I wanted to be a venture capitalist and join Sequoia Capital. They've financed and helped built some really special and enormously successful companies, including Google, Yahoo, Paypal, YouTube, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, and also Zappos.
Alfred Lin
The Internet Treasure companies tend to go public rather than get acquired, although there are clear exceptions, like Instagram, YouTube, Skype and PayPal.
Bing Gordon
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.
Brad Garlinghouse
Two-thirds of the world's population is unbanked or underbanked. Imagine if you had all your bank accounts shut down today, if you had all your credit cards shut off today, Paypal, Venmo, etc. What would life be like? And that's a problem that most of the world faces if you're in Latin America, Africa or South East Asia.
Brock Pierce
The moment we put up the PayPal button, some guy donated $300. That's when we realized that if you give somebody a chance to support something on the Internet, they'll do it.
Burnie Burns
As CEO, I believe my most important job is to both define reality and inspire hope for the PayPal team. Defining reality includes being realistic about all the things that could go wrong so that we are prepared to navigate those challenges.
Dan Schulman
PayPal benefited tremendously from having a close partnership with the eBay marketplace. It was a natural fit at the time.
Our strategy is to provide even more value to users and tie the Venmo community into the PayPal merchant marketplace so that they can use Venmo to buy things.
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 is a strong business: it has a strong balance sheet and free cash flows, and it will help us take a look at where we want to independently invest.
Venmo is one of the jewels of Paypal.
We are excited to see how PayPal's global payment platform can help small businesses in Cuba thrive and grow by making it easier to connect to international markets.
As we think about the future, one of the things we will do is to make sure PayPal becomes the central part of consumers' lives, how we enable consumers to manage and move their money more efficiently, easily, and less expensively than some traditional ways.
More people are using PayPal more frequently.
We're really thinking how do we re-imagine PayPal almost as a service. PayPal as a SaaS platform.
We take the privacy of our consumers' information as one of the most trusted things that people look to Paypal for, because when it comes to financial services, the single most important brand attribute you can have is trust.
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.
Software is eating the financial services industry. We have a large addressable market for PayPal to play in.
We had grown too fast at PayPal. Our operating expenses had grown too fast... Growth covers a lot of sin. We want to grow without sin.
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.
Daniel Lyons
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.
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.'
If you allowed PayPal to pursue its destiny, there are moves it could make to become the largest financial company in the world.
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.
Credits in your PayPal account are really just USD-backed - they are not a unique currency themselves. Other 'digital currencies,' such as Facebook Credits, can be created out of nothing and without limit, so they are not serious money.
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.
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.
For merchants, it is an amazing opportunity. Compared to Paypal, crypto has no credit card fees, no charge backs, no 'Oops, we decided to hold your cash for 3-12 months while we investigate something we can't disclose.'
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's been around forever. How do we use that platform to solve the future of commerce?
I think if you look at the commonalities between eBay, PayPal and OpenTable, all three are businesses that built a network in a vertical. Network effect businesses are very attractive businesses.
My personal experience with companies in the PayPal ecosystem taught me that a superb engineering culture is indispensable to building a winning business.
I think I was really lucky to work as a little kid at PayPal, grew up in the Valley as a coder.
Being able to access that Stanford alumni network was huge - I actually interned at PayPal while I was at Stanford and learned a lot. Being in that environment and learning about it as a student was really fun.
With PayPal, you have to send people over to their website... whereas with Stripe, we offer a way to integrate payments into the website, on the website or into a mobile app. That is what all the best businesses care about, so we make it very easy, very fast, very simple and very cheap to do this.
My life has become extremely hard. I am banned on Twitter. I'm banned on Uber. I'm banned on Lyft. I'm banned on Venmo. I'm banned on GoFundMe. I'm banned on PayPal. I'm banned on Uber Eats. I can't even order a sandwich.
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.
There's a herd instinct, and every time that people hear an announcement such as PayPal's in Dundalk, they start thinking, 'Ireland must be good if they're investing there', and by extension, 'Dundalk must be good, so let's have a look at it.'
Technology has come a long way since PayPal.
One of the things we did at PayPal was collaborative filtering and machine learning: looking at patterns of human behavior. We used it there to predict when people would try to cheat the system to get money. But you can predict pretty much any behavior with a certain amount of accuracy.
You can't get married to any one particular plan. That is the biggest lesson I learned at PayPal.
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.
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.'
Elon Musk with PayPal revolutionized banking.
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.
Technologies like PayPal foster competition because they enable people to shift their funds from one jurisdiction to another, and I think that ultimately will lead to a world in which there's less government power and therefore more individual control.
Even by Silicon Valley standards, PayPal's vision was massively ambitious.
PayPal was disruptive, it was democratizing, and it had universal appeal. It gave power to millions and millions of individuals and reduced monopolist control from nations, banks, and other huge corporations.
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.
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.
