9781422277393

PayPal did not exist for long be- fore it had a potential buyer. In 2002, it was offered as a publicly traded compa- ny, which meant that anyone could buy stocks and invest in PayPal. A growing online auction website, eBay, saw ways it would benefit from using PayPal. PayPal could make eBay’s service even more popular than it already was be- cause customers would be able to pay sellers in a safer, more secure way. EBay seized on the opportunity to acquire PayPal and bought the service for $1.5 billion in 2002. Dinner Plans

YouTube founders started with money made from PayPal.

T he sale of PayPal made the company’s employees a lot of mon- ey. Some stayed, but many of the core team left to pursue their own ventures. Chen, Hurley, and Karim all left within a few years of the sale, but they continued to keep in touch, meeting up for dinners throughout the Bay Area. On one very fortuitous meet-up in 2005, they came up with the idea for YouTube. Chen had just bought a home in San Francisco and wanted to show it off to his friends, so he invited them over for a dinner par- ty. Everyone was taking videos and photos with their digital cam- eras. After the party, they wanted to share their memories of the evening with each other. They found they could share the photos easily through image-sharing sites like Flickr. Emailing them was

1: Founding the Company

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