PayPal

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• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  took about three and a half years to actually make thing for smoking and which is about the time it took to make PayPal

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  you guys wind up selling it to eBay

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  this huge advantage that PayPal has it's why they're able to price the product so low because so many of the transactions are either on us or being funded from a bank account

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  the way that PayPal made money is that about half the payments at least when I was there were on us transactions where it was basically a PayPal account balance funding the transaction or someone funding the transaction from a bank account

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  hundreds of millions of dollars the company's making hundreds of millions so it's a percentage point of that

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  millions of dollars of fraudulent transactions that PayPal had to pick up the cost of

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  a human looking at the visual representations could spot right away a fraudulent pattern

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  the darkest moment in the history of pay was probably the fraud period... there was sort of a unique problem with processing credit cards on the internet which is you know there are CDs of stolen credit card numbers which you could acquire on the internet you know all these Russian hackers had them and these guys could just literally run credit cards through our system... we had the Russian mafia was doing it you know Nigerian Mafia... we were on the hook for that

• bullish endorsement David Sacks

  he literally kicked everyone's butts to get that deal done and literally we got the deal done I think the Friday before Black Monday I think if we had waited just one more day literally game over there would not have been a PayPal

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  we got something like 200 million in commitments to invested a 500 million pre-money valuation hello yeah but this is this is when you know PayPal had um no Revenue no profits and not even really a business model

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  the early backer of PayPal was Nokia Ventures because they ultimately saw it as this mobile play

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  we kind of got funded as a result of that first wave of mobile hype

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  you had to actually go through a seven-page signup flow that's it just seven and you have to sy the Palm Pilot twice during the flow

• bullish prediction David Sacks

  what if you could email money you now that sounds like a killer app

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  interesting technology but kind of a a dumb business and or idea

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  it was voted the worst VC back idea of 1999

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  the first entrepreneurial thing I did was PayPal

• bullish endorsement David Sacks

  you heard about PayPal and you know the money and the email thing was sort of magical

• neutral fact_claim Roelof Botha

  eBay was completely closed and sort of PayPal was one of the first companies to have the sort of embed strategy where PayPal buttons were on eBay but they they were essentially closed you know they they tried to not have us be on eBay and yet we managed to get in there and delivered an interesting service

• neutral fact_claim Roelof Botha

  at PayPal we we had to raise a lot of money and you know at the end of the day the founders and the people in the building I think maybe earned 15 or between 15 and 20% by the time we went public um you know that was unfortunate that's not a great outcome

• bullish endorsement Kevin Hartz

  Peter teal spoke a lot about uh that that tradeoff uh he he reflects when reflecting on PayPal it's it's that PayPal made it so simple to sign up uh whereas competitors to PayPal didn't make it because they would do things like ask for your social security number ask for your uh you know six extended family members made in names and and just make a very honorous process that nobody could really complete or it was so inconvenient uh and and that really is the the magic balance of of Fraud and and

• neutral fact_claim Kevin Hartz

  in the case of PayPal you know they publish their fraud rates and and in their case it's 20 basis points so as uh that's a a fifth of a percent and that's really a cost of good so you're trying to Maxim you're trying to make sure your margins are are are strong

• bullish fact_claim Kevin Hartz

  people you know trust PayPal because they never go down

• neutral assessment Dave McClure

  if they'd been a sexy event when I was here um PayPal did okay

• bullish assessment Dave McClure

  PayPal was an amazing Place uh was growing rapidly and was really a tremendous opportunity for me early in my career

• neutral fact_claim Dave McClure

  we had a community of maybe three between 250 000 or 500 000 Merchant and developers

• neutral fact_claim Dave McClure

  they had an API that was literally seven to ten lines of HTML which I put on the back of a t-shirt that I ran for our first developer conference

• neutral fact_claim Dave McClure

  maybe 200 250 people in the in the company in Palo Alto not not counting customer service in other areas yeah but I joined pretty soon right before they went public

• bearish criticism William Quigley

  we sold PayPal to eBay at a price that was way way too low 1.8 billion 1.8 billion and now a really it's worth 25 billion 25 billion and is the real value I think of the eBay franchise now

• mixed assessment Peter Horan

  this is a sign of the success and the ubiquity of a product that people are complaining about they also shut down somebody who is taking donations for some like really good cause you know this a sign of how ubiquitous PayPal has finally become that everybody

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  although PayPal reinstated ziv's account after a local NBC affiliate ran the story

