Reid Hoffman
Strategic Concepts & Mechanics
Primary Evidence
"At one of many late-night product debates that summer, Reid Hoffman raised another critical stumbling block: What if one of these hypothetical PayPal users forgot their PalmPilot and needed to execute a transaction? Levchin proposed a workaround, suggesting the PayPal.com website be set up to send money via a user’s email address. Users had to use the website anyway to download the PayPal software for syncing their handheld devices to their computers. The site could have an email system as a backup to the PalmPilot money-beaming option. When emailing money was first suggested, few recognized it as a eureka moment. Quite the opposite: Levchin intended it to be a throwaway demo—buried in a corner of the main site for the unlucky souls who forgot their PalmPilots. To him, emailing money was a far cry from PayPal’s primary use case. This feature, if it could even be called that, was a concession to Hoffman’s critique, not a core product."
"“We are living in the heaven of PalmPilots,” observed Reid Hoffman, a Stanford friend of Thiel’s and early Confinity board member, “and we could walk into every single restaurant and go to each table and ask how many people have PalmPilots.” He guessed the answer was between zero and one per restaurant. “And that means your use case can only be used between zero and one times, per restaurant, per meal cycle! You’re hosed! It’s over on this idea.”"
"David Sacks instructed Damon Billian to take to the message boards and correct “pricing disinformation,” and asked Reid Hoffman to appeal to his eBay contacts to correct their messaging. Sacks floated other ideas as well. Was it time, Sacks wondered, to send a legal “nastygram” to eBay and a preliminary injunction for anticompetitive pricing? Could Vince Sollitto, head of PR, do anything to “win public opinion without appearing weak?” Could the customer service team create special designations for loyal PayPal users? “Suggestions are welcome from all,” Sacks added. “We’ll need lots of good ideas to beat eBay on variables other than price.”"
"At twenty-plus-years old, PayPal has arguably become the worldwide payment system that its founders imagined. And yet, for some, even this scale of success is insufficient. “PayPal should be the world’s most valuable financial institution by far,” Musk argued. Years after they had left all of it behind, Musk proposed to Reid Hoffman that PayPal’s founding team should reacquire the company and grow it into the world’s financial nerve center."
"At one of many late-night product debates that summer, Reid Hoffman raised another critical stumbling block: What if one of these hypothetical PayPal users forgot their PalmPilot and needed to execute a transaction? Levchin proposed a workaround, suggesting the PayPal.com website be set up to send money via a user’s email address. Users had to use the website anyway to download the PayPal software for syncing their handheld devices to their computers. The site could have an email system as a backup to the PalmPilot money-beaming option. When emailing money was first suggested, few recognized it as a eureka moment. Quite the opposite: Levchin intended it to be a throwaway demo—buried in a corner of the main site for the unlucky souls who forgot their PalmPilots. To him, emailing money was a far cry from PayPal’s primary use case. This feature, if it could even be called that, was a concession to Hoffman’s critique, not a core product."
"“We are living in the heaven of PalmPilots,” observed Reid Hoffman, a Stanford friend of Thiel’s and early Confinity board member, “and we could walk into every single restaurant and go to each table and ask how many people have PalmPilots.” He guessed the answer was between zero and one per restaurant. “And that means your use case can only be used between zero and one times, per restaurant, per meal cycle! You’re hosed! It’s over on this idea.”"
"David Sacks instructed Damon Billian to take to the message boards and correct “pricing disinformation,” and asked Reid Hoffman to appeal to his eBay contacts to correct their messaging. Sacks floated other ideas as well. Was it time, Sacks wondered, to send a legal “nastygram” to eBay and a preliminary injunction for anticompetitive pricing? Could Vince Sollitto, head of PR, do anything to “win public opinion without appearing weak?” Could the customer service team create special designations for loyal PayPal users? “Suggestions are welcome from all,” Sacks added. “We’ll need lots of good ideas to beat eBay on variables other than price.”"
"At twenty-plus-years old, PayPal has arguably become the worldwide payment system that its founders imagined. And yet, for some, even this scale of success is insufficient. “PayPal should be the world’s most valuable financial institution by far,” Musk argued. Years after they had left all of it behind, Musk proposed to Reid Hoffman that PayPal’s founding team should reacquire the company and grow it into the world’s financial nerve center."
"The first team that I built has become known in Silicon Valley as the “PayPal Mafia” because so many of my former colleagues have gone on to help each other start and invest in successful tech companies. We sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Since then, Elon Musk has founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla Motors; Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn; Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim together founded YouTube; Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons founded Yelp; David Sacks co-founded Yammer; and I co-founded Palantir. Today all seven of those companies are worth more than $1 billion each. PayPal’s office amenities never got much press, but the team has done extraordinarily well, both together and individually: the culture was strong enough to transcend the original company."