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PayPal Wants to Be the Internet's Cash Register Again
The blue button helped teach the web to pay. Now PayPal is stitching checkout, Venmo, Braintree, credit, ads and AI agents into a new wager on how money will move.
RRE Ventures Has Been Playing the Long Game Since 1994 - and It Shows
The New York firm wrote early checks into Palantir, Datadog and Venmo, then stayed in the boardroom for the parts that actually get hard.
How a Forgotten Wallet Turned Into America's Verb for Money
Venmo turned paying a friend back into a social ritual - complete with emojis and a public feed. Fifteen years later, "just Venmo me" is how a generation moves money.
Up 'n go
Up 'n go is a San Diego fintech that lets restaurant guests pay their check by scanning a QR code or tapping a texted link - no app to download. Diners view the bill, split it any number of ways, pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, PayPal, a card or gift card, and leave feedback, all from their own phone. Built to plug directly into POS systems like NCR Aloha, Toast, Oracle Micros and Simphony, the company was among the first to bring app-free pay-at-the-table to U.S. restaurants and has since processed more than $1 billion across nearly 14 million contactless payments at chains from First Watch to Fox Restaurant Concepts.
Sonia Nigam
Sonia Nigam is the co-founder and CEO of Change, a San Francisco fintech that turns charitable giving into a few lines of code. Brands drop a Change button into checkout and the company handles the unglamorous machinery behind it - vetting, compliance, and disbursement across more than 200,000 nonprofits. A Northwestern computer science and business grad who engineered frictionless payments at Braintree and Venmo, Nigam quit her job at the start of the pandemic to build the donations API she wished existed. She and co-founder Amar Shah landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for social impact and raised a $5M seed round to bring giving on-chain.
Amit Jhawar
Amit Jhawar is the CEO of Attentive, the AI-powered SMS and mobile marketing platform. Before martech, he spent a decade building payments: he was among the first 30 employees at Braintree, served as its CFO and COO, engineered the acquisition of Venmo, and then ran Venmo as CEO after PayPal bought the business. A former Accel partner, he joined Attentive as President in 2021 and was promoted to CEO in June 2023, where he has steered the company from SMS marketing into a broader AI-driven customer engagement platform.
Nuseir Yassin
Nuseir Yassin, better known as Nas Daily, turned a self-imposed dare - a one-minute video every day for 1,000 days - into a media company that now reaches hundreds of millions of people each month. The Harvard economics graduate and former Venmo developer left a comfortable salary to chase a simpler question: how do you make a stranger care about a place, a person, or an idea in sixty seconds? The answer became Nas Company, an ecosystem spanning Nas Daily, Nas Academy, Nas Studios, the creator platform Nas.io, and the AI-driven agency 1000 Media.
Bryan Johnson
Bryan Johnson is an American tech entrepreneur who built and sold Braintree (the parent of Venmo) to PayPal for $800 million, then funneled the proceeds into venture firm OS Fund and neurotech startup Kernel. He is now best known for Blueprint, a personal protocol and commercial brand built around his 'Don't Die' philosophy, chronicled in the 2025 Netflix documentary 'Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever.'
Eric Wiesen
Eric Wiesen is a General Partner at Bullpen Capital, a San Francisco-based venture firm specializing in post-seed and early-growth investments. A two-time founder, former corporate attorney at Fenwick & West, and ex-General Partner at RRE Ventures, Wiesen brings a rare trifecta of legal, entrepreneurial, and investment experience to backing companies that don't fit the standard seed-to-Series-A mold. His track record includes exits through Braintree/PayPal ($800M), Venmo, Makerbot, and TapCommerce, and he's known for hunting non-obvious, non-consensus opportunities where value is obscured from the investment herd.