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  PayPal without warning had shut down the company's account saying the site quote could be considered obscene however zivid has been using the service for 4 years and neither ziv's content nor the PayPal's acceptable use policy has changed

• bullish endorsement Cyan Banister

  well sometimes I advise them to be parasitical which is you know go to Facebook build something that's you know rides off their success you know like right paypal to the ebay and to the zynga to the Facebook right

• neutral assessment David Sacks

  i think part of that's because they lost all the founding people very quickly and so they've lost sort of several successive generations and so it's hard to maintain the innovation when everyone who built this is gone

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  paypal has not exactly been at the forefront of innovation

• bullish fact_claim David Sacks

  i think it's got over 100 million users at this point

• bullish prediction David Sacks

  i think if paypal was a standalone company with its metrics it'd probably be worth over 20 billion dollars

• bullish fact_claim David Sacks

  it's growing so if you look at the payment volume today versus where it was when we sold it it's like 10x i mean the whole thing is like 10 times bigger

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  i think you're right that our sort of our secret of success has been

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  it took salesforce.com about 12 years to get to 3 million users and it took us about three years to get three million users now we're kind of well past that and that's because this is so much more viral it's designed as a social network where salesforce is designed as contact management crm

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  PayPal has not exactly been at the Forefront of innovation I think part of that's because they lost all the founding people very quickly and so they've lost sort of several successive generations and so it's hard to maintain the Innovation when everyone who built this has gone

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  ever since I was doing PayPal over 10 years ago we knew hey you're supposed to file patents the problem is do you really want your engineers taking their time writing these patents instead of coding and building your product

• bullish endorsement Ben Milne

  some of the early PayPal guys were the ones that told me well hey this might be a way for you to look at fraud you know so um to some of those guys thanks they saved us tens of millions of dollars easily

• neutral fact_claim Ben Milne

  I remember the PayPal team telling me like the business almost got shut down at one point because they were under such a constant assault from Russian hackers

• bearish assessment Ben Milne

  I don't think you can build a great business on just PTP alone PTP is a use case that's really erratic and hard to predict

• mixed assessment Ben Milne

  PayPal has been kind of stagnant for the last couple years people some people say it's mismanaged some people say it's underutilized a lot of the former PayPal uh Executives the PayPal Mafia as it were are pretty down on PayPal in fact they they don't even publicly and privately say you know it's kind of mismanaged and they're missing the opportunity ... I do think that PayPal's got a really strong opportunity to continue to build a really strong profitable business but the reality is I think we

• bearish assessment Ben Milne

  oh I mean 2.9% plus 30 cents of transaction and there's probably a sliding scale that you can negotiate with them but you know having uh gone through them for a lot of payments in the past and kind of my previous life and my other company you know it's expensive and it's not their fault the reality is is you know when they created that kind of um you can pay now with your bank you put in a card number and as soon as the card number goes in you have to roll that fee over it's just all there is to

• neutral fact_claim Steve Jurvetson

  corporate investors swooping in for series a quadrupling our offer ah you know that must be crazy it couldn't actually be worth that much um and so then as they started have some success you have some regrets but not a lot then when they sell to eBay you're like wow that was a big win that we missed

• bullish assessment Steve Jurvetson

  what really bugged me recently is I hadn't really factored in how many alumni of PayPal have started incredible companies that we may have very well had the inside track on the way the quote PayPal Mafia L just on and on right yeah and some more monsters coming I mean multi-billion dollar companies they're like paler and stuff that are still private all PayPal people

• bearish criticism Steve Jurvetson

  what have you missed pay PayPal those was the most painful to me and I only realized that recently so it wasn't painful at the time meaning uh well here's what happened so we presented the first actually I presented the first term sheet uh to uh confinity Luke NK and Peter teal and I think they thought it was low and they got an offer four times higher from noia and this is when the whole business idea was we're going to beam currency infrared ports

• neutral fact_claim Steve Jurvetson

  we made an offer to PayPal but got out bid

• bearish prediction Tom

  Bitcoin or some digital cash equivalent is going to definitely take over in terms of size of PayPal soon

• bullish fact_claim Gil Penchina

  the biggest winners would be LinkedIn PayPal had some nice base hits things like military calm and Evite's and others

• bullish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  he's invested in over 60 companies including LinkedIn and PayPal those are multibillion-dollar exits

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  I think PayPal's offline presence is very, very weak.

