They're not a portal, you have to program it to be a portal. this programming language to build a portal. And SharePoint as it stands today is not competitive. So we know what we're going to be competing with for about he next two years. Microsoft just released SharePoint 2010, they're generally on 3 to 4 year product cycles, so we're not going to have to worry about a new version until 2013 or 2014. People ask if we target small businesses or big businesses, but we just let the virality fill the pipeline.īI: Of the traditional software companies, who do you look at as a competitor? Is Microsoft a competitor with SharePoint?ĭS: Not yet, not today. PayPal was able to take on these massive liabilities because if the company didn't work it was going to go out of business anyway so there was nothing to lose.īI: How do you apply those lessons here at Yammer? Particularly in hiring - do you look for people who have never worked at big software companies?ĭS: It's quite a lot of both because of the viral spread. In fact, was it a violation of the rules? At most it was a grey area because Visa and MasterCard rules weren't written for the Internet.ĮBay certainly felt constrained - this may have been a rationalization after the fact for losing to a company they so clearly should have beaten - but they always said they felt too constrained with the risks and liability they could take on. There were other companies who didn't pursue what we were pursuing because they thought it'd be a violation of the rules. One of the ways PayPal was so successful is we did not know all the Visa and MasterCard rules we were supposedly violating. They have too much ideological baggage about the way things have to work. If you look at the PayPal companies, they did not try to replace the initial leadership with supposedly more qualified people.ĭon't hire people from the industries you're trying to disrupt. This whole idea that Mark Zuckerberg should stay CEO of Facebook, as opposed to being replaced by a professional manager, that was one of the things we learned at PayPal early on. One of the lessons we learned is that professional managers hired from the industries you're trying to disrupt tend not to be very beneficial. EBay and MySpace saw PayPal and YouTube as parasites. Basically turning larger sites into involuntary platforms for our applications, we figured out that distribution model. For instance, when YouTube started, the way they got distribution initially was to embed videos inside MySpace, which is exactly the tactic that PayPal had used inside eBay, we embedded our auction logos inside of eBay auctions. Blogging didn't really start until 2005, so the stuff we learned wasn't widely disseminated. So I'm not sure how much they really learn.Īnd then because PayPal sold at the end of 2002, a lot of those lessons were really valuable. One question is "Why hasn't Google spawned more companies?" I think there's a tremendous amount of success bias with a lot of these companies they hit a geyser early on, so then they're just running around trying to capture the oil and cap the well. If you fail too hard or succeed too easily, I'm not sure how much you really learn. Because we narrowly avoided failure multiple times, we learned a lot of the right lessons from success. So it ensured that there was a much greater degree of uniformity, at least along certain dimensions like scrappiness, entrepreneurial spirit and talent.Īnother part of it was, PayPal was a success but it very easily could have been a failure. ![]() So Peter recruited me from Stanford, and then I recruited people I knew, and then they recruited people they knew. Most of the people in the company were recruited by Peter or Max, or by people who Peter or Max recruited. They were not recruited by headhunters or recruiters, there was this viral recruiting method. I think first the people themselves were very good. ![]() Business Insider: How did such a small and relatively young company like PayPal spawn so many people in positions of influence and power?ĭavid Sacks: Several things.
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