Mortal Enemy as Team Adhesive

"Even its tussles with eBay, alumni observed, evinced a fighting spirit. The team would have to build, release, iterate, and repeat as eBay challenged PayPal’s use on the auction giant’s home turf. “The thing that brought us really close together was battling eBay,” Skye Lee noted, “because nothing brings a company together like having a mortal enemy.”"

"eBay now stood a real chance of reclaiming payments and each change it made sent executives—particularly Thiel and Sacks—into paroxysms of anger. “David and Peter would get totally hysterical and say things like They can’t do this! and How dare they?” an executive observed. “And we’re like, ‘It’s their platform. They can do whatever they damn well want.’"

"In sharing eBay’s “declaration of war,” Sacks observed that these encroachments arrived at a precarious time. “Unfortunately because of the forced upgrade scheduled to begin on Monday,” he explained, “we are at our most vulnerable point. It is critical that we respond swiftly and creatively in the next week to give ourselves the maximum chance of success (survival?) over the next month.” Worryingly, this would be the first time in the Billpoint-PayPal saga in which Billpoint had undercut PayPal on price. “... this will be a critical test,” Sacks wrote in his email to the group, which he dubbed “the Ebay [sic] Response Team.” He included the company’s top performers across a range of functions: its entire executive team, the producers of auction products, its head of PR, the stewards of its Visa/ Mastercard relationships, its general counsel, data experts, and others he felt could help."