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 in October 1997 for $97 million,[1] and RocketMail became Yahoo! Mail.[2]
Drebes then founded Desktop.com in 1999 and secured $29 million in financing.[3] The company was shut down in 2001 after giving back about half the venture capital it received.[4]
In 2002, Drebes began working closely with the early proponents of the OpenID protocol. In response to his work, he founded Janrain in 2002[5] to build software for user management based on OpenID. The company is perhaps best known for its social ID login technology, which allows users of Facebook, Google and many other social networks to log into any web site using previously established social IDs. Janrain has received over $79 million in venture capital funding, including $15.5 million in 2011,[6] $33 million in 2013,[7] and $27 million in 2015.
