dotBank

"On Friday, August 31, 2001, PayPal registered its ten-millionth customer. At PayPal’s 1840 Embarcadero office, the team—already abuzz over the upcoming IPO—celebrated with after-work margaritas, and Thiel sent out an email reflecting on the milestone: As of this week, PayPal has reached its 10,000,000th user. One suspects that too much importance is attached to round numbers. Still, it helps put things into some sort of context: (1) November 18, 1999: 1,000 users. We’re still not sure whether the product is going to take off, or whether the user numbers are just going to fizzle after an initial burst of interest. (2) December 28, 1999: 10,000 users. PayPal is signing up about 500 users/ day, and it’s getting more and more difficult to mail (by hand) all the envelopes with people’s identification numbers. Still, it’s starting to look like the rate of growth is increasing from day to day. (3) February 2, 2000: 100,000 users. It’s definitely looking exponential.... But we have no idea what we’re going to do with these users. We’re starting to get nervous about the sign-up bonuses ($ 20 a person) and we know it can’t go on forever.... Obviously, the spending is growing exponentially too.... A company down the street (X.com) has the same bonuses, and we’re scared that we’re going to get bankrupted in the race. [After the merger, it turns out they were kind of scared too.] (4) April 15, 2000: 1,000,000 users. We’ve just merged PayPal and X.com, and raised $ 100 million as a result of the high growth rates. Now it’s up to us to create a business with the capital, employees, and customer base. Robert Simon, the CEO of dotBank, an early competitor acquired by Yahoo and morphed into PayDirect, suggests that the online payments race will be won by the first company to get to the 5,000,000-user number. Good work everyone."

"On Friday, August 31, 2001, PayPal registered its ten-millionth customer. At PayPal’s 1840 Embarcadero office, the team—already abuzz over the upcoming IPO—celebrated with after-work margaritas, and Thiel sent out an email reflecting on the milestone: As of this week, PayPal has reached its 10,000,000th user. One suspects that too much importance is attached to round numbers. Still, it helps put things into some sort of context: (1) November 18, 1999: 1,000 users. We’re still not sure whether the product is going to take off, or whether the user numbers are just going to fizzle after an initial burst of interest. (2) December 28, 1999: 10,000 users. PayPal is signing up about 500 users/day, and it’s getting more and more difficult to mail (by hand) all the envelopes with people’s identification numbers. Still, it’s starting to look like the rate of growth is increasing from day to day. (3) February 2, 2000: 100,000 users. It’s definitely looking exponential.… But we have no idea what we’re going to do with these users. We’re starting to get nervous about the sign-up bonuses ($20 a person) and we know it can’t go on forever.… Obviously, the spending is growing exponentially too.… A company down the street (X.com) has the same bonuses, and we’re scared that we’re going to get bankrupted in the race. [After the merger, it turns out they were kind of scared too.] (4) April 15, 2000: 1,000,000 users. We’ve just merged PayPal and X.com, and raised $100 million as a result of the high growth rates. Now it’s up to us to create a business with the capital, employees, and customer base. Robert Simon, the CEO of dotBank, an early competitor acquired by Yahoo and morphed into PayDirect, suggests that the online payments race will be won by the first company to get to the 5,000,000-user number. Good work everyone."