After the internet bubble burst in 2000, and the consequent lack of investment funds, some in Silicon Valley predicted that enterprise software (software that satisfies the needs of an organisation rather than individual users) was dead, search was dead and internet advertising was dead.
But tech entrepreneurs continued to innovate.
And that’s where the group that started PayPal comes in.
PayPal, the first service that enabled people to move money safely and quickly by linking payments to email, was so successful that the company’s initial growth was huge.
“When the product launched in October/November ’99, we ended 1999 with about 10,000 users,” said David Sacks, PayPal’s former COO. “And by the summer of 2000 we had about five million users.”
PayPal became so essential to eBay’s business that in 2002 eBay bought PayPal in a deal worth $1.5 billion, making many of the company’s employees rich and enabling some to become ‘angel investors’, given the lack of investment funds elsewhere at the time, and help start companies that today are household names.
The group – including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Sacks himself – has founded, funded or led some of the world’s biggest tech firms, such as LinkedIn, Yelp, Tesla and YouTube. Read more about them here.