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  I think it's safe to assume that if you were going to try to buy it, you'd be in the $40 billion-ish range at least.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  People don't know how profitable it is, though. ... not a lot of transparency. ... So there are a lot of questions.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  So eBay right now is worth $70, and at least two-thirds of that worth is PayPal and PayPal subsidiaries, you know, Venmo and all that sort of thing. And I think when you put it on market, I actually think PayPal will go up unless there's like some kind of major issue.

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  half the people I talk to say it's going to be bought in two seconds. ... But I don't buy that. I think it's going to be very expensive

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I think it's definitely a savvy move because if you just look at the overlap between the businesses, it's getting smaller and smaller, the percent of revenue on eBay that was being driven by PayPal and vice versa.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  PayPal is going to be much larger than eBay already is. This is a savvy move, right? Splitting them up, letting them choose their own course?

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  I've heard good things about the guy. And I would also say like out of all the major like credit card companies, Amex is the most forward thinking in terms of digital and their initiatives.

• bearish assessment Ryan

  I mean there's been rumors right of you know PayPal potentially acquiring square and PayPal's now spinning out of eBay they clearly feel like they're behind on stuff and I for sure they were the ones kind of cut out of the announcement so um they seem the most likely to potentially be hurt but it doesn't seem like a zero sum game

• bearish criticism Reid Hoffman

  Elon Musk had a bad idea in his career. Yes. We have one. great ones. That one not so good. bad idea.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  Elon was essentially fired or pushed out of PayPal at the time where there was a power struggle.

• bullish assessment Reid Hoffman

  the basic decision was master merchant. That worked out. PayPal's here today, etc.

• neutral fact_claim Reid Hoffman

  the cost line was exponentiating. ... the actual thing was free credit card processing with exponentiating transaction volume. ... you're losing money on every transaction.

• neutral fact_claim Reid Hoffman

  in August of 2000, PayPal had burned $12 million in one month. Not a dime of revenue.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  PayPal is, of course, an iconic brand. We all know that. We use it. We love it. But there is so much more than just that yellow button. They've built a global payment infrastructure that's designed to scale along with your company. And if you're an AI and SAS startup, PayPal is already set up for the way you monetize. That means seats, subscriptions, credits, token usage, API consumption, and usage based pricing. PayPal already works with all the leading billing platforms, and they offer complet

• neutral fact_claim Peter Thiel

  we were sort of less smoothly functioning, but a lot of people did feel ownership of the product and would um would raise their voices quite a bit if they felt things were off track.

• neutral fact_claim Peter Thiel

  I think it was a relatively entrepreneurial somewhat chaotic culture. We had a lot of very strong personalities.

• neutral assessment Peter Thiel

  the overarching lesson you learned going through a business like PayPal which had a lot of challenges but ended up succeeding the highle lesson was you can build a great company but it's hard.

• bullish prediction David Sacks

  do you think major corporations are going to go for this would a Microsoft unit say hey our head counts been frozen I could totally see that down the line like big big picture we want to move into SMB eventually and Enterprise as offerings what we could imagine would be something like that um another economic downturn where Microsoft or PayPal lays off all of their support Administration and we can come on and say either in a downturn or just say hey you guys spend x million a year on this we co

• neutral assessment David Sacks

  if there's a common denominator between PayPal, Yammer, and Zenefits, it's that all three companies innovated on distribution, not just product.

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  the critical moment for us was in around December of 1999, um a user emailed us and this was forwarded to to the management team by our customer service rep. And that user asked if she could use the PayPal logo on her eBay auctions and was asking for our permission. ... we dropped everything and focused on taking over the eBay platform.

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  PayPal started um in '99 and we IPO'd in 2002. And later in 2002, we we sold the company to eBay. So, PayPal really um that whole era that you associate with the PayPal Mafia, all of that occurred in about three and a half years.

• bullish fact_claim Keith Rabois

  Peter Thiel back in PayPal taught me the answer to this, which is, he used to insist every single employee was allowed to do exactly one thing, like one thing, and not two, not three. And he wouldn't talk to you about anything else.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  with PayPal, if you remember, they had a thing where, hey, get your friends to open an account and we'll put $10 in their account and $10 in yours.

