One thing I would like to see in Vancouver and Canada is something similar to the PayPal mafia. They were all early employees of PayPal. They all had monster exits with PayPal, and they were able to take their winnings and form a syndicate that co-invests.
I often talk about the PayPal mafia out of San Francisco, people that were in PayPal and got out of PayPal and continue to reinvest in other start-ups and create a huge pay-it-forward type of network there.
Ten Internets ago, when PayPal was started, it was all these tools that no one had built yet to bring commerce to the Internet. My first startup used PayPal.
After PayPal, I never thought I would get interested in payments again. But bitcoin is fulfilling PayPal's original vision to create 'the new world currency.'
We're really thinking how do we re-imagine PayPal almost as a service. PayPal as a SaaS platform.
It's clear to me now that Ethereum is the new currency of the Internet. It's way ahead of where Paypal was in its day, and it's much more exciting to its customers than Paypal ever was.
Nowadays people talk about PayPal's founders as prescient geniuses who would inevitably change the world. It was, however, not so obvious that PayPal would taste its first major success by helping people sell Beanie Babies on eBay. But they had a vision, a hope, and the perseverance to try multiple iterations until they got it right.
PayPal exists because banks are not interoperable: I can't efficiently pay you $10 unless I'm giving you a $10 bill. So we're all on PayPal and Venmo, I need interoperability on the same ledger.
When we were associated with eBay, it was surprising to me how many merchants were very reluctant to work with PayPal because we were accessing their data and their information, and they felt in some way, shape, or form they were competing with eBay.
What we want to do to monetize Venmo is to add more and more capabilities. Anywhere you see a PayPal merchant, you can click on that button and actually use your Venmo account to check out at that merchant. Then we'll monetize that transaction exactly the same way we monetize a PayPal transaction.
We had a mission at PayPal - which was to create a new financial system, a new world currency, and we failed. We were a financial success, but we didn't succeed at the purpose of our company.
If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done.
Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.
Venmo is one of the jewels of Paypal.
A lot of hackers set up scam sites. They can impersonate a site like PayPal, for instance.
Elon Musk with PayPal revolutionized banking.
I had a guy on Facebook for, like, years just asking if he could PayPal me money, and of course I have to say no when, really, I'm just like, 'Why wouldn't I? He doesn't want anything for it.'