Łukasz Nosek (; born June 1, 1975) is a Polish-American- French entrepreneur, notable for being a co-founder of

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support E-commerce payment system, online money transfers; it serves as an electronic alter ...

Biography

Łukasz Nosek was born in

Tarnów Tarnów () is a city in southeastern Poland with 105,922 inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of 269,000 inhabitants. The city is situated in the Lesser Poland Voivodeship. It is a major rail junction, located on the strategic east– ...

, Poland. After emigrating to the US, he earned a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In the summer of 1995, while still in college, he co-founded SponsorNet New Media, Inc., along with fellow Illinois students

Max Levchin Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchin (born July 11, 1975) is a Ukrainian-American software engineer and businessman. In 1998, he co-founded the company that eventually became PayPal. Levchin made contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts ...

and Scott Banister. Nosek then worked for

Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was o ...

. In 1998, with Max Levchin, Peter Thiel and Ken Howery, Nosek co-founded

, serving as vice president of marketing and strategy, creating the company's "instant transfer" product. In his first conversation with Thiel, he told Thiel he had just registered to be cryonically suspended, in other words, that he would be subject to low-temperature preservation in case of his legal death in hopes that he might be successfully revived by future medical technology. Thiel himself would later follow Nosek's example. After PayPal went public and was sold to

eBay eBay Inc. ( , often stylized as ebay) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that allows users to buy or view items via retail sales through online marketplaces and websites in 190 markets worldwide. ...

for $1.5 billion in 2002, Nosek left the company to travel and pursue

angel investing An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups A startup or start-up is a company or p ...

. In 2005, with Thiel and Ken Howery, he started Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

firm with over $1 billion under management. In July 2017, Nosek left Founders Fund to launch Gigafund, an investment fund focused on space exploration. Nosek was the first institutional investor in Elon Musk's

SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly referred to as SpaceX, is an America, American space technology company headquartered at the SpaceX Starbase, Starbase development site in Starbase, Texas. Since its founding in 2002, the compa ...

, and sits on the company's board. He also sits on the board of

ResearchGate ResearchGate is a European commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. According to a 2014 study by ''Nature'' and a 2016 article in ''Times Higher Education' ...

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Nosek, Luke 1970s births Living people Angel investors American venture capitalists American technology company founders American corporate directors Computer programmers Cryonicists People from Tarnów PayPal people Polish emigrants to the United States Grainger College of Engineering alumni 21st-century American businesspeople Year of birth missing (living people) Financial technology company founders