• neutral fact_claim Patrick Collison

  they're pretty large and established and so on but it certainly was not just them and that's sort of when we look to just our friends people when you running companies and so on and most actually weren't building on PayPal

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  PayPal was just horrific to deal with like every time I tried to get into my account it didn't work every time we tried to accept money from people it didn't work and then they would everybody would tell me the same thing do you have PayPal account I have one oh can can I tell you it's locked and I can't get anybody on the customer support line and I have $2,000 in there but I can't get into my anybody have customer support problems with power

• bearish fact_claim Alfred Lin

  I passed on this company... There's this company called Confinity that came by... and we passed... That became obviously PayPal and that was Elon at X. And that's brutal. That's like a $50 million mistake. Oh, I think more $100 million mistake. $250 million mistake.

• neutral fact_claim Peter Smith

  we'll do I think we're this year we're gonna be at around and adjust our consumer wallet around 30 40 percent of the volume PayPal will do this year

• neutral assessment Peter Smith

  ah PayPal and you're transferring money digitally you're just the biggest target

• bearish fact_claim Peter Smith

  it took PayPal down for 18 hours yeah they just redirected at PayPal and it wiped them out for 18 hours

• neutral fact_claim Max Levchin

  Visa and MasterCard both caught on to the fact that we were processing cards online and we're losing way more than 1% which is the most you're allowed to lose in charge because they came to us and said hey you guys have about six months to live and then we're gonna shut you down

• bullish assessment Max Levchin

  we fix things up enough for a year later we had and then reluctant an amazing job actually it sounds it's hard to describe how important it is to have great forecasting

• bullish fact_claim Max Levchin

  we had just enough success to say oh no hang on a second look three months ago we're losing like 10% like this is nothing now

• bullish assessment Max Levchin

  we had an amazing team of really truly great people

• bearish prediction Max Levchin

  we're gonna probably wind up by the killing each other

• neutral fact_claim Max Levchin

  we're basically just neck-and-neck competing

• neutral fact_claim Keith Rabois

  When I joined PayPal which was right after Peter had come back as CEO in September 25th 2000 Peter came back as interim CEO PayPal Peter and I had this negotiation about me joining PayPal and we went back and forth we agreed on title and equity compensation and cash compensation

• neutral fact_claim Keith Rabois

  half the founders of PayPal built bombs in high school

• neutral fact_claim Keith Rabois

  less than half the company went to Stanford most went to University of Illinois which is a large state school in the middle of America yeah that's where all the engineers came from none of them came from Stanford

• neutral fact_claim Keith Rabois

  we made our own network and we made our own success and then we rebuilt a network of ourselves but we didn't have any connections

• bullish assessment Keith Rabois

  if you think about the PayPal my friends at PayPal why were we successful we were able to marshal a critical density of talent in one building and you know sustain it for a period of time

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  we you know Reed Hoffman had a metaphor at the time which is we were very good at deflecting bullets so people were shooting at us left and right and none of the bullets had landed but he's like just because people have shot it you know five times doesn't mean the sixth doesn't kill you

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  we did the same thing PayPal choose that we sold PayPal 50 billion or two billion 1.5 then they spun it back but we you know significantly debated at the board level Moritz Mike didn't want us to sell was adamantly opposed to selling thought it was catastrophic mistake of all time but we were stressed about like the risk from eBay and stressed from the government governmental risk post 9/11 and we decided to sell clearly the company's worth Lots trading up like 106 billion today you know for 1%

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  our rates are divided up by risk tier as you can imagine so we do risk based pricing and it starts as low as we like literally a handful of percent one point two five percent for a month and then it goes up from there so the the fees range from one point two five percent up to three

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  we partner with a lot of banks as well in in Europe and other places and it's just you know your DNA is your DNA I think sometimes and that's their DNA for us our DNA is data and technology and automation

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  it's great getting third-party validated information that's connected by our customer and stays connected

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  you land on our site give us access data we make a decision to prove and ship money within six or seven minutes on average

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  they can't really get capital from those banks those banks are not set up to serve them they can go they can spend eight weeks and though often I would say nine out of ten times get a no at the end of that process

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  our average loan actually we set up as a line of credit as I mentioned and so average line credit is like 20 to 25 thousand average loan is about $7,000 that's what yeah businesses borrow four or five six times a year they keep coming back again and again on it

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  and 50 million in top-line revenue that's not that's small to them right so they don't even they don't even think of the businesses we serve as actual businesses many times

• bullish assessment George Zachary

  you look at PayPal and now it's like stripe and square and cryptocurrency yeah they were that was like a version of crypto right which is it was the pre crypto version which was how do we replace fiat money

