PayPal

“By the time that I, between I had agreed to join, which is in December and then joined, December, and joined, we were already in conversations with four different companies about buying PayPal.”

“EBay had bought a company called Billpoint, which it owned a hundred percent of, and it launched on its platform, and it wanted everything to go through Billpoint, nothing to go through PayPal.”

“When I joined, it wasn't a hot startup. When I joined, it was kind of thought to be a little weird thing. It was a hot startup by about six months later.”

“The history of the styling fee that we have was that I was worried that you could be a bot or somebody who's going to steal money or steal my clothes. And so I felt like if you were willing to PayPal me 20 dollars before I've even sent you anything, you were p…”

“So the basic issue with PayPal was that it's designed for consumers, not for businesses. And so if you're building an app, if you're building, you know, a website, if you're building a new marketplace, something like this, PayPal works okay for sending, you kn…”

“I can tell you all the times and show you all the emails from really credible investors, like people that, these, they're investors that picked Google and PayPal and YouTube and Facebook and all of the kind of internet greats that came before us, and so sittin…”

“I don't think you could have really predicted it. Obviously, Max was already pretty far along for a 24 year old, so it was obvious, you know, he was gonna be someone interesting in the industry, you know, Peter Thiel, same thing. So, you know, I'd say the top …”

“PayPal was doing something very similar. The only difference is they weren't running a bank. They were just kind of a money transfer service.”

“But Peter being such a, sort of, you know, an inveterate contrarian was quite sympathetic to this case, and decided on the spot to make, you know, a fairly material investment of 200,000 dollars.”

“So the basic issue with PayPal was that it's designed for consumers, not for businesses. And so if you're building an app, if you're building, you know, a website, if you're building a new marketplace, something like this, PayPal works okay for sending, you kn…”

“Reid was one of the more prescient Grains who was sort of like, hey, you can secure other things. Maybe you can like secure invoices or secure IOUs or, you know, secure something that kind of is valuable in and of itself. And that kind of pushed us close enou…”

“And so it was kind of a race, which they should have absolutely won because they had a Product that was supposed to do what we did that they owned, that could be built in, that, you know, could be promoted much, much, much better than we could.”

“And as a footnote, we had a Web to Web, very much a demo quality product that I threw together to just show how this works if you just don't happen to have any Palm Pilots around. And it's that demo that took off like crazy.”

“And then Luke came up with the original viral marketing idea where he had said, hey, what if we gave every new user who signed up 20 bucks, but not just 20 bucks for signing up, but 20 bucks to the person who invited them.”

“One of the interesting accusations that sometimes is leveled against the early PayPal crew is that it was this idea of a frat culture. It's actually quite the opposite. You know, if anything, we were screening against this idea of sort of a self-righteous, pri…”

“He has an engineer's mindset. So for an engineer, which I certainly am, it's a great person to agree or disagree with because it's always rational.”

“Right as we filed to go public, they came in and said, Hey we'll we'll buy you. Don't go public. And we said no.”

“The reason ultimately eBay was able to acquire us is because the team was so overloaded over the four years of previous life.”

“And so by mid June, I think I was starting to sort of become aware of the fact that we're probably losing tens of millions of dollars to these fraudulent activities per quarter.”

“Every Monday when eBay auctions would settle, the system would just go down for multiple hours.”

“And then you merge, and it's a fifty-fifty merger, which means just no one knows who won. And that's, by the way, sort of the root of all complexity at paypalx.com story is that because we sort of settled on this, well, there's not really a senior partner. Equ…”

“Sometime in April of 2000, we saw just this enormous attacks primarily from my former homeland or the general region, like all those were the Eastern block countries, basically realizing that this is a very loosely secured financial system.”

“They came at payments a little bit after we did, but they had some really good ideas that we didn't have. So very quickly, we start just looking at each other and going, oh, that's a good idea. We'll copy that, and vice versa. And we were in the market just be…”

“PayPal was this unbelievably combative Kind of a truth-seeking, by any means necessary, almost, culture.”

“Max created that test after PayPal was getting hammered by hackers.”

“At PayPal, we had access to all this amazing purchasing data. We never once tried to use it for credit scoring.”

“Our exclusive method of payment was PayPal, and so if PayPal worked in that location, then we were able to just Ride those rails.”

“Ended up bringing on board a co-founder who was a bit more technical, had been in product management. And then I also brought on a technical co-founder, somebody who had been actually a founder of PayPal, was the first engineer at YouTube. And so at first ther…”

“The largest Internet M&A before us was PayPal to eBay, right? One point by a billion. And So this was like two X. And then you had. This is amazing. YouTube. YouTube was also 1.6 billion or something like that. Yeah. Also the same year with Google. So this was…”