这是一本美团老王比较推荐的书，于是从网上找来，一读就读进去了。确实非常不错，创业这件事，或者说成就事业这件事，做到一定的规模而言，确实是既有必然性，也有很大的偶然性，这本书其实就是非常好的诠释。
PayPal能最终成功其实是有巨大的偶然性。先是立足Palm，虽然开局不错，但如果没有及时转到eBay上，可能就死了；转到了eBay初露头角之后，X.com的挑战就直接而来，一个讲用户增长好，一个讲变现能力好。最终资金压力下合并了；却又是危机四伏，不仅外部竞争对手突然加倍，连eBay都推出了自营服务直接竞争，内部管理上也是危机四伏，请来的CEO Harris差点把公司搞死，Elon Musk也管的很差，不得不换人，请回peter才顺利搞定后面的事情，一直挣扎在生死线上，终于通过缩减成本、调整产品延长了生命，拿到了新融资。上市也是一波三折，居然能赶上911，不仅被对手突然跳出来搞各种诉讼，还被政府盯上了动不动要调查、要资质牌照，股价也随之大起大落。还好，最后和ebay完成了合并，ebay关闭了自营服务，同意停掉赌博业务换取监管的不再追究，才能顺利到今天。这其中的偶然性，如此之多。几乎每个路口都是生死选择。
但奇怪的是最终公司活了下来，还越做越大。离不开创始人peter，更离不开团队一开始的vision，整个过程中也从未偏离vision，每次快死了都是偏离太大，纠正回来就能回到成长的路上。这其中的故事，实在是耐人寻味。
按惯例，做些摘要吧。
But privacy and security, Fieldlink’s original focus, were just as important as convenience—no digital wallet could be successful without addressing these two concerns. This is where Max’s original encryption idea came into play. Encrypted data on a digital device theoretically could not be stolen, making it more secure than cash carried in a wallet.The only problem was the Fieldlink name itself. While not exactly a misnomer for a payments company, it failed to hint at the new strategy.Peter and Max settled on a new name, Confinity, a combination of “confidence” and “infinity.”
这就是Paypal最初的故事，对于To C的公司而言好名字的重要性不言而喻。一开始就抓住了要改善的三点：隐私、安全和方便。
“Every successful company needs some form of a big-picture vision to guide its decision-making processes. Management teams also need to motivate their employees by making them feel that their company is somehow special.
“It was this potential that made Confinity’s vision of “world domination”—which might have been more appropriately called “world liberation”—all the more credible.”
愿景是相当无价的东西。当你真的找到、相信你的愿景时，成功才可能在前方。
“Luke echoed this strategy. Growth, he insisted, was critical for a startup at this stage to deter potential competitors and position us to implement a business model that would begin to generate serious revenue.”
“Hence a large, established network is very valuable to enter and very costly to leave; in essence it locks in its members and prevents would-be competitors from getting off the ground.”
“But if PayPal can be used to pay millions of people, the account is much more valuable. Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, coined Metcalfe’s Law as a way of understanding the power of networks. He claimed that the value of a network equals the square of its users, implying that a network with twice as many users as a competitor is four times as valuable.”
一开始就要抓住核心要素，制定正确的战略：增长、培育网络效应。
“Peter and the management team believed that we needed to find the fastest way possible to scale up PayPal’s customer base. If we could increase our number of accounts to reach critical mass before our competitors, the resulting network effect would freeze out any opponents.”
网络效应面前，最重要的就是快速增长用户，达到Critical Mass的临界点，成功点火。然后就可以了。
“Confinity wasted no time mobilizing. In a shift every bit as significant as Fieldlink’s move away from Palm security, overnight we changed PayPal’s focus from payments between friends to online auction transactions.”
发现机会就果断掉头。如果不是这么果断，paypal就没有后来的故事了。把阵地从Palm切换到Ebay，对谁都不是容易的事情，Paypal能在一夜间搞定，厉害。
“PayPal system failed to materialize as most recipients withdrew their funds upon receipt. Worse still, since few users kept account balances the vast majority of them used credit cards to fund their payments, a decision costing Confinity a 2% fee to the credit card associations on each transaction. Every time someone signed up and used PayPal, we lost more money. All of this meant that while Confinity was in no imminent danger of running out of money, we had a limited runway for operating in cash-burning mode. We needed to grow our network to critical mass and banish our competitors soon if PayPal was to survive.”
虽然有了用户，财务上还是风险很大，持续烧钱。好在Paypal清楚地意识到这一点。
3
“PayPal is going to be the way we acquire accounts—it’s easier to sign up for it than an X.com bank account and doesn’t require the user to give his Social Security number. Then once customers are registered with PayPal we’ll upsell them to X.com financial services to bring in revenue.”
