Confinity

X.com.

which is financial services of various sort through the web, sort of ahead of its time, but becomes better known through its merger with a company that at that point is called Confinity, later to become PayPal.

And this is his...

First encounter with Teal and the other members of what will later be described as the PayPal mafia.

So Till went to Stanford, got a philosophy degree, went to Stanford Law School, became a lawyer, didn't want to do that, and then became a hedge fund manager and happened to find himself back in Silicon Valley at the right time, late 90s, when things were about to take off, the dot-com boom, and ended up investing in helping co-found PayPal.

originally was called Confinity, but then he merged it with another company across the hallway from his office run by a guy named Elon Musk, who is pursuing a similar goal.

And PayPal ends up making him wealthy, makes him a multimillionaire, which he then leveraged into becoming a billionaire with investments in things like Facebook.

He was the major first investor in Facebook, also co-founded a company called Palantir, which has gone on to become a major surveillance software company with massive government contracts all over the world.

But I feel like between COVID and the fact that all these merchants independently had to switch over their machines, and the fact that, I mean, I wouldn't have guessed in...

I mean, you obviously did because the Confinity was PalmPilot sending money, so you're ahead of the whole PDA wave.

But I wouldn't have guessed that those three things would have come behavior.

It's like change of consumer behavior, ubiquitous new merchant payment terminal, plus ubiquitous mobile telephony, and that's certainly one thing that has changed the world a lot.

And the same year, he co-founds X.com. And no, not that X. We'll get into that.

This is an online banking startup, which merges with a company called Confinity to become...

Drumroll, please.

PayPal.