All Stories
Max Levchin: The Ukrainian Refugee Who Co-Founded PayPal with $700
I have been fascinated by immigrant founders for a while now. I wrote about Elon Musk leaving South Africa at...
9 min read
Roelof Botha: From PayPal CFO to the Most Powerful Investor in Silicon Valley
I have been tracing the paths of PayPal Mafia members for a while now, and I keep noticing that the...
9 min read
Three PayPal Engineers Started YouTube Because They Couldn't Find a Video Online
I was mapping the companies that emerged from the PayPal alumni network when I started digging into the YouTube origin...
8 min read
Reid Hoffman Built LinkedIn in His Living Room Six Months After Leaving PayPal
I was reading the newspaper on a quiet Sunday morning and saw yet another article about LinkedIn’s AI features, which...
8 min read
How PayPal Started as a Way to Beam Money Between Palm Pilots
I was at a parent-teacher meeting last month and another parent Venmo’d me for a class gift, and I thought...
9 min read
The Story of PayPal's First Customer — And the $10 That Changed Fintech
A guy at the gym asked me last week what I was reading on my phone between sets, and I...
7 min read