and digital purchases become the norm, to a much greater extent now than in the past due to the pervasive use of digital commerce. PayPal will provide you financial success if you put your money on it.
