To raise the money she needed, she leveraged her family connections. She convinced Tim Draper, the father of her childhood friend and former neighbor Jesse Draper, to invest $1 million. The Draper name carried a lot of weight and helped give Elizabeth some credibility: Tim’s grandfather had founded Silicon Valley’s first venture capital firm in the late 1950s, and Tim’s own firm, DFJ, was known for lucrative early investments in companies like the web-based email service Hotmail.
