Kevin Hartz: evaluation

Transcript context

…As we understand the history, at least, PayPal in those early days, pre-acquisition by eBay, there was a lot of stuff going on, like lots of great ideas. Obviously tons of companies that got spun out. But there were a few ideas that got left on the cutting room floor that PayPal would do. One of those ideas was international money transfer, that you would obviously pick up the mantle with Xoom. If we have our history right, there was also an events idea that maybe got left on the cutting room floor, but we'll save that for a little bit later in the episode. How did Xoom then come out of your experience there? Well, I see that you both have done your homework extremely well. What had happened is that a fellow named Dave McClure had joined David Sack's group. David is an extraordinary product person and now runs a venture fund out here in the valley called Craft Ventures. He's a great investor and a great product person, but Dave was running the product at the time at PayPal. We had discussed, well, your payments platform, you're not just a payments company, and just like the great companies of the time and into the future, when you have a platform, you build an API. This is kind of a prestrike sort of thing and Dave McClure joined. We turned out to be the first developers on it. We kicked around a lot of different ideas, including ticketing, but will be honed in on and that was in discussions with Roelof, with Peter was this money remittance thing. They said that if we were doing merchant processing at the scale that we were achieving right now, we've got to focus ourselves. We would be going after this big lumbering incumbent that charges these egregious rates called Western Union and this was a missionary zeal for us because it was a way to help immigrants send money back to their families in a faster, better, and cheaper than the incumbents, the MoneyGrams and Western Unions out there. You started that on the PayPal API. Was it a separate company from the start? Or did it get started within PayPal and then you sort of spun it out? How did that work?…

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