![]() ![]() Otherwise, how could one expect each employee to make rational calculations and decisions on their own every day? To enforce this norm, almost every all-hands meeting consisted of distributing a printed Excel spreadsheet to the assembled masses and Peter conducting a line by line review of our performance (this is only a modest exaggeration). Radical transparency on metrics: All employees were expected to be facile with the metrics driving the business. Peter did not accept no for answer: If you couldn’t solve the problem, someone else would be soon assigned to do it. “I didn’t get fired–I got a pat on the back. I was a 22-year-old whippersnapper, and I remember firing off this e-mail that disagreed with the entire executive staff,” says Yelp’s Stoppelman. To borrow an apt phrase, employees were expected to “come to work every day willing to be fired, to circumvent any order aimed at stopping your dream.” Jeremy Stoppelman has relayed elsewhere the story about an email he sent around criticizing management that he expected to get him fired and instead got him promoted: Refusal to accept constraints, external or internal:We were expected to pursue our #1 priority with extreme dispatch (NOW) and vigor. Our annual review forms in 2002 included a direction to rate the employee on “avoids imposing on others’ time, e.g. As a result, David enforced an anti-meeting culture where any meeting that included more than 3-4 people was deemed suspect and subject to immediate adjournment if he gauged it inefficient. If you identified the 8-12 most critical innovations at PayPal (or perhaps even the most important 25), almost every one had a single person inspire it (and often it drive it to implementation). Most great innovations at PayPal were driven by one person who then conscripted others to support, adopt, implement the new idea. (Although I resisted some of this approach during the PayPal years, I am now a proponent of it and have even devised a theory of why it is crucial.)ĭedication to individual accomplishment: Teams were almost considered socialist institutions. Even our annual review forms in 2001 required each employee to identify their single most valuable contribution to the company. He would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your #1 initiative. What strong beliefs on culture for entrepreneurialism did Peter, Max and David have at PayPal?Įxtreme Focus(driven by Peter): Peter required that everyone be tasked with exactly one priority. As an angel investor, I’ve invested in two college dropout founders this month. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, is another dropout. Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey - the founders of Twitter - are not college graduates. Rob Kalin, Etsy’s founder, never finished college. Indeed, Caterina Fake just published an outstanding post advocating that entrepreneurs drop out of college: Nevertheless, at PayPal we often urged students to drop-out and some of the best entrepreneurs I have met subsequently dropped out of school too. Paul Graham’s advice is sound (Students Guide to Startups): Should a student finish college or go work for a startup if given the chance to work for a YC, TechStars alumni? We also provided free lunch in the 1840 Embarcadero Office, but stopped serving lunch when we moved to Mountain View off of Castro Street. Yes, in we provided free breakfast at dinner at 8 pm during the week at PayPal during 2000 -2002. In addition to the elements that Reid has identified:ġ) Confrontational culture: People needed to fight for their ideas against vigorous critiques.ģ) Internal promotions (nearly exclusively) for executive and managerial roles.īefore Google, were there other Silicon Valley companies that provided their employees with free meals while at work? “this is the way that it is always done”ģ) intense need to survive: lots of immediate challenges to ongoing lifeĤ) entrepreneurial execs/teams that create/reinforce cultureĥ) and, as always, luck, fortune, or whatever you call it… What key values led to early PayPal’s culture of entrepreneurship?ġ) hiring: youthful, smart, driven people with a strong hunger to winĢ) taking no answer at face value - e.g. * Max Levchin, David Sacks, Reid Hoffman, Keith Rabois, Yishan Wong, Dave McClure The PayPal Mafia* (in their own words) on: ![]()
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