2 years ago
#91 PayPal's Early Innovations
Payment by email and cutting edge fraud prevention.
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Today we know PayPal as a financial powerhouse. But when it was a young company, it had to innovate to survive. PayPal was the result of the merger of two startups—Confinity and X.com. Confinity was trying to be a digital payments solution for Palm Pilots, while X.com was an early online bank. PayPal first found success as a conduit for eBay payments. But perhaps PayPal's greatest innovations were in the area of fraud prevention. PayPal was a pioneer of bank account verification, CAPTCHAs, and using machine learning techniques on big data.
Show Notes
- The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni via Amazon
- CAPTCHA via Wikipedia
- Random Forest via Wikipedia
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