You probably all know, what PayPal is, for the ones, who don't:
PayPal is the leading service for online payments, it has recently gotten more than 200 Million users and is one of the biggest businesses in the world.
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Now for the actual story of PayPal:

It all begun in the late 90s, in 1998 a man named Max Levchin wandered around silicon valley, searching for a startup to participate on, when he met Peter Thiel, who also wanted to get big into the computer buiseness, so they started thinking about what difference they could make in the still young technological age.

After a longer time period they settled on the idea to make payments easier. So they founded the precursor of PayPal: Fieldlink.
It was only accessible via a PDA, they were the newest technology in this time, but they also were pretty expensive, so there weren't very many users on fieldlink leading to it's failure.

1999:

Back to the drawing board, they needed a platform not bound to a certian device. And what is connected to nearly every electronic device on this planet? Exactly the internet, they reincorporated under the name "Confinity", and together with a 3$ Million investment by Nokia, they made the trick.

PayPal had a very aggressive marketing strategy, get 10$ for signing up, get another 10 for each friend you also get to sign up. So PayPal skyrocketed very fast, after only three months after the releasing, PayPal had 12k users.

Shortly after Ebay got involved, in the early days of Ebay you could only purchase products via cheques and money orders.
So they integrated PayPal into their website, wich also gave PayPal an enormous boost in popularity!

Before the .com bubble popped, PayPal had many competitors, the biggest of them was x.com.
x.com was founded by none other than Elon Musk. Yes this Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Hyperloop.Photo: Reuters

Ironically both headquarters were located only two blocks away from each other, making things complicated on a personal level. Eventually "The PayPal Wars" got so intense, that both sides were doing 100h+ of work every week.

Surprisingly, in March of 2000 this war ended, when Elon Musk and Peter Thiel shook hands and merged both companies.
At the same time, the .com crash happened, destroying most of PayPal's competitors. Thanks to the merge of their companies, PayPal managed to survive the .com crash.
All PayPal executives became engaged in various other companies, such as YouTube, Reddit and SpaceX i.e., they acquired so much influence that they even got a own name: The PayPal Mafia.

By end of 2001 PayPal had almost 13 million active users, so the next step was pretty obvious: Just two weeks after 9/11 PayPal announced to go public, this happened in February 2002.
Despite the fact, that the economy was still shocked from the 9/11 incident, PayPal's shares were selling at nearly 50% more of the intended target price.

A few months later, Ebay bought PayPal for 1.5$ Billion, all the original founders of PayPal had gone other ways, but that did not stop PayPal from growing.
By 2006 PayPal could be used in more than 55 countrys
By 2011 PayPal had over 100 Million users.

I hope I could give you a little insight into the interesting history of PayPal