• mixed assessment George Zachary

  I thought it was too early yeah and it was we didn't invest Oh brutal and this is a case in venture where you can be right and wrong you can be right conceptually but absolutely wrong in the financial outcome so you're right it's too early for a bank but they still won because they pivoted and iterate because they merged with con finiti right

• neutral fact_claim George Zachary

  Elon was smart enough to take cash yes a hundred million off that it was like a three hundred million dollars I mean it was less less yeah I'll let him tell you right but that was the first that was where he got his first chunk of cash and then he started XCOM yeah which merged with you know Peter MPL and David sacks and Max's Max leviton's infinity right you know which was their idea about using replacing fiat money right

• bullish assessment George Zachary

  David Sachs came up with the product idea let's just email each other money as opposed we're just becoming the payment method right for eBay right and then they really had something

• bullish fact_claim Jeff Housenbold

  eBay was profitable from day one and yet we were investing in international we're investing in fixed price we were investing in Bill Point which was the competitor of PayPal and and then you know before that split off PayPal is now a you know one hundred and forty billion dollar business

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  PayPal is kind of weird, because almost all the companies started by the PayPal folks, except for YouTube, were started by executives at PayPal. And that's really under discussed. You know, the founder of Yelp was VP Eng, Reid Hoffman was initially on the board, and then he ran BD, he was like an SVP there. Elon Musk was CEO, Peter Thiel was CEO, Max Lepshin was CTO, they were all executives. And the rank and file and people actually didn't start much, which is kind of odd. Nobody ever talks abo

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  paypal you might have heard of it did pretty well sold to ebay

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  One of the great examples, of course, is PayPal, Alex, that created LinkedIn, Yelp, Founders Fund. Elon would have created his companies anyway, but you can kind of go back to PayPal and X for him going out and doing Tesla and SpaceX. That was the thing, the sort of foundational moment of all those people working together. Sachs' firm, Kraft, with Max Levchin. I mean, the list goes on and on and on.

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  PayPal had this situation back in 2000, the year 2000, right after the dot-com crash. We were burning $10 million a month, like fast. We had no revenue and no business model. Okay. And we had said the service would be always free. We had four months basically of life. And we pulled up on the throttle. And what we did is we basically introduced paid accounts. We started charging transaction fees. And we cut the cost structure of the company. And we made that last $40 million last a lot longer tha

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  david sax um went to stanford with folks you know like keith roboite uh peter thiel during an era where uh they were a bunch of huge nerds who created a way to transfer money on palm pilots called paypal it didn't work until they decided to move it to email i'm not sure whose idea who gets credit for moving it to email sax

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  my experience at paypal really changed my thinking on this because paypal it was a startup that launched effectively as an involuntary app on top of the ebay market at that time ebay had a monopoly on the auction market and that was the key sort of beachhead market for online payments so we launched on top of ebay they were constantly trying to dislodge us and remove us from their platform and really the only thing keeping them from just switching us off was a was an antitrust thread we actually

• bullish fact_claim David Sacks

  So, I mean, PayPal was really a pioneer in all these areas.

• bullish fact_claim David Sacks

  There are more unicorns founded by ex-PayPal people than ex-Google people. Even though at sort of the PayPal mafia, if you define it as the pre-IPO group of people who worked at PayPal, there were only a couple of hundred in the Bay Area.

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  PayPal obviously had that as well.

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  What I'd say is that you would think that the friendships would make it like this sort of calm, friendly environment. PayPal was actually a very, um, frictional contentious environment. And, but I do think that there is a trust element to it, which is we were constantly debating what the truth was and what we needed to do and what the big risks to the big business were. And so we were yelling. In fact, Peter, when he hired me, he told some of the other people on the team, look, I want to hire Da

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  the answer is that at PayPal, we recruited our friends to work at the company because literally nobody else was willing to come work at this crazy startup. Peter recruited his friends who he had gone to college with at Stanford. Max recruited his friends from U of I. That's how the initial team was recruited is through friendship networks. But it wasn't like this was some exclusive club. It's just that nobody else wanted to be a member.

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  PayPal was built largely during the downturn.

