David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Today, it’s going to something tremendously bigger and I don’t think it’s what they saw. So I think they thought they were acquiring a feature. I think that’s likely too. It’s interesting too, you know, one of the sort of aphorisms in the tech world is you can’t build a really big company on the back of somebody else’s platform. This is the example that both proves and breaks the rule like PayPal became a huge company obviously and did it on the back of the eBay platform, but ended up having to sell to eBay because they were so captive to that platform. I guess it gets a little bit into the, you know, what would happen otherwise. Could you happen in those fragile early days? Remember, it was 13 years between the acquisition and the spinoff when all of the vast majority of the now value and PayPal was created. Could that have happened if during those early years when it was so much dependent on eBay, it had been a separate company and eBay could have made changes to completely kneecap PayPal? Well, yeah, I think we’ve moved on to the what would have happened otherwise segment. Yes, absolutely.…

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