PayPal

No single number decides. Layers can disagree — that's the point. New to this? →

• 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.