Vincent Chan: Inside PayPal -->
(I retrieved this post from the Wayback Machine. The quotes are<br>from this Quora thread.)
June 28, 2010
Why did so many successful entrepreneurs and startups come out of<br>PayPal? I long have been fascinated by the extraordinary achievement<br>from the ex-Paypal team and wonder about the reasons behind their<br>success. In the past, mass media tried to answer this question<br>several times but still couldn�t give us a clear answer.
I once asked David Sacks the same question during an event in Los<br>Angeles. He told me the secret is that Paypal has built a "scrappy"<br>culture. No matter what problems they faced, they would find a way<br>to solve them. I kind of got the idea, but was still confused about<br>the execution details.
So when I saw some of the past Paypal employees answering this<br>question on Quora, I was super excited! After all, they should be<br>the only ones who can tell people the inside stories.
Below are some highlights of their answers.
On Talent Management
"Peter and Max assembled an unusual critical<br>mass of entrepreneurial talent, primarily due to their ability to<br>recognize young people with extraordinary ability (the median age<br>of *execs* on the S1 filing was 30). But the poor economy allowed<br>us to close an abnormal number of offers, as virtually nobody other<br>than eBay and (in part) google was hiring in 2000-02." (by Keith<br>Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal)
"Extreme Focus (driven by Peter): Peter required that everyone be<br>tasked with exactly one priority. He would refuse to discuss virtually<br>anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your<br>#1 initiative. Even our annual review forms in 2001 required each<br>employee to identify their single most valuable contribution to the<br>company." (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of<br>Paypal)
"Dedication to individual accomplishment: Teams were almost considered<br>socialist institutions. Most great innovations at PayPal were driven<br>by one person who then conscripted others to support, adopt, implement<br>the new idea. If you identified the 8-12 most critical innovations<br>at PayPal (or perhaps even the most important 25), almost every one<br>had a single person inspire it (and often it drive it to implementation).<br>As a result, David enforced an anti-meeting culture where any meeting<br>that included more than 3-4 people was deemed suspect and subject<br>to immediate adjournment if he gauged it inefficient. Our annual<br>review forms in 2002 included a direction to rate the employee on<br>"avoids imposing on others� time, e.g. scheduling unnecessary<br>meetings." (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of<br>Paypal)
"Refusal to accept constraints, external or internal:We were expected<br>to pursue our #1 priority with extreme dispatch (NOW) and vigor.<br>To borrow an apt phrase, employees were expected to "come to work<br>every day willing to be fired, to circumvent any order aimed at<br>stopping your dream." Jeremy Stoppelman has relayed elsewhere the<br>story about an email he sent around criticizing management that he<br>expected to get him fired and instead got him promoted. Peter did<br>not accept no for answer: If you couldn�t solve the problem, someone<br>else would be soon assigned to do it." (by Keith Rabois, former<br>Executive Vice President of Paypal)
"Driven problem solvers: PayPal had a strong bias toward hiring<br>(and promoting / encouraging, as Keith mentions) smart, driven<br>problem solvers, rather than subject matter experts. Very few of<br>the top performers at the company had any prior experience with<br>payments, and many of the best employees had little or no prior<br>background building Internet products. I worked on the fraud analytics<br>team at PayPal, and most of our best people had never before done<br>anything related to fraud detection. If he�d approached things<br>"traditionally", Max would have gone out and hired people who had<br>been building logistic regression models for banks for 20 years but<br>never innovated, and fraud losses would likely have swallowed the<br>company." (by Mike Greenfield, former Sr. Fraud R&D Scientist of<br>Paypal)
"Self-sufficiency � individuals and small teams were given fairly<br>complex objectives and expected to figure out how to achieve them<br>on their own. If you needed to integrate with an outside vendor,<br>you picked up the phone yourself and called; you didn�t wait for a<br>BD person to become available. You did (the first version of) mockups<br>and wireframes yourself; you didn�t wait for a designer to become<br>available. You wrote (the first draft of) site copy yourself; you<br>didn�t wait for a content writer." (by Yee Lee, former Product &<br>BU GM of Paypal)
On Culture & Ideology
"Extreme bias towards action � early PayPal<br>was simply a really *productive* workplace. This was partly driven<br>by the culture of self-sufficiency. PayPal is and was, after all,<br>a web service; and the company managed to ship prodigious amounts<br>of relatively high-quality web software for a lot of years in a row<br>early on. Yes, we had the...