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YouTube founder Chad Hurley explains the virality hack he learned at PayPal In February 2005, three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—founded YouTube. The initial idea was to build a video dating site called “Tune In, Hook Up”. When that idea failed, the founders pivoted to... show more
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![David Sacks on what made the PayPal Mafia so successful The employees of PayPal went on to build many of the companies that defined Silicon Valley in the 2000s, such as Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yelp, Yammer, and more. David Sacks—founding COO and product leader at PayPal—reflects on some of the factors that he believed contributed to their success: “I think one of the key things was that PayPal innovated not just on product, but on distribution as well.” He gives three examples of distribution strategies the PayPal Mafia brought with them to their next companies: 1. Virality. PayPal paid users $20 to refer their friends, which led to explosive growth. Virality was a huge factor in LinkedIn’s success. 2. Building on an existing network/platform. PayPal leveraged eBay’s power seller network, while LinkedIn leveraged their users’ network of email contacts. You want to “go where the users already are,” Sacks argues. 3. Embeds. PayPal let customers embed the logo on their websites and eBay auctions. YouTube employed this same strategy by making their videos easy to embed on Myspace and other websites. Sacks continues: “All of these techniques today are commonplace, but in the early 2000s, we were one of the first companies to do them… We were innovating not just on product but on distribution as well, and that is something that all of the PayPal Mafia companies have done.” He contrasts the ~220 employees pre-IPO PayPal employees producing 7+ unicorns versus only a handful from Google even though Google had 100x the number of employees. “It’s a really interesting question: Why?… I think this sort of scrappiness around distribution is a big part of the explanation… If you’re an entrepreneur working in a small team, you’ve got to figure out from zero: How do I get my first user? How do I get the second user? How does that go to one hundred, one thousand, one million?… [Google] never has to think about that. They’ve got guaranteed distribution of half a billion users. And so, I think that scrappiness around distribution is one of the key reasons that there’s been so many PayPal mafia companies. I think it’s an interesting thing to think about as you create your own startups.” Video source: Draper University (2014)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1873713143752626472/ext_tw_video_thumb/1873687754036625408/pu/img/7P7KJAu3WSmBeuKa.jpg)
![Elon Musk on how PayPal got its first 100,000 customers in one month “I didn’t expect PayPal’s growth rate to be what it was, and that actually created major problems,” Elon explains. “We started PayPal on University Avenue [in Palo Alto], and after the first month or so of the website being active, we had 100,000 customers.” As Elon explains, the key to PayPal’s viral growth was it referral program: “We started off first by offering people $20 if they opened account and $20 if they referred anyone. Then we dropped it to $10, and then we dropped it to $5. As the network got bigger and bigger, the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot that we could offer.” He continues: “And then we just did a bunch of things to decrease the friction. It’s like bacteria in a petri dish. What you want to do is try to have one customer generate two customers, or three customers ideally. And then you want that to happen really fast.” Elon estimates that PayPal spent $60-70 million to fuel this growth, before the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion. Source: Khan Academy (Apr 2013)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2072289438068031597/amplify_video_thumb/2072289340655362048/img/ZT-mCL7tq1pjq6V9.jpg)
![Peter Thiel on the most important lesson he learned building PayPal The early employees of PayPal went on to build incredible companies like Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yelp, Yammer, and more. When asked about the factors that explain these outlier successes, Thiel suggests that it was probably a combination of several different things: an entrepreneurial culture, lots of strong personalities, and the early 2000s was a great time to start a company. But Thiel also says that the overarching lesson you learned working at PayPal—which had a lot of challenges but ended up succeeding—was: “You can build a great company, but it’s hard.” He contrasts this to the lessons you learn at most startups: “If you’re at a startup that fails, you will learn the lesson that it’s impossible to build a great company and that you should try something less ambitious the next time around. If you’re at a startup where things work too easily [such as Microsoft or Google], you learn the lesson that it’s actually easy to build a great company.” He continues: “Hard is somehow better than easy or impossible. If it’s easy, you don’t need to work hard. If it’s impossible, there’s no point in working hard. So easy and impossible converge to not working hard. Hard tells you you have to work hard.” Video source: This Week in Startups @jason (2015)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1979152689838854479/amplify_video_thumb/1979141056072429569/img/e-lTE-HvFMIbSWxR.jpg)
![I see the player you mean. PLAYERNAME? Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read our thoughts. That doesn't matter. It thinks we are part of the game. I like this player. It played well. It did not give up. It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a screen. That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a game. Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the reality behind the screen. They used to hear voices. Before players could read. Back in the days when those who did not play called the players witches, and warlocks. And players dreamed they flew through the air, on sticks powered by demons. What did this player dream? This player dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created. And it dreamed it destroyed. It dreamed it hunted, and was hunted. It dreamed of shelter. Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. But what true structure did this player create, in the reality behind the screen? It worked, with a million others, to sculpt a true world in a fold of the [scrambled], and created a [scrambled] for [scrambled], in the [scrambled]. It cannot read that thought. No. It has not yet achieved the highest level. