Growing up in Cuba, Jose Pimienta didn’t see the Internet until 2006. He and his friends taught themselves computer programming with a Russian textbook on the Pascal programming language that had been translated into Spanish. Even in university, when he finally had access to the Internet, Pimienta, now 27, was limited to 20 megabytes per month of data — a small fraction of what fits on a thumb drive today. Yet, in 2013 when PayPal hosted its first-ever global hackathon competition in San Jose, Calif., with a $100,000 purse, Pimienta and two partners placed third for developing a peer-to-peer lending app called LoanPal.
