#91 PayPal's Early Innovations

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 Follow us on Twitter @KopecExplains. Theme “Place on Fire” Copyright 2019 Creo, CC BY 4.0 Find out more at http://kopec.live