Luke Nosek

Łukasz Nosek was born in Tarnów, Poland. After emigrating to the US, he earned a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) in 1996. During his time at UIUC, he met several student entrepreneurs from the school's Association for Computing Machinery chapter including Max Levchin, Scott Banister, and Russel Simmons that would become future colleagues.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1995-1996)

In the summer of 1995, while still in college, he co-founded SponsorNet New Media, Inc., along with fellow Illinois students Max Levchin and Scott Banister, who would be future colleagues at PayPal. Following graduation, Nosek then worked for Netscape from 1997 to 1998 as an evangelist.

PayPal (1998-2002)

In 1998, with Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Yu Pan, and Ken Howery, Nosek co-founded financial payments company Fieldlink, later renamed to Confinity before merging with X.com to create the PayPal service, where he was 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 after death in hopes that he might be revived by future medical technology. Thiel himself would later follow Nosek's example.

After PayPal went public and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, Nosek left the company to travel and pursue angel investing.