You can’t get married to any one particular plan. That is the biggest lesson I learned at PayPal.
We’re all put on Earth for a limited amount of time. Am I using in a way that is great, or good enough, or wasteful?
Having a highly homogeneous background, education, values, preferences, etc, in the very early team is better than not – cuts down on time-wasting arguments.
Technology has come a long way since PayPal.
If we compare the two, Facebook is currently a superior place to market a product like Slide. Twitter is more like a general distribution agent. It’s like broadcast radio.
If the game designer produces more content than he can consume per month, some fraction of the people will say more quests, more tests, more challenges, more whatever, and they will be compelled by it.
PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job.
Right now, nearly all the apps on Facebook take a week to build. No more.
Mobile is the perfect example of what is enabling economic growth in the technology sector.
The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.
Being an entrepreneur is not about being in love with an idea, it’s about being in love with running a company.
You’re going to pull out your phone and try to use whatever is the most appropriate app on your iPhone or your Android device. Yelp saw that very early on. And when we launched the mobile product, we saw immediate growth, and we were stunned.
We’re becoming slaves to our social networks – and that’s not a bad thing. You like your favorite networks, so do you friends, and pretty soon you have market winners.
Think of Slide as a giant media network for people to transmit information. The content that’s in there now has been provided by users – it’s whatever they want it to be.
Media is very different from financial services. People are very fickle and very vocal. They believe that things should be one way and not the other. It’s still very rewarding to build products for huge audiences. It feels like you’re making an impact.
If you’re building a social product, you’re still living in the last century if your product doesn’t work on Facebook.
If I see what you’re up to on Facebook but I don’t see your updates on Flickr, I’ll still care about Facebook.
Facebook is so ubiquitous now that it’s like another manifestation of the web itself.
But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just this tug-of-war where it was like, ‘We’re trying this, this week.” Every week you go to investors and say, “We’re doing this, exactly this. We’re really focused. We’re going to be huge.” The next week you’re like, “That was a lie.
For a long time, it was one of these things where – I was really much younger than now – my whole “brand” both to the investors and to our board members was this crazy Russian boy-genius who comes out and sprinkles magic dust on technology and things just work.