The Ledger
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Calacanis: Peter Thiel fully vested Elon Musk's stock when firing him
“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.”
PayPal Burned Over $10M Monthly With Seven Months Runway in 2000
“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…”
Rabois: PayPal had virtually no successful external executive hires
“And this was definitely the PayPal model. We basically had no external hires that thrived, and so everybody was internally groomed from within.”
PayPal and Square surpassed Bank of America and Goldman Sachs in 2020
“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.”
PayPal Raised $100M at $500M Valuation Days Before the 2000 Crash
“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.”
Hower: PayPal went through three CEOs and burned $10M+ monthly in 2000
“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.”
Major tech companies scaled without traditional sales or marketing
“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.”
O'Driscoll: Stripe and PayPal Each Process $1.8 Trillion Annually
“They both process kind of 1.8 trillion dollars a year, right?”
Rajaram: PayPal raised prices five times in three years early on
“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.”
Alibaba Pitch Framed Company as eBay, Amazon, and PayPal of China
“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.”
PayPal launched its first hardware product within six months under Marcus
“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.”