Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
21 published records
01 / belief
“I mean, in my opinion, it’s like here’s what happens: if eBay doesn’t acquire PayPal in July to October of 2002, eBay acquires PayPal for a different price at a different time.”
02 / belief
“I believe the status is within four years of the acquisition, over half of all PayPal employees have left and including all of the founders of both Confinity and X.”
03 / belief
“I mean, I think yeah, it was a very Apple thing to do as a very we want to create the best user experience by making sure that we control all the key components of our product.”
04 / belief
“I think taking all of this into account, it’s almost like, you know, I think I’m going to net out at a B+ for eBay on the acquisition.”
05 / commitment
“There is so much to dive into and unpack here. So I will get through the acquisition history and facts quickly, but first, a quick note.”
06 / belief
“I think we should take a step back too and just do a little more stage setting here, which is it’s hard for us to remember.”
07 / belief
“I think the skill is holding both of those… to borrow a phrase from my wife, she loves this phrase, “holding both of those things in your head at the same time.”
08 / belief
“There’s a great article on the Tech Republic – we’ll link to it in show notes – it’s titled, I believe, How the PayPal Mafia Redefined Success in Silicon Valley.”
09 / belief
“Let’s move into category and I think we can discuss a lot of these themes and unpack them as we go.”
10 / uncertainty
“In this case, I don’t know that it added tremendously to eBay’s marketplace and actually there’s a point that Keith Rabois points out where they had visibility into eBay’s growth and they predicted that eBay’s growth was going to plateau and that they actually needed to make the sale because they were like, “we don’t have a different growth strategy yet, and people are going to be concerned.”
11 / belief
“I think the only, well, not the only but one potentially negative picture you could paint for eBay here is if you think about over the subsequent 13 years between the acquisition and the spinoff, PayPal grows so much that it has colored 60-65 percent of the entire value of the company, maybe even 70 percent.”
12 / evaluation
“Other acquisitions that we’ve ripped apart have that characteristic too from that time period where it’s all about integration, it’s all about “Great, we like your product.”
13 / recommendation
“Yeah, I think we can grade it. So, this is a really interesting one to grade because one of the themes that I think has been pretty pervasive throughout the show that we’ve done is that the best acquisitions that we’ve given the highest grades to have been ones where the acquirer follows the mantra of “Leave the team alone, it’s all about the people, let them do their thing, don’t mess with the magic.”
14 / prediction
“The money transfer, what they have grown into today which people eventually did become very comfortable with but were uncomfortable at the time. So they probably would have had to ride out some tough times for a while if they had moved away from eBay, and eBay maybe doesn’t figure it out and figure out the fraud detection, and then people are uncomfortable transacting on eBay and they never get everyone onboarded to their own payment platform, and people don’t like using eBay because they still have to use an analog system.”
15 / preference
“In looking at kind of the way that eBay was facing decisions at this point was okay, we love electronic platforms in our platform.”
16 / prediction
“The biggest one that I think is interesting is eBay transactions generated two-thirds of PayPal’s payment volume at the time of the transaction.”
17 / evaluation
“Then, just keep repositioning because I think that we just get emotionally attached to what we make and people will get really emotionally attached to their vision.”
18 / evaluation
“I believe, I could be wrong in this, and that he said he had a computer science degree and it turns out he didn’t have a college degree at all.”
19 / uncertainty
“Now, what it turned to, I think, was a behemoth that was not in the cards at the time and it would be super interesting to look at what was in Meg Whitman’s head and if they really though that this could be something that they grew independently because I think there’s been a lot of discussion since then, kind of like hindsight is 20/20 that that was the vision the whole time was to grow this new internet business where we can just transfer money anywhere all the time.”
20 / recommendation
“I’m thinking about this question of building a big company on the back of somebody else’s platform and I think perhaps you could make an argument that you can do it if you can essentially raid the platform, get all the users from it and then migrate to your own platform.”
21 / evaluation
“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.”