Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate

Some aspects of business turned out to be less of a mystery than you had thought. What did you find you were better at than you thought? Graham: I found I could actually sell moderately well. I could convince people of stuff. I learned a trick for doing this: to tell the truth. A lot of people think that the way to convince people of things is to

the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate.

The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.

If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and

I'd say determination is the single most important quality in a startup founder. If the founders I spoke with were superhuman in any way, it was in their perseverance

Innovations seem inevitable in retrospect, but at the time it's an uphill battle.