Operating CompanySilicon Valley / Bay Area

PayPal

Operating Company · San Jose, CA

San Jose CA. Originally Confinity (Peter Thiel + Max Levchin, 1998) merged with X.com (Elon Musk, 1999). Renamed PayPal. Acquired by eBay $1.5B 2002. IPO 2015 (spun off from eBay). Flagship product: online payments. Origin company of the PayPal Mafia — 20+ subsequent billion-dollar companies founded by alumni. Stanford and UIUC heavily represented in founding team.

Founded

1998

Region

Silicon Valley / Bay Area

Investors

People

About Silicon Valley

Before venture capital and chip startups, the region was seeded by government-funded and corporate research — Stanford Research Institute (SRI) did defense-funded applied research there from the 1940s on, and Xerox PARC, decades later, quietly invented the graphical interface and Ethernet inside a copier company's research lab. Silicon Valley is a string of towns down the peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, named for the semiconductor firms — Fairchild, Intel — that came out of that same research culture, with Sun Microsystems later carrying the workstation-and-networking era forward before software and then AI layered on top. Stanford anchors it and UC Berkeley sits across the bay. What the region chose to build shifted with each era without ever fully leaving the last one behind — chip design, enterprise software, and frontier AI labs still operate there, often within a few miles of each other.

Region Stats

Total firms 194

VC / investors 63

Companies 115

Universities 16

Known For

Software

Semiconductors