WEBVTT

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There's a reason so many famous

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founders came from PayPal.

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They call it the PayPal Mafia.

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People like Elon Musk, who later

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built Tesla and SpaceX, Peter Thiel,

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who went on to start Palantir,

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the co-founders of YouTube, the founder

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of Yelp.

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It's not a coincidence that they

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are all from the same company.

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In fact, early PayPal wasn't a

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dream job at all.

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People were dealing with a new

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chaos every day.

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Fraud attacks, systems breaking, platforms

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trying

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to block them.

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So engineers were constantly asking themselves,

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what happens when 10 million people

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use it?

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And instead of solving that with

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meetings, they solved them with systems,

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fraud pipelines, automated checks, kill

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switches.

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Over time, people there stopped thinking

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like developers and started thinking like

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owners.

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So when a lot of them

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eventually left, they didn't leave as

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employees.

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They left knowing how to build

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products that survive real-world use.

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Next time you see a unicorn

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founded by an ex-PayPal person, don't

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credit the pitch deck.

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Credit the pressure and systems.