Paypal和X.com合并了，CEO是Musk，Elon并不是那么出众。但故事还是可以的，paypal来吸引用户，x来变现，只是后续的一切说明这个想法也很难落地。
“In the course of just a few weeks, a sector that did not exist six months earlier had become crowded with four startups (the merged X.com, PayMe, PayPlace, and gMoney), one portal (Yahoo PayDirect), one giant bank (Bank One’s eMoneyMail), and the eBay-Wells Fargo partnership (Billpoint) all vying for supremacy. PayPal’s road to “world domination” was suddenly well traveled, indeed.
合并之后带给行业的拥挤也是没谁了，一下子来了四家创业公司、yahoo、银行入局，连ebay都搞了自己的品牌，格局一下子似乎要看不清楚了。但真正最后起决定性的，一定不是谁大，而是最有毅力、战略最正确的那个。
这种状况的出现其实是非常常见。当下民营火箭的格局也是如此，国家队、四大公司、一批新公司还有中科宇航都在，虽然结果上肯定是多家并存的状态，相信我们的选择没错。
4
“The PayPal and X-Finance Web sites continued to run as completely separate services. Even our corporate e-mail systems took two months to integrate; most e-mails that Confinity employees thought they were sending to their X.com colleagues never arrived.”
公司的合并和整合不容易，最简单的内部沟通有时候都会举步维艰。
“In this way growth and scalability resembled the proverbial chicken and egg problem—we needed to find ways to improve PayPal’s scalability without interrupting its torrid viral growth”
“If there was a silver lining to our rapidly deteriorating situation, it was that Billpoint failed to capitalize. After its initial boost from the free listing day subsided, Billpoint hovered around 6% listing acceptance for most of April.”
“It was from his active vantage point that Elon witnessed the company’s growing pains firsthand while listening to grumblings from members of the executive team upset with Harris’s direction and the company’s inability to execute tasks under his stewardship. Faced with an uncertain situation, Elon did not shy away from the spotlight—to the contrary, as tension mounted over the company’s malaise, he moved to reclaim it.”
“With the board closing ranks behind the chairman, Harris had no choice but to tender his resignation. Elon took over control of operations by assuming the position of CEO and—in a conciliatory move to Confinity’s stakeholders—turned over his position as chairman to Peter.”
炒掉CEO不容易。
5
By contrast, Confinity’s freewheeling atmosphere had allowed minimal supervision to be counterbalanced by shared goals, clear priorities, and encouragement from management that the staff suggest new ideas. I did not fully comprehend this on my tumultuous first day on the job, but Confinity had struck a balance that fostered both employee individuality and corporate flexibility. This winning formula enabled us to stop on a dime and implement new ideas quickly, to the point where we overhauled our business model to focus on eBay in less than a week.”
“By using credit cards as a back-up funding source, we were able to front the cash ourselves on ACH-funded payments until the bank transfer settled. This decrease in risk made “instant ACH” a viable funding alternative for PayPal, enabling us to offer a bank account-funded payment option to all of our customers.”
“Sacks and Elon sent PayPal Paul to do damage control on the message boards. Paul posted a “clarification” that the $1,000 lifetime credit card spending limit was a typo, it was supposed to be a $2,000 per six-month-period limit. He also explicitly stated a promise from management that would later prove fateful—X.com would never force sellers to upgrade to fee-bearing accounts.”
“The Half.com acquisition sent ripples through X.com. Besides once again demonstrating eBay’s ability to flex its muscles whenever a competitor threatened its dominance, it also marked the first time that eBay controlled a trading platform that limited a seller’s payment options.”
eBay这种既赖以生存的地方，又是自己最大对手的敌人是最难搞的，真是用尽了浑身解数。
6
“PayPal’s margins improved slightly to -3.28% for the third quarter, due to a drop in credit card processing costs as more customers began to use bank accounts to fund payments. But growth in payments caused our gross losses to increase despite this small improvement in margins. With our average daily payment volume reaching $4.6 million, up 70% from the prior period, it meant we were losing $150,000 every day just from ordinary business operations. As Peter’s $100 million in venture capital began to dissipate, Elon realized that X.com was living on borrowed time.”
“Instead I opted to base the upgrade trigger on the company’s biggest expense, credit card processing fees. While users couldn’t be expected to sympathize about paying their pro-rated share of our overhead costs or fraud losses, the direct cost of their credit card payments was clear and understandable. Plus it had a useful analogy in the offline world, where only businesses accept credit card transactions. This conveniently implied that PayPal’s high volume credit card recipients were justifiably categorized as “business users.”
7
“Underwriting all of the risk for our verified buyers and sellers was a costly proposition, especially when we didn’t demand any risk-reducing behavior in return.”
