A Quote by David O. Sacks
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.'
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're really thinking how do we re-imagine PayPal almost as a service. PayPal as a SaaS platform.
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.
PayPal, which was founded in 1998, may be the closest thing to a global currency that has ever been created. Based in San Jose, California, the company operates in 190 markets, sending and receiving payments in 24 currencies on behalf of 90 million active members.
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.
It's completely reasonable, even if some Bitcoin currency purists wouldn't like it, to have credit and debit card payments denominated in Bitcoin rather than dollars, and net settled on Bitcoin instead of on Fedwire.
Even by Silicon Valley standards, PayPal's vision was massively ambitious.
Bitcoin is a currency, bitcoin is a network, bitcoin is a technology and you can't separate these things. A consensus network that bases its value on the currency does not work without the currency.
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.
PayPal came within an inch of being shut down by regulators when they started. The feds seizing the Dwolla account and stealing the money that is owned by Mt. Gox customers is more proof that Bitcoin is the superior payment system.
PayPal claims it can help merchants expand into international markets; its system makes it easier to do business with customers in multiple countries, for example, by handling tricky stuff like currency conversions automatically.
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