A Quote by Gil Penchina
I've been lucky enough to be involved in a number of great startups, including eBay and Wikia as an entrepreneur and LinkedIn and Paypal as an investor.
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For me, the international expansion of eBay was the best idea. We are now in 35 countries, and have a huge global network. The second best one was the acquisition of PayPal - the wallet on eBay.
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.
PayPal is a business that will be bigger than eBay.
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.
As an entrepreneur, as an investor, I'm trying to be as educated as I can to where the progression of technological capability is going and what it does to these different categories that, me as an artist and an influencer, I can get involved and bring value.
I've been lucky to play with so many great players, to be coached by so many great coaches and lucky enough to be healthy enough for so many years.
PayPal benefited tremendously from having a close partnership with the eBay marketplace. It was a natural fit at the time.
Because most startups are lean and scrappy organizations consisting of a limited number of people and supported by an even smaller number of resources, startups cannot afford to have any slackers on board. When you fail, you cause an 'epic failure,' and when you win, everyone in the company knows about it.
A captivating moment was when I realized that people, including myself, were not saying, “I just bought an item on eBay.” They were saying, “I just won an item on eBay.” It was the thrill of the hunt. I bought a car on eBay.
In the U.S., Wikia has content sponsorships with top brands, including Blizzard Activision, Sony, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, ABC Television and others.
Elon Musk is an incredibly prolific entrepreneur, having come up with, or been at the founding team of Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, PayPal, all different industries that seem to have nothing to do with each other.
The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less, but still failed. The third one, you know, proper failed, but it was kind of okay. I recovered quickly. Number four almost didn't fail. It still didn't really feel great, but it did okay. Number five was PayPal.
Good luck to you if you're lucky enough to have faith. Some of us aren't lucky enough. My mother has great faith and finds great comfort in it, and I'm jealous of her!
I think extreme secrecy is a bad sign in all startups. Very few startups die because they tell you exactly how their technology works. On the long list of startup killers, that's pretty far down. Though on the list of entrepreneur fears, it's pretty high.
We are seeing a lot of cases where the startups are writing the term sheet, dictating the terms, selling common stock instead of preferred stock, where they don't give the investor veto rights or board seat or privileges, and they are really asking the investor -- why should I take your money when there is other money available.
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.
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