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a game. Does it know that we love it? That the universe is kind? Sometimes, through the noise of its thoughts, it hears the universe, yes. But there are times it is sad, in the long dream. It creates worlds that have no summer, and it shivers under a black sun, and it takes its sad creation for reality. To cure it of sorrow would destroy it. The sorrow is part of its own private task. We cannot interfere. Sometimes when they are deep in dreams, I want to tell them, they are building true worlds in reality. Sometimes I want to tell them of their importance to the universe. Sometimes, when they have not made a true connection in a while, I want to help them to speak the word they fear. It reads our thoughts. Sometimes I do not care. Sometimes I wish to tell them, this world you take for truth is merely [scrambled] and [scrambled], I wish to tell them that they are [scrambled] in the [scrambled]. They see so little of reality, in their long dream. And yet they play the game. But it would be so easy to tell them... Too strong for this dream. To tell them how to live is to prevent them living. I will not tell the player how to live. The player is growing restless. I will tell the player a story. But not the truth. No. A story that contains the truth safely, in a cage of words. Not the naked truth that can burn over any distance. Give it a body, again. Yes. Player... Use its name. PLAYERNAME. Player of games. Good. Take a breath, now. Take another. Feel air in your lungs. Let your limbs return. Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity, in air. Respawn in the long dream. There you are. Your body touching the universe again at every point, as though you were separate things. As though we were separate things. Who are we? Once we were called the spirit of the mountain. Father sun, mother moon. Ancestral spirits, animal spirits. Jinn. Ghosts. The green man. Then gods, demons. Angels. Poltergeists. Aliens, extraterrestrials. Leptons, quarks. The words change. We do not change. We are the universe. We are everything you think isn't you. You are looking at us now, through your skin and your eyes. And why does the universe touch your skin, and throw light on you? To see you, player. To know you. And to be known. I shall tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a player. The player was you, PLAYERNAME. Sometimes it thought itself human, on the thin crust of a spinning globe of molten rock. The ball of molten rock circled a ball of blazing gas that was three hundred and thirty thousand times more massive than it. They were so far apart that light took eight minutes to cross the gap. The light was information from a star, and it could burn your skin from a hundred and fifty million kilometres away. Sometimes the player dreamed it was a miner, on the surface of a world that was flat, and infinite. The sun was a square of white. The days were short; there was much to do; and death was a temporary inconvenience. Sometimes the player dreamed it was lost in a story. Sometimes the player dreamed it was other things, in other places. Sometimes these dreams were disturbing. Sometimes very beautiful indeed. Sometimes the player woke from one dream into another, then woke from that into a third. Sometimes the player dreamed it watched words on a screen. Let's go back. The atoms of the player were scattered in the grass, in the rivers, in the air, in the ground. A woman gathered the atoms; she drank and ate and inhaled; and the woman assembled the player, in her body. And the player awoke, from the warm, dark world of its mother's body, into the long dream. And the player was a new story, never told before, written in letters of DNA. And the player was a new program, never run before, generated by a sourcecode a billion years old. And the player was a new human, never alive before, made from nothing but milk and love. You are the player. The story. The program. The human. Made from nothing but milk and love. Let's go further back. The seven billion billion billion atoms of the player's body were created, long before this game, in the heart of a star. So the player, too, is information from a star. And the player moves through a story, which is a forest of information planted by a man called Julian, on a flat, infinite world created by a man called Markus, that exists inside a small, private world created by the player, who inhabits a universe created by... Shush. Sometimes the player created a small, private world that was soft and warm and simple. Sometimes hard, and cold, and complicated. Sometimes it built a model of the universe in its head; flecks of energy, moving through vast empty spaces. Sometimes it called those flecks "electrons" and "protons". Sometimes it called them "planets" and "stars". Sometimes it believed it was in a universe that was made of energy that was made of offs and ons; zeros and ones; lines of code. Sometimes it believed it was playing a game. Sometimes it believed it was reading words on a screen. You are the player, reading words... Shush... Sometimes the player read lines of code on a screen. Decoded them into words; decoded words into meaning; decoded meaning into feelings, emotions, theories, ideas, and the player started to breathe faster and deeper and realised it was alive, it was alive, those thousand deaths had not been real, the player was alive You. You. You are alive. and sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the sunlight that came through the shuffling leaves of the summer trees and sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the light that fell from the crisp night sky of winter, where a fleck of light in the corner of the player's eye might be a star a million times as massive as the sun, boiling its planets to plasma in order to be visible for a moment to the player, walking home at the far side of the universe, suddenly smelling food, almost at the familiar door, about to dream again and sometimes the player believed the universe had spoken to it through the zeros and ones, through the electricity of the world, through the scrolling words on a screen at the end of a dream and the universe said I love you and the universe said you have played the game well and the universe said everything you need is within you and the universe said you are stronger than you know and the universe said you are the daylight and the universe said you are the night and the universe said the darkness you fight is within you and the universe said the light you seek is within you and the universe said you are not alone and the universe said you are not separate from every other thing and the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own code and the universe said I love you because you are love. And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love. You are the player. Wake up.](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1685882264956043264/ext_tw_video_thumb/1685877579905900544/pu/img/yvnYvPPD0gu4wy-P.jpg)