The company’s co-founders, David Sobie and Mark Geller, and its full 120+ team, will join PayPal, and will report to Frank Keller, SVP Consumer In-Store and Digital Commerce at PayPal. And notably, PayPal made a strategic investment in the business in 2019, as part of an $11 million financing round.įollowing the deal’s close, Happy Returns will continue to work with retailers and shoppers both on and off PayPal’s platform, it says. Happy Returns has also been closely working with PayPal throughout its history, it notes. The service has been used by several digitally native brands, including Everlane, Rothy’s and Parachute Home, among others. These are found in physical retail stores like Paper Source, Sur La Table, Cost Plus World Market and others. It all began in 1998 when Levchin went to see Thiel give a guest lecture at Stanford University. Today, the Happy Returns solution offers a combination of software, services and logistics that allows retailers to manage their returns through their own retail stores, by carrier, as well as through Happy Returns’ “Return Bar” locations. PayPal is Proof Good Ideas Gain Traction Quickly Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Elon Musk, David Sacks and Reid Hoffman are the six key founders that created the world’s largest online payment system. In fact, the foot traffic that offering an Amazon returns desk or locker system in-store has led retailers like Kohl’s and Stein Mart to embrace the enemy by catering to shoppers with Amazon returns in their own stores. Meanwhile, today’s retailers have to compete with giants like Amazon and Walmart, both which enable returns more easily for their customers by way of their large brick-and-mortar footprints - Amazon with Whole Foods’ other locations, and Walmart with its own stores. Happy Returns found that online items are three to four times as likely to be returned than those purchased in store, for example. Because online shoppers can’t inspect items they buy directly, online retail tends to see higher return rates, especially in apparel. The company says it will continue to offer its returns experience to online retailers and shoppers as a part of PayPal.įounded in 2015, Santa Monica-based Happy Returns’ value proposition was to take some of the overhead and cost out of the returns process for online retailers. It also has relationships with hundreds of brands that have been using its returns software and reverse logistics services. Often referred to as the Don of the PayPal Mafia, Peter Thiel is one of the original co-founders of. Elon Musk, seen as one of the most visionary tech entrepreneurs from the Silicon Valley scene, started his. The company today offers a network of more than 2,600 drop-off returns locations in the U.S., including those in over 1,200 metros and in every U.S. PayPal Mafia: The PayPal Mafia Members In A Nutshell Elon Musk. It is a story of sweeping, nail-biting entrepreneurial success-the definitive account of how a generation of technology founders came to learn and practice their craft.PayPal announced today it’s acquiring Happy Returns, a returns solution provider that offers online shoppers access to easier ways to send back unwanted merchandise to retailers without having to box it up and ship it themselves. Based on hundreds of interviews and with unprecedented access to thousands of pages of never-before-seen material, Soni's narrative digs deep into the founding of a company whose creators have changed how we use the internet and technology today. In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores the earliest venture of some of today's foremost business titans. Before they became a "mafia," they were the unknown, uncertain creators of the company PayPal. And yet, for all that, the story of the company where they all first met has gone untold. Together, they constitute the most influential network in Silicon Valley, responsible for forming, funding, or advising two decades worth of major tech companies from SpaceX to Facebook, YouTube to Yelp, Palantir to LinkedIn, and many more. Today, the world knows them as the "PayPal Mafia." Out of the founding employees of PayPal have come billionaire start-up executives, Academy Award-winning producers, and high government officials. Out of PayPal came the most powerful players in Silicon Valley and a new template for entrepreneurship in our modern age. A definitive, deeply reported look at the origin story of PayPal and the creation of the "PayPal Mafia," a group that includes Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Max Levchin, among many others.
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