PayPal's Pivotal Evolution
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A story about how PayPal's original ambitious vision was to create a global currency, but pivoted to become a payment network, and how its early employees went on to create numerous successful companies.
"PayPal originally had this vision to create a global virtual currency - they even had shirts that said 'one currency to rule them all.' But they shifted away from that later. At a recent Bitcoin conference, Peter Thiel talked about how they went to something more practical - it worked, but was less ambitious.
Instead of creating their own financial system, PayPal settled on being a payments network that works with existing banks and the dollar currency, just funneling money through. While that worked, you could tell Thiel regretted moving away from the bigger idea. Bitcoin later proved that original vision was the big idea.
The people who worked at PayPal - the PayPal Mafia - went on to create YouTube, LinkedIn, Tesla, SpaceX, Yelp, Affirm, and Kiva. There are over $10 billion companies that came from that group. Why? Because they were all weird nerds thinking about the future.
Max Levchin, one of the PayPal cofounders, was so focused on this culture that when interviewing someone who mentioned playing pickup basketball, he said 'We're not hiring this guy - no great programmer plays pickup basketball.' They believed your goal as a startup is to build a cult - people who religiously believe in the mission and are willing to work harder and go to bat for the thing they believe in."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.