The story
Confinity started out beaming money between Palm Pilots, until eBay sellers showed what the product was for. It merged with X.com, eBay paid $1.5B, and the early team went on to found or fund a remarkable share of the Valley.
No. 016 · 1998 · Palo Alto
PayPal
Beamed money between Palm Pilots. Produced a mafia.
The mafia funded everything
Make my startup a legend- 1 Palo Alto, 1998. Software for Palm Pilots.
- 2 They close funding by beaming the money.
- 3 Nobody really wants that.
- 4 Except auction sellers.
- 5 Bots buy things to bootstrap it.
- 6 A merger. A coup. A very stressful year.
- 7 eBay pays $1.5B.
- 8 They go on to fund half of everything.
- Founders
- Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek and Ken Howery, merged with Elon Musk's X.com
- Founded
- 1998, Palo Alto
- What they do
- Online payments and Venmo.