The Founders
A historical narrative about the founding of PayPal and the entrepreneurs who built it.
Levchin’s form appeared to scroll as the user typed, but he worried that the jittery screen animation looked too “psychedelic” and “insane.” His superiors, though, dubbed it “perfect.” “Our people will use it because they know it,”
Standard operating procedure saw boards installing a seasoned CEO to steer dot-coms once they found their footing: eBay’s Meg Whitman, Yahoo’s Tim Koogle, and Google’s Eric Schmidt stood as but a few high-profile examples. Even at Amazon, under the vise grip of Jeff Bezos, there had been a brief flirtation with a COO named Joseph Galli in 1999, who was supposed to step in as “adult supervision.” Galli lasted a grand total of thirteen months, and Amazon hasn’t had a COO since.
The Gausebeck-Levchin test became the first commercial application of a Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart—or CAPTCHA. Today, CAPTCHA tests are common on the internet—to be online is to be subjected to a search for a specific image
hydrant or bicycle or boat—from a lineup.