The TIME Warp Strategy Weblog

PayPal was founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel in 1998. It went public in 2002 and soon afterwards finally was sold to eBay. Most managers and key persons of PayPal then left the company and launched various further business ventures, such as Youtube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Slide, Yelp, Geni, Yammer, Anchor Intelligence, TradeVibes, HourTown, Room 9 Entertainment and also SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Clarium Capital Management and The Founders Fund. Regarding this, the New York Times mentioned it'd 'Pay off to have Pals in Silicon Valley'. Obviously, there's something special with those PayPal-people and that's why it is so interesting to read more about the PayPal story.

Eric Jackson was one of the first PayPal employees when in 1999 Peter Thiel, the then CEO of PayPal, draw him from Arthur Andersen into the tiny startup company. A short time after the successful Going Public and the sell out to eBay, Jackson left PayPal - as most of the earlier managers. He then wrote "The PayPal Wars", the true story about how they made PayPal growing against all odds and beat all competitors.

There were good reasons why this book turned out to be a bestseller among business books and even former Mc'Kinsey Guru Tom Peters named it a page turner. It's true what people say: It reads like a spy novell.

Very strongly recommended for all startup teams in all branches !

It looks like a sculpture of modern art but it's the newest generation of high tech wind turbines: With only 5 meters height and 3 meters diameter, very light weighted and very quiet the QR5 type offers additional applications.

Jondos GmbH, a startup company from the environment of Regensburg university launched a commercial service version of the Java Anon Proxy ('JAP') - with increasing interest from the market.

Munich based independent film producer WTP international is well known for it's innovative film production methods as well as for proving that exciting feature films don't need big budgets. WTP's new feature film 'Loneliness never walks alone' will start in german cinemas in march.

Iren Dornier, grandson of Claude Dornier who was famous for his innovative constructions of seaplanes such as the DO-X, constructed a new small seaplane which did it's maiden flight in late summer 2007.

Richard Florida, professor at George-Mason-University and american Guru of city development, published a new book "The Rise of the creative class". His interesting findings: Not the mega cities are the places by which the creative class will be attracted.

Yeebase, Hanover/Germany, is a very interesting start up company with an exciting, self-developed technology. The company is publisher of the 'T3N magazin' focused on open source community from the web development fields.

A couple of firms in Kiel/Germany, specialized originally on building services and intelligent homes started an unconventional project which seems to be quite successful.