PayPal's Technical FAQ from Oct '99 (cobbled in response to a Slashdot post haha) demonstrates how ahead of the game they were: use of ECC (with tech advice from Stanford's Dan Boneh & Martin Hellman), privacy policy that prohibited sale of user data to 3rd party advertisers, generating cash via "the float" in a Merrill Lynch Money Market Fund, etc.<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19991012084438/http://paypal.com/faq.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/19991012084438/http://paypal.com...</a><p>But I think it's probably the "synergy" with eBay that was the biggest surprise. I recall having a neighbor at that time who sold old movie posters. Rather than driving around the country to comic book conventions, he was able to do more in one month in online auctions than the past decades he had been collecting. That was the great awakening. PayPal went from "college kids requesting cash from parents" to trading rare sports memorabilia with instant clearing by March 2000.<p>>>> If you needed to integrate with an outside vendor, you picked up the phone yourself and called; you didn’t wait for a BD person to become available. You did (the first version of) mockups and wireframes yourself; you didn’t wait for a designer to become available. You wrote (the first draft of) site copy yourself; you didn’t wait for a content writer.<p>"You must unlearn what you have learned" ;)
Reads the same as Netflix. Individuals empowered to make decisions and execute, at all levels of the organization.<p>With higher responsibility also comes the risk of exposing the company to situations that a more practised individual would know to avoid. It'd be interesting to hear about how these companies mitigate risk from their armies of ambitious underlings.
There is something nagging at me - it is something deep. It is that there has to be a set of values, a set of cultural red lines that we do not cross.<p>Every branch of the military will happily tick pretty much all of those "do it now, don't let anything stop you" boxes.<p>But every branch of the military has in place very deep redlines (sometimes expressed as rules of engagement, sometimes as "honour") - because they know the horrors of crossing those lines, with a "get it done at any cost attitude".)<p>Most humans have that ability to get things done, they just tend to work for organisations that don't reward it. And so the onus is on management (as ever). Build a culture that rewards innovation - but has some set of values that accepts some lines cannot be crossed.<p>Yes there is danger in retreating from the edge of chaos - but then we all live in Ming China. That is a better problem than going too far over the eve of chaos.<p>it's hard, for companies as well as societies.
As much as I respect the founders/alumni that came from PayPal, do any of them still use it?<p>Forced to use PayPal since 2004 as a small business owner, it was impossible to reach their customer support. They've also left me to fight with insurers when it came to fraudulent transactions.<p>Glad to hear they built a talented team, but as a customer...
Sounds like a great place to work. I wonder about the "young people with extraordinary ability" however. Surely they would have also succeeded with "older people with extraordinary ability"? (ok they probably would cost them more..)
I found this glorification of PayPal a bit befuddling. I use their service myself often, but chiefly because the banking system in the USA is so hideously backwards (more so ten years ago). In Germany for example, if a private party would want to pay some other private or commercial party, they would use a bank-to-bank transfer, which completes in less than 24h. This system was used even before the WWW. I payed the office of a "Mitfahrergemeinschaft" (office of a ride sharing organisation) via phone in the early nineties (that's when I learned that nobody looks at the signature of the bank-transfer requests sent via snail mail unless there is a complaint).<p>So I'm not quite convinced that PayPal was all that innovative, but they did fill a void here.
Number 1 definitely. Focus is super important.<p>Second to this I’d put good hiring. I have seen companies that try to follow these models without rigorous recruiting or hiring processes. It results in a huge mess because management has these massive expectations but the people they hire just aren’t good enough. As a result, everyone gets demoralized
> you’d do your homework first and then come to the table with "35% of our [insert some key metric here] are caused by the lack of X functionality"<p>Tangential, how do you decide whether to collect a new metric? Use data-driven thinking? But how, you don't have data until you invest in building that collector.
1. Eat our own dogfood : Makes us more empathetic with our customers<p>2. Eat other food as well OR do not limit ourselves to our own dogfood : This can help greatly in shaping our products better and in providing seamless experience migrating customers from competitors to our product.
How did projects get staffed? Was that senior mgrs allocating staff to winner proposals? The article mentions "Most great innovations at PayPal were driven by one person who then conscripted others to support, adopt, implement the new idea.". I am wondering how "conscripted" worked. It also mentions "Vigorous debate, often via email: Almost every important issue had champions and critics. These were normally resolved not by official edict but by a vigorous debate that could be very intense." It looks like David Sacks was successful at shaping a product-driven culture there. Is the implication that innovation and project allocation was coming out of "product"?
I believe the #1 reason is just the accumulation of really smart people in a place like silicon valley, at the time of infancy of internet. That makes things click like nothing else.
Great entrepreneurs maximize their impact by identifying and working with people who have great talent. I wonder, then, how many people of average ability will simply never encounter any of these legendary founder types, because the founders create this bubble around them and don't waste any time trying to co-operate with the rest.
Sounds reminiscent of Google - where staff gravitate to the teams they want to work on - but "done right", ie: with accountability. On the other hand, I wonder if it produces some of the same problems - who takes responsibility for long term maintenance when everybody's a hero creating bold new things?