Ken Howery

Co-founder of PayPal, Howery is an American investor who graduated from Stanford University in 1998 with a B.A. degree in Economics. That same year, he co-founded PayPal with Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Elon Musk, and Max Levchin. He had been with the same team of people since university, having met Thiel at an alumni event while studying economics at Stanford. Thiel told him he needed someone to help him out on his fund, so he joined him.

One of their first investments was in a company called Field Link, which wrote encryptions for Palm Pilots, the original handheld devices that could "beam" information between each other. Both Howery and Thiel joined the Board, and soon a joint idea for PayPal emerged. The original plan was to allow Palm Pilot users to beam money to each other, but they also worked on a web-based version so that users could check their transfers online too. They worked for six months on coding, but at the launch date in late 1999, the Palm Pilot version still had security issues. They launched the web-based version instead and watched it take off. Their service offered a secure and instant way of transferring money between people who didn't know each other.

From 1998 to 2002, he served as PayPal's CFO. Following PayPal's acquisition by eBay in 2002, Howery served as eBay's Director of Corporate Development until 2003. He then rejoined Thiel in 2004 at Clarium Capital Management, where he served as Vice President of Private Equity, as well as a member of the research and trading teams.

In 2005, he and Thiel, along with fellow PayPal alumnus Luke Nosek, started Founders Fund. In 2007 he co-founded and became a Partner in the Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capitalist company that specifically backed the brains behind original start-ups, with over $1 billion under management. His co-founders were people he'd worked with for years: Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek, both of whom had also been PayPal Directors; and Sean Parker, who set up Napster, the music sharing business, and Plaxo, an early social networking service. Parker was also the first President of Facebook.

One such investment was SpaceX, a private rocket company based in Los Angeles that shuttled supplies to those in the international space station. Another investment was in Palentir Technology, which specialized in finding patterns in vast amounts of data. Howery and his colleagues found solutions to problems such as stopping a bank from being hit by a "fishing attack," during which fraudsters send emails that, when opened, could empty an account.

He has been a member of the Council on Competitiveness and the Selection Committee of the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers Program. Howery has also been chosen as a keynote speaker at the Harvard Business School Entrepreneurship Conference. In 2010, Venture Capital Journal named him one of the Top 10 VCs under 35, and in March 2012, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader. He is based in San Francisco, CA.