Ebe Was Trying to Shut You Down

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Papel was providing a service to a million plus be sellers, helping them collect credit cards on line. Ebe did not have a revenue share arrangement, or just a service available to b sellers and buyers. They had their own service that they had fully acquired, or acquired and then built up called bill point. Right round the same time as paypal was founded. And so it was kind of a race which they should have absolutely won, because they had a product that was supposed to do what we did.

During its formative years in the late 1990's, Paypal attracted an extraordinary group of young entrepreneurs, who then went on to build some of the best known companies in tech. They became known as The PayPal Mafia—and Max Levchin was one of the leaders. A computer genius from Soviet Ukraine, Max joined Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and others as they grew PayPal into a massively successful online payment service. Along the way, they encountered almost every start-up challenge imaginable, including the emotional ouster of Elon Musk as CEO. After PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, Max couldn't sit still, so he launched a startup lab that eventually led to another successful fintech company: Affirm. Guy will talk to Max about Affirm next week, in the second episode of this two-part series.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.