PayPal Escaped Obscurity by Embracing Credit Card Competitors

In late 1999 a young computer scientist named Max Levchin started receiving emails from strangers about a web demo he’d created to illustrate the workings of an app.

The app, which he’d also helped create, was an encrypted payments platform for the state-of-the-art mobile device of the day, the Palm Pilot: Two users would agree to the transaction, the sender would enter his credit card number into his device, and once both Palm Pilots were physically plugged into their owners’ computers, the appropriate amount would be debited from one and credited to the other. “It was fairly clunky,” Levchin concedes, ...