• bullish prediction David Friedberg

  this is going to lower the prices on it

• bullish prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  i think what you do is you go to places like all of the merchants that use stripe and say we'll give you a three or four or five percent discount and they'll be like okay and so you'll see these prices that just you know fall everywhere ... it is so good for consumers if this were to happen

• bullish prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  paypal already owns braintree so now you have stripe and braintree that effectively were competitors that won't be and then what block gives you is an entire point-of-sale infrastructure ... and you get the cash out so you put it all together and i think it's a it's a shot across the bow for visa and mastercard

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  i think they're doing about two trillion a year of annual transaction volume i think paypal is doing 1.7 so actually stripe is a little bigger than paypal now but the thing that paypal has that stripe doesn't really have is the consumer relationship so you know over 400 million active consumer accounts

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  the existential issue for paypal is that you're dealing with a product that's 25 years old ... that interaction model is legacy and so unless you've got a a vision of how to resuscitate it and rejuvenate that that product i think yeah it could be a good financial play maybe

• mixed fact_claim David Sacks

  the reason they got these offers is the market cap is down to you know it was down in the what like 30 something billion i mean this is a company that was worth 200 billion ... so the reason why it's attracting offers is it's so beaten up

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  that's why paypal has stagnated is that as soon as it was acquired back in 2002 they basically blew out like all the founders all the founding dna and it was just kind of run by you know consulting types

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  and i will say that there is a certain individual that must look very closely at putting in a competitive bid

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  the other thing is this is probably not the final clearing price i think the price is probably another 10 to 15 percent higher from here

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  i think that ebay and paypal are probably the beginning of a wave of mega deals of call it flaccid you know digital businesses you have too much attention that can be revived okay with the blue chew of capital and the right operator again i think that there's probably a big a big wave of this to come

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  and what is not clear in the deal docs that were published because i don't think it's relevant to the public markets is who's actually going to operate paypal post clothes and my bet would be that they're going to hand it over to the stripe guys and say you guys

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  you are creating a competitor to visa and mastercard because you now have upwards of six or seven hundred million accounts you have massive stablecoin infrastructure ... so that now stripe gets access to an ultra low cost set of payment rails literally like to zero brings it everywhere all over the world so does block advent can pour money into it so it's quite powerful if it comes together

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  the product is getting very long in the tooth i think it's only growing seven percent a year ... the product has become somewhat obsolete and in a way it's a legacy product ... i think that's a very hard problem to fix maybe they wouldn't maybe they would just run it more efficiently and kind of milk it

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  paypal is still a juggernaut sacks 439 million consumer accounts you did something right 25 years ago it's still the test of time amazing ... paypal has psi usd which is already in circulation that's their stable coin

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  stripe and the private equity fund advent are jointly offering to acquire paypal for about 60 bucks a share which is a small premium most people think will go for more like 70 a share paypal stock jumping on the news

• neutral fact_claim Reid Hoffman

  And we do this merger with X.com and and, you know, like pre the merger closing, you know, Elon is saying, oh, I got the CEO, Bill Harris. He's best ever. That's part of the reason why you should give so much percentage of the company to X.com and the merger, you know. And then after the merger, literally the first meeting I had with Elon, it's Bill Harris, a complete disaster. We need to fire him right away. Like before we get to the first board meeting, we need him fired.

• bullish assessment Reid Hoffman

  Peter and Max recruited just a tremendous focus on on like intense learning curves. So, you know, it was one of the things that Peter later is like, OK, I guess you have to interview for being on sports teams and so forth because this teamwork thing does matter. But like high performers and it was kind of like a like and that was part of the reason why there was such intense, you know, kind of innovation and capability.

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  PayPal had all these existential issues where you had these larger entities trying to kill us. Visa, MasterCard, eBay, who else? Oh, the list goes on Citi Bank. And Reid was kind of our emissary who kept all these dogs at bay and managed to, I guess, be friends with them, I guess, to some degree, even though they wanted to kill us. And Reid was kind of in charge of making sure that these existential issues didn't blow up on us. And they didn't. So we got pretty lucky there.

• bullish assessment Reid Hoffman

  David very quickly, because he, you know, has a strong learning curve as he plays these things, kind of got the instinct of what the game we were playing with PayPal was. And it's part of the reason why I think, you know, each of the execs have, you know, kind of key contributions to making, you know, kind of PayPal successful. And David's was this kind of, like, maniacal focus on the kind of the cycle of how the product worked on eBay.

1. 2028-03-21 what if you could email money you now that sounds like a killer app · Prediction · pending

VentureSignalScore 30.6/100 for paypal, composed from 2 of 4 components (emerging formula), discounted ×0.85 for 50% signal coverage