Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

WePay, Driven by Social Sharing, Raises $10M

WePay, an upstart PayPal competitor that helps people accept money online for donations, events and stores, has raised $10 million in a new funding round led by Ignition Partners.

WePay CEO Bill Clerico

Among many competing payments providers, one thing that stands out about WePay is how it’s driven by social sharing. Almost half of WePay’s traffic is referred by Facebook, CEO Bill Clerico said yesterday on a panel we were both on at the Startup Conference in Mountain View, Calif.

A rep for the company said the exact Facebook referral stat is 43 percent — and much higher for campaigns like this one to support a family that lost seven members in a car crash.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based WePay, which initially launched as a groups payments tool, has raised a total of $20 million from Ignition, Highland Capital Partners, August Capital, Y Combinator, SVAngel, Dave McClure, Mark Goines, Steve Chen, and Max Levchin.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik