Paypal founders11/1/2022 ![]() Investigators said more analysis is needed to clarify what the device was doing in the Eskom CEO’s Volvo. Their preliminary findings show that agents can use the device for tracking and eavesdropping at a range of up to 5km. Things That Make You Go Hmm□: Eskom CEO Car Bugged!Įskom CEO Andre de Ruyter’s car was bugged with a “sophisticated” device, which he discovered under his seat while cleaning his vehicle, the Sunday Times reports.Īccording to investigators, the device isn’t commercially available to the public and is commonly used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. What lessons do you draw from PayPal? Leave a comment at the bottom and let me know! A small group of driven people who are creating something big. Somewhere right now, there’s another PayPal. Any startup that’s growing ten-fold every month is a bet you have to make. But how many investors would think to ask?įortunately, if you missed that, PayPal’s off the charts growth would catch your attention. Later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer but willed herself to live another 25 years.Īny investor who heard that story would know that Levchin aspired to be as tough as his grandma. She overcame antisemitism and sexism to get a PhD in physics in the Soviet Union, a rare feat. PayPal co-founder Max Levchin deeply admired his grandmother. Sometimes the market shows you what your product is - be open to it!įor investors, PayPal shows the timelessness of a question from Arthur Rock, perhaps the first venture capitalist: “Who do you admire?” PayPal has some great lessons for founders. ![]() In the excellent new book, The Founders, author Jimmy Soni tells the story of how this iconic company came to be. What did catch on was that throwaway product: e-mailing money. Few people had PalmPilots and money beaming never caught on. The problem was, not everyone was a Silicon Valley early adopter. E-mailing money would be a backup in case you left your PalmPilot at home. The PayPal founders’ originally wanted to beam money between PalmPilots. But its product began as an afterthought. #PAYPAL FOUNDERS FULL#Anyone signed up to our Super Nerd tier can also access the full episode, transcript, and intelligence report by going directly to the episode page at and clicking on "premium extras." All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which can be easily added to your favorite podcast application.PayPal processes over $1 trillion in payments every year. Most of the conversation about fraud, using financial incentives to effectively buy customers and scale quickly, as well as a discussion about the intersection of fintech and cryptocurrency is featured in the second part of our episode available on our premium subscriber feed. All of these innovations came out of a company under siege for almost the entire course of its pre-IPO existence, and it was in many ways this daily battle for survival that was central to shaping not only PayPal’s culture, but its success: the type of success that every entrepreneur and every founder dreams of. Things like CAPTCHA, blitzscalling, and micro-deposits, just to name a few. The objective of this episode is to give you a historical context for many of the business practices that have since become standard operating procedures across both Silicon Valley and Wallstreet. ![]() And that's because the story of the PayPal mafia is also the story of an unlikely, but nonetheless successful merger of two very different but equally competitive cultures, that of Elon Musk’s X.com and Peter Thiel’s Confinity. ![]() ![]() And that’s what PayPal's founders did, and they did it while under constant threat of extinction, from not only criminals trying to defraud their customers or competitors trying to take their business, but also from each other. It was one of the earliest pioneers of what former team member and later LinkedIn founder Reed Hoffman would dub “blitzscalling,” which is what you do when you need to grow really, really fast. PayPal was fintech before anyone even knew what that word meant. It's about a company that was in so many ways ahead of its time. The history of PayPal is in many ways the history of the future. The history of the so-called “PayPal Mafia” does not simply constitute the individual histories of star-studded founders like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reed Hoffman, and others. In Episode 233 of, Demetri Kofinas speaks with award-winning author and recurring Hidden Forces guest Jimmy Soni about his newst book on the PayPal Mafia and the founders who shaped Silicon Valley and transformed the Fintech and online payments industry. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |