PayPal
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| Type: | Subsidiary of E-bay |
| Industry: | e-Commerce |
| Founded: | 1998 |
| Founder(s): | Ken Howery Max Levchin Elon Musk Luke Nosek Peter Thiel |
| Ownership: | Owned by E-Bay |
| Headquarters: | 2211 North First Street San Jose, CA 95131 |
| Country: | USA |
| Employees: | 618 [1] |
| Revenue: | $3.4 billion as of 2010 [2] |
| Website: | www.paypal.com |
| Blog: | PayPal Blog |
| Facebook: | PayPal |
| LinkedIn: | PayPal |
| Twitter: | Error creating thumbnail: Unable to save thumbnail to destination @PayPal
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| Key People | |
| Scott Thompson, President | |
PayPal is a global payment service provider and a subsidiary of eBay, Inc, one of the leading e-Commerce company based in the United States. PayPal is compose of two other billing services called Payflow Gateway and Bill Me Later. Consumers with PayPal accounts can securely send and receive payments electronically using credit cards and bank accounts. The company is serving more than 103 million accounts within 190 markets and 25 currencies around the world. Its headquarters is located in San Jose California.[3]
History
Max Levchin, an online security specialist and Peter Thiel, a hedge fund manager co-founded PayPal. In 1998, they met at conference at Stanford University where Thiel provided a lecture. Levchin and Thiel agreed to become partners and created the company known as Field Link which produced encyption software for wireless devices such as cellphones and palm pilots. Their idea was to make the handheld devices of consumers as a secure digital wallet. Field Link did not click and the company was re-organized as Confinity. The name of the company was derived from the words confidence and infinity. The company offered money transfer services using palm pilot and other Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). In 1999, the Confinity launched PayPal when one of the company's engineer developed a method enabling consumers to pay electronically. [4]