Max Levchin

Max Levchin

The PayPal co-founder was born in Ukraine but moved to the United States in the early 1990s as a political refugee.

After leaving the company, he embarked on another entrepreneurial adventure: Slide, a service that allowed slides with photos to be shared on social networks.

Levchin managed to sell the website to Google, but only a year later, the search engine decided to close the service and Levchin disassociated himself from the technology giant.

As Thiel did with Facebook, the Ukrainian computer scientist is responsible for the initial investment in a platform that is now quite popular: Yelp, where users can recommend local businesses.

Where did you know the founders of Yelp? They were two former Paypal workers: Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons.

Levchin was also a member of the boards of Yahoo! and Evernote and executive producer of the film Thank You for Smoking.

3. Elon Musk

Although today he is known as the CEO of Tesla and founder of Spacex, at the beginning of the new millennium his main role was that of shareholder and CEO of PayPal.

Musk’s company, X.com, merged with PayPal in 1999, and the South African entrepreneur took over for a short time before being ousted in October 2000.

However, he remained the main shareholder of the company until its sale to eBay, with which he earned US$165 million.

The aerospace company SpaceX is joined by other innovative Musk ventures, such as the neurotech firm Neuralink.

4. Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim

Chen, Hurley, and Karim met while working at PayPal.

Neither was in their thirties in 2005, when they came together to found a concept that didn’t exist at the time: a video-sharing platform they called YouTube.

Chen and Hurley are the two best-known founders of YouTube. (Photo: Bryan Bedder)

A year later, Google bought the company. A transaction that reported millions of dollars.

Since then, they have participated on their own in the creation of other companies. Among them, Airbnb , of which Karim was one of the first investors.

5. Reid Hoffman

Hoffman had served on PayPal’s board of directors since its inception and was its executive vice president when eBay bought the firm in 2002.

That same year, together with former colleagues from PayPal and his previous company, SocialNet, I founded the social network dedicated to the professional field LinkedIn .

The firm is now owned by Microsoft, which bought it for $26.2 billion last year, and has more than 100 million monthly users.

Hoffman joined the Microsoft board of directors in 2017.

But he has also contributed to the creation and development of other companies through his role as an investor. Among them are Facebook, Airbnb, and Change.org.

Now you can receive notifications from BBC World. Download the new version of our app and activate it so you don’t miss out on our best content.