💸 Ever used PayPal (or Venmo) to send or receive money online?

This fintech giant has an fascinating origin story that involves some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley!

PayPal was founded in 1998 by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, two young entrepreneurs who wanted to create a secure way to send money over the internet 🔒💸

Their initial idea was to create a service for sending payments via PDAs (personal digital assistants, the smartphones of the 90s) 📟

The company, originally called Confinity, launched its first product in 1999 👶

It allowed users to beam payments from one Palm Pilot to another using infrared technology 📡

In 2000, Confinity merged with X.com -- an online banking company founded by a young entrepreneur named Elon Musk -- and changed its name to PayPal 🚀

PayPal's big break came when it became the preferred payment method for eBay buyers and sellers 🛍️

Its user base exploded, reaching 1 million customers in just 15 months 🚀

In 2002, PayPal went public and was soon acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion 🤝

This made it one of the biggest tech acquisitions of its time and minted a new generation of Silicon Valley millionaires 💸

Later, PayPal was spun out of eBay, and today, it is a $70 billion public company with over 400 million users across PayPal, Venmo (which they acquired in 2013) and other subsidiaries 📈

Perhaps most impressively, many of PayPal's early employees and founders, known as the "PayPal Mafia", went on to start other massively successful companies like Tesla LinkedIn YouTube and Yelp 💡