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Origin’s ambitious vision and steadfast innovation has attracted some of Tech’s brightest minds. Our Inside Origin series highlights key investors, advisors, and team members. This week we dive into the world of a founding team member of PayPal, Yu Pan.
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These stories and more will be covered in future Inside Origin editions! This marks the third edition of our bi-weekly Inside Origin series. Our most recent edition covered Youtube cofounder Steve Chen’s involvement with Origin. Today we’re exploring the incredible journey of Yu Pan, who played an integral role as the lead research engineer for OUSD!
Few builders can compete with the vast experience and cutting-edge products under Yu Pan’s belt.
Born in China, Yu Pan graduated from the University of Illinois with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. Exploding with innovative ideas, he became one of PayPal’s six original founding members in 1999.
Yu spearheaded engineering efforts during his five year tenure at PayPal, building out many core elements of PayPal’s payments and auction infrastructure. He even spent time developing a crude version of a “crypto wallet” which enabled offline digital signatures for payments, evidencing his visionary perspective.
Not one to rest on his success, Yu subsequently joined YouTube as the platform’s very first engineer. Continuing his streak of engineering genius, he built the embedded video player that ignited the video-sharing platform's meteoric growth.
This move proved fortuitous for many reasons. At YouTube, Yu crossed paths with our co-founder Matthew Liu, who was growing YT as one of the site’s first project managers. The meeting marked the start of a long and enduring friendship and working relationship.
As a visionary obsessed with value and empowerment, Yu shared Matt’s infectious excitement for a smart contract protocol built to serve the sharing economy.
Yu’s passion for innovation and relentless building saw him officially join Origin as lead research and development engineer in 2018.
His broad insights and battle-tested expertise have contributed greatly to Origin’s success. As Origin Dollar’s lead research engineer, Yu played an integral part in building OUSD’s robust mechanics and seamless usability.
PayPal Cofounder & First YouTube Engineer Talks About His Work at Origin
Yu’s career illustrates a rare brilliance that has left indelible marks on the industries he’s worked in.
Between YouTube and joining Origin, he served as CTO for payments startups including Affirm and 8i. Somehow, he’s also made time to found multiple startups during his illustrious career.
Yu Pan’s serial success evidences decades of incredibly hard work coupled with an insatiable passion for software. His unique vision and ability to execute has been disrupting the payments landscape since its early beginnings.
We’re immensely proud to have had Yu Pan play an integral role in Origin Protocol’s founding, as well as having him as one of our most ardent supporters.
