Larry Drebes (born April 20, 1967) is an American businessman and the co-

founder Founder or Founders may refer to: Places *Founders Park, a stadium in South Carolina, formerly known as Carolina Stadium * Founders Park, a waterside park in Islamorada, Florida Arts, entertainment, and media * Founders (''Star Trek''), the ali ...

Janrain Janrain, sometimes styled as JanRain, is a customer profile and identity management (CIAM) software provider based in Portland, Oregon, United States. It was established in 2002. Akamai acquired Janrain in January 2019. History Janrain was foun ...

, Four11 Corporation, and Desktop.com. He was also an early leader of the

OpenID OpenID is an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol promoted by the non-profit OpenID Foundation. It allows users to be authenticated by co-operating sites (known as relying parties, or RP) using a third-party identity provi ...

initiative, which was widely supported by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

, and other providers of

online identity Internet identity (IID), also online identity, online personality, online persona or internet persona, is a social identity that an Internet user establishes in online communities and websites. It may also be an actively constructed presentatio ...

Career

In 1992, Drebes was a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Four11 Corporation, the parent company of Rocketmail, an early webmail provider. Four11 was acquired by

Yahoo Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...

in October 1997 for $97 million, and RocketMail became

Yahoo! Mail ! Mail (also written as Yahoo Mail) is an email service offered by the American company Yahoo, Inc. The service is free for personal use, with an optional monthly fee for additional features. Business email was previously available with the Yah ...

. Drebes then founded Desktop.com in 1999 and secured $29 million in financing. The company was shut down in 2001 after giving back about half the venture capital it received. In 2002, Drebes began working closely with the early proponents of the

protocol. In response to his work, he founded Janrain in 2002 to build software for user management based on OpenID. The company is perhaps best known for its social ID

login In computer security, logging in (or logging on, signing in, or signing on) is the process by which an individual gains access to a computer system or program by identifying and authenticating themselves. Typically, user credential ...

technology, which allows users of

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

and many other

social networks A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of meth ...

to log into any

web site A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, education, ...

using previously established social IDs. Janrain has received over $79 million in

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 ...

funding, including $15.5 million in 2011 $33 million in 2013 and $27 million in 2015.

Personal life and education

Drebes was born in

St. Louis St. Louis ( , sometimes referred to as St. Louis City, Saint Louis or STL) is an independent city in the U.S. state of Missouri. It lies near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a populatio ...

. He graduated from St. Paul's School and then earned a BS in

Marketing Marketing is the act of acquiring, satisfying and retaining customers. It is one of the primary components of Business administration, business management and commerce. Marketing is usually conducted by the seller, typically a retailer or ma ...

from Maryville University. Drebes is married to Karen Drebes and has three children.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Drebes, Larry 1966 births Living people American computer businesspeople American technology company founders Businesspeople from Portland, Oregon Businesspeople from Wisconsin Businesspeople in software American chief technology officers People from Lake Charles, Louisiana Stanford University alumni Tulane University alumni