Hire Outsiders, Ban the Experienced

"Its earliest hires included high school dropouts, ace chess players, and puzzle champions—often chosen because of their eccentricities and peculiarities, not in spite of them."

"Lauri Schultheis recalled specifically hiring for inexperience. “When we were looking to hire people for fraud, we were actually trying to find people that didn’t have experience with fraud, because we didn’t want them to have preconceived notions about what they would be doing at PayPal... We wanted them to be able to pivot and think outside the box and look at things from a different perspective, instead of saying, ‘Well, you know, at such-and-such bank, this is how we did it, and that’s how we should do it here.’"

"The alumni also came to see inexperience as an asset. “Very few of the top performers at the company had any prior experience with payments,” Mike Greenfield, a member of the fraud analytics team said, “and many of the best employees had little or no prior background building internet products.” Had the company built its fraud process traditionally, he said, they “would have hired people who had been building logistic regression models for banks for twenty years but never innovated, and fraud losses would likely have swallowed the company.”"

"“Immigrating is an entrepreneurial act,” Sacks explained. “You take an affirmative step to leave your country, and you frequently leave everything behind. That’s the ultimate entrepreneurial act. So it’s not surprising that when people get to the US, they continue to try to do entrepreneurial things, to mold their own environment.”"