PayPal

“And when I was at eBay, I, since eBay, I used to think one of my biggest failings there was I didn't build a services business. It seemed incredibly obvious to me that eBay with the community and PayPal with the payments should support a services business. I n…”

“The middle section here, this cloud section is in a lot more trouble today. Or it will be in a lot more trouble as digital wallet usage continues to proliferate.”

“Bitcoin is inherently viral, like PayPal, like email, like Skype, like Facebook, because when you send Bitcoin to somebody else, you're telling them, download the Bitcoin client.”

“There was one of the investors I talked to years later who talked to us in summer of 2000 and said he didn't want to invest in the company because the CEO, Elon was living in a one bedroom condo in Palo Alto at the time, and the CEO was clearly lying to him be…”

“The most like amazing venture capital portfolio of all time would be if you just simply invested in all the PayPal founders. Or all the PayPal people for all the new companies.”

“If you signed up, you got 10 dollars. If you referred someone who signed up, you got 10 dollars. So we had a 20 dollar customer acquisition cost.”

“We got to break even in September, 2001. We were the first company in the U.S. To file after nine 11, filed end of September.”

“We did dial back the marketing pretty quickly, although there was there was there then emerged this very big fraud problem in rapid succession and so the burn stayed over ten million a month all the way through September, 2000.”

“Yeah, we'd started targeting eBay January, 2000. I'd say it was 30, 35% of the sellers on eBay were using us by April or May, so it was fairly heavily embedded.”

“Certainly, if you'd been able to keep it going as an independent company, it would be a lot bigger. 1012 years later”

“And so we closed on, yeah, we closed on a hundred million on Friday, March 31st, and the following Monday, the bottom fell out of the market.”

“The customer base was growing at sort of a five to seven percent daily compounding rate. It had hit a 100,000 users in, on February third, 2000, and got to a million by mid-April of 2000.”

“The open source components that, that make up a large part of the DCOS are used by a large number of companies today. Some of the biggest users out there are companies like Twitter Airbnb, HubSpot, eBay, and PayPal are using it for running things. Netflix is u…”

“Most of the fraud on eBay and PayPal was organized crime, typically out of Eastern Europe. Where they had incredibly talented computer science professionals who lacked a lot of commercial opportunity.”

“There's about 6000 total to date, which is outpacing the number of GitHub repositories for other common payment systems like PayPal.”

“You can scale massively and lose the decentralization, and at that point, Bitcoin loses most of its distinguishing features, and you're left with a kind of PayPal situation With all the things people gripe about with PayPal.”

“The way PayPal deals with many issues is they simply block about half the world from transacting, right? I mean, there's an eBay, 20% of all internet, international transactions are blocked because the way they deal with the fact that their system is not built…”

“And then I started building a team at PayPal. And I started watching it as a practical aid for building a team.”

“So when we looked at our loss rates in the summer of 2000, we were basically Bleeding out millions of dollars in fraud related losses per week. We were basically running out of money, even though we had sixty million dollars in the bank, which was very strange…”

“There will be many scenarios, but one of them is that they become more of a back end. If you think about it, now we are connecting more and more services to our bank account, and we are manipulating this money, but without touching the bank account itself. And…”

“Amazon probably has more cards on file than PayPal has cards on file.”

“They had their own bill payment thing that they developed later, which didn't really work, and that's why they bought PayPal, but it was all COD.”

“PayPal did a few deals in back at the beginning of the decade with the Facebook and, you know, felt like, okay, there you have money there. You have social graph. We have social commerce, right? Well, it just, it hasn't worked that way.”

“Send it to my personal PayPal account. And so that was literally how we made our first money was just a hundred bucks via PayPal.”

“PayPal and HiRISE were two of the first four that we built”

“At PayPal, we had of the 254 employees we had in Mountain View when we went public to maybe three had any expertise in financial services at Square. If you included me, which is I'm certainly not a prototypical financial services guy of the first 300 employees…”

“At PayPal we had to change to, like, we, as you know, because you were close to us there, like, we had to change to a paid model because we're like, oh, look, we have exponentiating volume, which means exponentiating cost curve, which means despite having rais…”

“So if you know kind of the true base version of who we all are, as you watch one of these people go for something really big, like Elon Taking humanity to Mars, which is extraordinary. And yet, you know, he's a human being. Like, I've seen him sweaty and tired…”

“As we were interviewing, certainly the early team and even the later team, We kept on selecting for entrepreneurs. We would ask, like, one of the stock questions I would ask was, so what are you going to do after PayPal? And the answer that I welcomed the most…”