Paypal Archives - Serious Startups

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison On The Paypal Mafia [video][Ignition Mobile]

This morning at Business Insider’s Ignition Mobile, Deputy Editor Nicholas Carlson interviewed 24 year old Irish rock star entrepreneur, Patrick Collison the CEO of payment startup Stripe.

While there was much debate as to whether Collison became a millionaire at ate 19, one thing that’s been turning heads about this mobile payment startup is that their investors include Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Elon Musk, the original founders of Paypal who are widely known as the “Paypal Mafia”.

One might find it odd that these three men who helped shape the web payment and now mobile payment space, may not want to invest in a company that competes with the one they founded.

Collison said that he believes that Thiel, Musk and Levchin, are still determined to solve the problems that they set out to solve with Paypal and the new problems that have cropped up in the mobile age.

All three founders are now removed from Paypal after selling the company for $1.5 billion back in 2002 to eBay,Paypal’s largest user.

While Paypal has been busy pushing an offline product to retail and working towards a more prominent position in the mobile space, Collison said he felt that innovation at Paypal stopped when Levchin, Musk and Thiel exited.

Check out the video below:

Bill Harris, Former CEO Of PayPal And Intuit To Speak On “Adult Supervision” At Everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference

Bill Harris, Personal Capital, Intuit, Paypal, Facebook, everywherelse.co the startup conference

Bill Harris CEO of Personal Capital and Former CEO of Paypal and Intuit to speak at everywhereelse.co (photo: salon.com)

Everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference has quickly become the biggest starutp conference in the United States. The unique thing about everywhereelse.co is that it’s a celebration of startups outside Silicon Valley with information, and education for startups facing a similar set of challenges, being from outside the valley.

By now you’ve heard that our speaker lineup is one of the best in the country including Scott Case, Pat Riley, Tracy Myers, several managing directors from startup accelerators across the country, founders from some of the best accelerators across the country like Techstars, YC, and MassChallenge and many more.

Today we’re pleased to announce that veteran “parental supervision” CEO Bill Harris will speak at everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference on Monday morning.

Harris is the CEO of Personal Capital, his own startup that’s already raised $25 million in venture capital, prior to that he has had a successful career in media, finance and entrepreneurism. Harris has twice been brought into young companies to be CEO and returned the companies to their founders in incredible positions.

Harris was brought into Paypal as it’s first CEO back in the late 90’s and prepared it for a $100 million dollar investment, eventually leading to the acquisition by eBay who owns it today. He also served as CEO at Intuit after merging ChipSoft into Intuit. Harris serves an advisor to some of the Facebook billionaires and has also taken a board or advisory role with several other successful companies.

Harris will speak about his current company Personal Capital. He will also talk about the real need by some startup founders to hire a CEO that is more seasoned than themselves. Eric Schmidt, the current Executive Chairman of Google, was hired as CEO of Google to lead Sergey Brin and Larry Page to the point where they could take back the company they founded.

Many credit Harris with bringing together Confinity and it’s founders Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek and Ken Howery with X.com and Elon Musk to actually form the company we know as Paypal.

Attendees and startups in the everywhereelse.co startup village will benefit from hearing Harris speak on all things startup and about his experiences advising, mentoring and helping some of the biggest startup founders in the world. It’s an amazing victory for startups “everywhere else” to have the opportunity to hear someone of Harris’ caliber and experience at a conference.

Nearly 2000 people from across the country and around the globe, have already purchased attendee tickets for everywhereelse.co the startup conference. The are still a handful of tickets left. There are 135 startups in the Startup Village and there are just 10 startup village booths left. More info can be found at everywhereelse.co tickets can be purchased below.

Event registration for Everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference powered by Eventbrite

San Diego Startup: The Tip Network Is PayPal For Servers

Although restaurant and hospitality industry technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, one area where it still falls short is tipping. That’s where San Diego startup The Tip Network comes in.

With the economy the way it is these days restaurant owners and managers are mice-managing their shift schedules even more than they ever have before. Owners are managers are quick to make cuts to their wait staff the minute they can. This causes a major pain for servers. In a lot of restaurants servers either need to stick around after getting cut or at the end of their shift, come back at closing time or wait until the next day to reconcile their tips and tip out. This can be a major pain point for servers.

The Tip Network offers solutions for problems like that and other problems that plague proprietors of tip based businesses.

Tip Network is a cloud based tip management solution for independent and chain restaurants. We enable managers to easily track, allocate, and distribute tips digitally to their staffs Tip Network. Each staff member has their own unique Tip Network profile that allows them to (1) send money to any account, at any bank (2) send money to anyone in the network, (3) and many other things down the road .

Using the Tip Network, servers take ownership and management of their tips over, instantly. Now, from the comfort of their own home, or device they can tip out to support staff, move tips to their bank accounts even pay back loans to other servers. Like PayPal, with The Tip Network users get their own ID and can move their tips around anywhere in the network.

Founder Greg Crisci has first hand experience as a server and knows the pain that his startup hopes to solve. He’s busy these days looking for integration partners and preparing the implementation of his new tipping alternative. He did take a few minutes to talk to us though. Check out the interview below:

Groupon To Go Head To Head Against Square On Mobile Transactions

Groupon the daily deals site is reportedly interested in entering the Mobile Commerce field to compete with the likes of Square and most recently PayPal. The company who is embroiled in controversy in almost anything it does, from how it reports it’s profits to how it stock raises, wants to handle your money.

Business Insider is reporting that it’ll charge 1.8% transaction fee and a $0.15 per transaction charge for payments that they process. Whereas Square charges 2.75% with no per transaction fee and PayPal Here charges 2.7%, also with no transaction fee. In a risky move, Groupon will provide not only the device that retailers can charge customers, but also an iPod Touch to take the payments with. Like Yahoo, which recently made waves by releasing a semi browser for the web, and an iOS application, Groupon which keeps failing and is being mishandled would rather throw as many things against a wall and see what sticks versus fixing what’s wrong and instead is trying to hide from this.

Source: Business Insider

Peter Thiel Looking To Bolster New Zealand’s Budding Tech Scene

VentureBeat is reporting today that Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel has invested $12.1 million dollars into the New Zealand technology scene.

Thiel’s Valar Ventures is teaming up with the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund for a total offering of $40 million dollars. New Zealand’s Minister of Economic Development, Steven Joyce, welcomes the funding not just for the money but also the connections Thiel brings to the table.

“[This] is a very positive development for New Zealand technology companies wanting to expand into large offshore markets,” Joyce told the Wall Street Journal. “These companies require not only capital but also getting access to the right offshore networks in those markets and building their customer base.”

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