PayPal

“So I think it's just like a few founders who were able to attract a lot of talented people together. And those people were going to be doing very successful things anyway. And they just followed the best talent initially.”

“There's a bunch of companies like PayPal, Airbnb, Facebook, Hotmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, WhatsApp, Quora, Reddit. A bunch of companies who've gotten really big, really fast, without doing any traditional sales or marketing.”

“Some of Gil's investments include some pretty well-known companies that you might have heard of, including PayPal, LinkedIn, AngelList themselves, Indiegogo, and many, many more.”

“The first thing that we did is we put a landing page up that was Naturebox.com, it showed a picture of what the box looked like, and then you could click a buy now button. And if you clicked that buy now button, you actually got sent to PayPal, where you could…”

“During my first year working there in 2000, you know, we had essentially three different CEOs over the course of that year. You know, at our worst point, we were burning, you know, more than ten million dollars a month.”

“Some management lessons about avoiding general managers. We didn't really subscribe to the view that someone was a quote unquote good manager versus someone who was excellent in a particular discipline. And I think there's a lot of truth to that.”

“Kevin's also a prolific angel investor, with one of the most successful angel portfolios in the valley, with the likes of Airbnb, Uber, PayPal, Pinterest, and Yammer, all in Kevin's personal angel portfolio.”

“If you've used PayPal, you know, in the last few years, you know that it doesn't feel like an experience that was made in the last few years. It feels like older technology.”

“Probably just that the outcomes are going to be 10 X or bigger than you think. When we were doing PayPal, it was hard to envision that it would be a hundred billion dollar plus company in 20 years. We thought a one and a half billion dollar outcome was great. …”

“The company had raised a hundred million at 500 pre at the height of the bubble. We literally closed the financing right at the beginning of April, 2000, I think, 1516 days before the Nasdaq started to slide.”

“We raised this hundred million dollar round that I referenced in March, and then by June, we had seven months of runway left. We were burning over ten million a month, and Mike Maritz actually was the one who really rang the alarm bells for us and got us to fo…”

“Meg Whitman gave me an offer to remain a CFO of the company, and Mike Moritz gave me a call and asked whether I'd interviewed Sequoia, which is kind of strange because they were looking for a computer science major who'd done product management at an enterpris…”

“Having been, you know, part of the five-person executive team at PayPal through its, you know, dogfight Existence of survival or death. I knew all the landmines in the payment industry. So they came to me and said, hey, we've got this deal, which is, you know,…”

“And ubiquity wins. Like Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, Square Cash, all these payment networks, they became ubiquitous around the US, As more and more people started using them, and that's how its winner takes all, or winner takes most, I guess, with these types of pay…”

“Last year, you probably know this, but you know, you've heard some of these stats, like PayPal became more valuable than Bank of America and Square became more valuable than Goldman.”

“At my first startup, LinkExchange, we had this brilliant contractor who was younger than us, so I was 25, Max Lefton was 22, and when we sold our company, he left to start PayPal. We all knew Max was, like, just a whole next-level brilliance. I mean, when he w…”

“If PayPal sold to eBay for fifty billion, I doubt the intensity and commitment to pursuing startups would have stayed that, would have been as high for as many of them. Certainly some, but not most.”

“Like if you think about like, you know companies like PayPal and Skype and so forth, like, you know, these companies, I would argue the biggest impact of those companies wasn't the services they created. It's the people that they touched and what those people …”

“And in the span of six months or less, we basically had our product in the market, which was the first hardware product that PayPal had shipped.”

“I proactively decided to do it in a brutal way as I wanted it to be a shock to the culture so that it became uncomfortable to the people who wouldn't be a cultural fit for the company.”

“There was three people out of 254 people in the company that, when we sold the company, that could live in San Francisco because the company was based in Palo Alto. There was no extra time to commute between Palo Alto and San Francisco.”

“Max rejected me the first time as a freshman. We had an argument on a whiteboard and I thought he was going to bring me in anyway.”

“One of the things that we don't do enough is counter metrics, and I think I saw that at PayPal and at Facebook, where you would grow a metric like at PayPal, for example, there were two teams. One was growing revenue, and then one was actually stopping revenue…”

“And this was definitely the PayPal model. We basically had no external hires that thrived, and so everybody was internally groomed from within.”

“When I look back on my time at PayPal, 90% of our growth came from, like, 10% of the stuff that we did.”

“When you're in a big company where having the right answers like five or 10% of the problem and getting the entire organization and to change people's mindset and align resources ends up becoming like 80 or 90% of the problem.”

“The best, I'll say categorically, the best growth people I hired and managed in my time at PayPal had no marketing experience, had no product experience at all.”

“They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns, building products that, frankly, nobody ever used”

“Having done this at PayPal, having done this at LinkedIn, having done this at Airbnb, having done, like all of this stuff, it's always a chaotic hot mess.”

“The day that acquisition of PayPal by eBay was announced Peter had resigned, and I met him up at the Sundeck restaurant in up on Sand Hill Road, and he said, you know, Kevin, I'm working on this business, and, you know, we're taking kind of the fraud algorithm…”

“The story was positioned very simply that, hey, it's the China consumer play, and they are the eBay plus Amazon plus PayPal of China.”

“I got pitched early in stripe and square, and I Didn't do the investments because I knew how hard payments was from PayPal.”

“He had, like, a bonus system for PayPal employees. If they lived within, like, a couple miles of the office, you'd give them more money.”

“He fired him, but he treated him like a human being. Okay. He vest fully vested all his stock, took nothing out of his pocket, thanked him for it and told him that was the way it was going to be.”

“And he told us that PayPal back in the day, raised prices five times. In three years, because there's such stickiness. They knew their customers really couldn't do anything.”

“Doing basically what everyone in your industry does, doing scammy affiliate marketing when it's basically part of your thing. I mean, startups cut corners, right? It's not, this isn't Delvesque, but everyone cuts a corner. When everyone in your industry is sli…”

“They both process kind of 1.8 trillion dollars a year, right?”

“So it's probably just a dance from 28 to 35. And then it gets parked with advent to while they figure out antitrust and capital issues.”

“The board rejected it, right? And the fact that the board rejected it means to me that they're going to accept it.”

“Smart deal to try and do, but they're clearly not willing to overpay as they see it.”