Entrepreneurs generally describe themselves as either unlucky or brilliant, depending on whether or not they were successful. Since the company can never be founded again, Peter Thiel says it is hard to know whether they were in fact brilliant or merely lucky with Paypal. He does say th...
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Max met Peter at a free lecture on the currency market held in Terman. The lecture only had six attendees and Max approached Peter afterwards to tell him he was going to start a company. Peter had lots of friends that had been involved in startups, most of which had blown up catastroph...
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Peter Thiel articulates the divergent perspectives on what brought the U.S. economy to the brink. Watch more videos from Peter Thiel here: http://new.bigthink.com/experts/peterthiel
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The founders of Paypal are often asked if they are a bank. They are not a bank because they are not involved in fractional lending, nor are they backed by the Federal Reserve. Peter likens Paypal to a money market fund.
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In the beginning, the company had three points of focus: recruiting people, selling investors, and selling the products to customers. Selling the company to investors was initially the most difficult of the three and Peter discusses how difficult it was to secure funding.
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Peter’s advice to eBay for the future of Paypal is to keep scaling the business. At the beginning, it made sense to integrate Paypal's product closely with eBay, but now they are starting to develop applications outside of eBay and these should be vigorously promoted.
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Paypal was the first company to file for IPO status after 9/11 and consequently faced much-stricter-than-normal scrutiny. Additionally, the night before a deadline the founders found out that they were being sued for patent infringement. After a sleepless night and rushed meeting with a...
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Technology companies face four major development hurdles along the path to success: basic concept, the product, getting it to customers, and making money. Focusing on the last, the two prevalent business models for making money in the high tech market are advertising or partnering. Aft...
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The concept of digital cash had been around long before Paypal. Paypal was unique in that it was successfully able to create a compromise between security, privacy and convenience that was acceptable to the customer.
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The world is headed in the direction of a global, inter-connected economy in which enormous amounts of money are transferred around the world. Currently, there are outrageous margins on currency exchanges so there is an opportunity in offering transfers at respectable margins.
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To mark the first major funding round, the Paypal founders staged the famous Beaming at Bucks, where the Paypal money encryption technology was used to send the funding money from one PalmPilot to another across the room in a publicity demonstration. There was a mad rush before the demo...
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The customer growth following the free-$10 plan was exponential. Since each new customer cost the company $10, this caused an exponentially growing burn rate as well. As the burn rate was catching up to them and competition was quickly approaching, Paypal merged with its largest compet...
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