Paypal Quotes

Technology has come a long way since PayPal. ~ Max Levchin

For PayPal to work, we needed to attract a critical mass of at least a million users. Advertising was too ineffective to justify the cost. Prospective deals with big banks kept falling through. So we decided to pay people to sign up. We gave new customers $10 for joining, and we gave them $10 more every time they referred a friend. This got us hundreds of thousands of new customers and an exponential growth rate. ~ Peter Thiel

My proceeds from the PayPal acquisition were $180 million. I put $100 million in SpaceX, $70m in Tesla, and $10m in Solar City. I had to borrow money for rent. ~ Elon Musk

The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your won thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.
If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we'd figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, "We're trying this, this week." Every week you go to investors and say, "We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge." The next week you're like, "That was a lie. ~ Jessica Livingston

Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SolarCity - they are all expressions of Musk. SpaceX is Musk. ~ Ashlee Vance

Pink Friday Eminem 8 Mile It must hurt to sell your album on Paypal ~ Nicki Minaj

The Internet Treasure companies tend to go public rather than get acquired, although there are clear exceptions, like Instagram, YouTube, Skype and PayPal. ~ Bing Gordon

For me, the international expansion of eBay was the best idea. We are now in 35 countries, and have a huge global network. The second best one was the acquisition of PayPal - the wallet on eBay. ~ Meg Whitman

Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school. ~ Peter Thiel

Technologies like PayPal foster competition because they enable people to shift their funds from one jurisdiction to another, and I think that ultimately will lead to a world in which there's less government power and therefore more individual control. ~ Peter Thiel

If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done. ~ Peter Thiel

Nowadays people talk about PayPal's founders as prescient geniuses who would inevitably change the world. It was, however, not so obvious that PayPal would taste its first major success by helping people sell Beanie Babies on eBay. But they had a vision, a hope, and the perseverance to try multiple iterations until they got it right. ~ Eric Ries

Me: I'm glad we never had to resort to robbing banks for money. You'd be a terrible accomplice.



Georgia: Yes, remember that. Me = terrible accomplice.



Me: Tell me something I don't already know. If you were a hooker, you'd probably track your payments on an Excel spreadsheet and claim them on your taxes. (Add terrible hooker to the list.)



Georgia: Whatever. I'd be the most organized hooker. I'd get one of those credit card swipe-y things.



Me: When is the right time to complete the transaction in that scenario?



Georgia: I think they'd swipe before, and sign their PayPal receipt after.



Me: Prostitute Georgia is classy AF.



Georgia: I know, right? ~ Max Monroe

PayPal staff pioneered techniques in fighting online fraud that have formed the basis of software used by the CIA and FBI to track terrorists and of software used by the world's largest banks to combat crime. ~ Ashlee Vance

Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, has launched a movement to convince people to not go to college.3 It's a waste of money. The return on investment isn't there anymore. School has gotten too expensive. . . If writing [computer] code is your deal and you're able to go to a trade school that enables you to write code, that's far better than a computer science degree from a four-year college or university that looks great on paper, but doesn't give you the skills you need when you graduate. ~ John Dearie

A lot of hackers set up scam sites. They can impersonate a site like PayPal, for instance. ~ Michael Demon Calce

I think if you look at the commonalities between eBay, PayPal and OpenTable, all three are businesses that built a network in a vertical. Network effect businesses are very attractive businesses. ~ Jeff Jordan

I wish I would have known that there was no need to wait. I went to college. I went to law school. I worked in law and banking, though not for terribly long. But not until I started PayPal did I fully realize that you don't have to wait to start something. So if you're planning to do something with your life, if you have a 10-year plan of how to get there, you should ask: Why can't you do this in 6 months? Sometimes, you have to actually go through the complex, 10-year trajectory. But it's at least worth asking whether that's the story you're telling yourself, or whether that's the reality. ~ Timothy Ferriss

PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job. ~ Max Levchin

We had a mission at PayPal - which was to create a new financial system, a new world currency, and we failed. We were a financial success, but we didn't succeed at the purpose of our company. ~ Luke Nosek

What Ethereum Is Good For Ethereum is suited to building economic systems in pure software. In other words, it's software for business logic, wherein people (users) can move money (data representing value) around with the speed and scale that we normally get with data.12 Not the three- to seven-day floating period you get with the commercial banking system. Or the fees associated with vendors such as Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal. With a simple Ethereum application, for example, it is fairly trivial to pay hundreds of thousands of people, in hundreds of countries, small amounts every few minutes, whereas in the legacy banking system you would need an entire payroll department working overtime to constantly rebalance your account ledgers and deal with the cross-border issues. ~ Chris Dannen

The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less, but still failed. The third one, you know, proper failed, but it was kind of okay. I recovered quickly. Number four almost didn't fail. It still didn't really feel great, but it did okay. Number five was PayPal. ~ Max Levchin

As you start building the product, don't assume that you know all the answers. Listen to the community and adapt. We had a lot of our own ideas about how the service would evolve. Coming from PayPal and eBay, we saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn't see anyone using our product that way, so we didn't add features to support it. ~ Chad Hurley

One thing I would like to see in Vancouver and Canada is something similar to the PayPal mafia. They were all early employees of PayPal. They all had monster exits with PayPal, and they were able to take their winnings and form a syndicate that co-invests. ~ Ryan Holmes

I wanted to be a venture capitalist and join Sequoia Capital. They've financed and helped built some really special and enormously successful companies, including Google, Yahoo, Paypal, YouTube, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, and also Zappos. ~ Alfred Lin

I often talk about the PayPal mafia out of San Francisco, people that were in PayPal and got out of PayPal and continue to reinvest in other start-ups and create a huge pay-it-forward type of network there. ~ Ryan Holmes

<...> I think we didn't know what we were doing. I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is that you're not really going to build one specific company. The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneur- ship - is you realize one day that you can't really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what that thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal. ~ Max Levchin