“Billpoint’s headway notwithstanding, December brought two significant milestones for our company—PayPal registered its 5 millionth account while also processing $1 billion in cumulative payments. Vince Sollitto’s press release proclaimed that “PayPal has confirmed a prediction by Robert Simon, [former] CEO of dotBank… [that] the first company to reach five million users [would] become the clear market leader.”16 Other numbers for Q4 sounded just as good. Our payment volume increased by 29% from the prior quarter despite the upgrade campaign, bringing our average total payments to $6 million per day. Nearly two-thirds of all those transactions went to business accounts and generated $7.4 million in revenue. ”
“If nothing else, Yahoo’s collapse provided some insight into the relative strength of PayPal and eBay’s network effects. PayPal’s payments network was strong enough to survive the forced upgrade process, although our competitor did make up some ground by undercutting our pricing.”
8
“This dramatic about-face in our transaction margins was no puzzle to Peter Thiel. It was a few weeks into his stint as the acting-CEO when I heard him compare our new economy payments network to an abstract old economy machine. PayPal’s many policies—such as the fees charged to sellers, spending limits placed on unverified buyers, and our behind-the-scenes fraud algorithms—were like levers, dials, and pulleys. The key was to adjust each of them carefully in unison with the others until the machine hummed along at cruising speed. And Peter had no choice but to tinker. ”
“Peter kept a running list of critical issues and it was common for him to make impromptu calls for status reports with notepad in hand.”
“Despite the NASDAQ Composite resuming its free fall in early-2001—the index dropped from 2,800 to 1,800 in just two months—Peter returned to the private equity markets and secured $90 million in additional financing, an amazing accomplishment given the gloomy state of Silicon Valley.”
“As previously noted, paranoia is an essential ingredient in any successful startup, and this time our fears had a basis. Panicked e-mails flew around the office after the policy was uncovered, and Sacks, Peter, and Reid caucused constantly on the subject. ”
“Although the 1961 Federal Wire Act, written to combat telephone gambling, prevented these gaming services from setting up shop in the United States, no federal law forbade individual citizens from using online gambling sites. ”
9
“After trimming our losses to $1.9 million in the third quarter, we booked an operating profit of $2.8 million in the fourth as our revenue soared from $30.2 million in Q3 to $40.1 million in Q4.”
“Perhaps more amazing, though, was that our aggregate number of users reached 12.8 million after just twenty-six months of operation. To put this into perspective, eBay, which launched its service on Labor Day of 1995, took more than four years to reach 10 million accounts.”
“By asserting that the company was entitled to a potentially large amount of compensation for damages, CertCo’s lawsuit exposed PayPal’s shareholders to a new risk not previously articulated in our IPO prospectus. The by-the-books SEC administrator assigned to our case ruled that this legal attack meant we needed to amend and redistribute the prospectus to potential investors before the shares could finally be priced and floated on the open market, making an IPO the following day logistically impossible.”
10
“As Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once put it, “Agencies established in response to [consumer protection] movements have imposed heavy cost on industry after industry to meet increasingly detailed and extensive government requirements.”
11
“It was at this moment that the ramifications of the deal sunk in—PayPal’s competitive war had ended. Our constant state of conflict, of wondering what eBay would do to us next, was over. But so too was our independence.”
“There’s always some question as to whether or not these kinds of deals make sense. But given that we got a good valuation and removed a huge risk from the company, I think it does.”
“At a lunchtime conversation the following week I asked him what was his primary motivation for finally doing the deal. Peter replied that it was a “sense that this constant state of war was wearing people down.”
“We want PayPal to be the currency for the Internet,” he said. “And the most important driver for that is the number of people using the system. EBay has 46 million users. There’s a huge amount of room for us to grow within that customer base. And once we take off on eBay, it’s going to lead to further expansion off eBay. Whether it’s inside or outside of eBay, I really think that this move puts us in the best position to achieve world domination.”
“Entrepreneurial nimbleness may have helped us survive both the company’s post-merger internal turmoil and Billpoint’s fierce competitive charge, but these new threats would require a different approach.”
“EBay’s, however, were not. Inside the auction giant it seemed as if nothing got done without a face-to-face meeting—or possibly several, if you were unlucky. And holding a meeting was never as simple as just sending an Outlook “meeting request” and sitting down with key stakeholders.”
“A generation gap could partially explain this divergence. EBay’s senior executives—including Whitman, then forty-five; CTO Maynard Webb, forty-six; and eBay U.S. President Jeff Jordan, forty-three—were born at the tail end of the Baby Boom and were on average fifteen years older than their respective PayPal counterparts Peter, Max, and Sacks.”