PayPal | Acquired Podcast

Musk laughed and said, “Yeah, I get it.” But he prevailed. He spent a year having his own team of engineers rewrite the Unix coding that Levchin had written for Confinity. “We wasted a year doing these technical tap dances instead of building new features,” Levchin says. The recoding effort also prevented the company from focusing on the growing am

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Livingston: What can big companies do to preserve a startup culture? Levchin: I don't know. Less PowerPoints. I think PayPal—even by the time we were acquired—still felt really startup in a variety of ways. But not as much as originally. People were definitely grumbling about how the startup culture was being lost, even internally. But then, when w

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I think Yahoo is smarter now about dealing with startups than they were then. We were one of the first companies they bought, and I think the idea was, back then, that what you should do with an acquisition is "integrate" it, in the same way that a sugar cube becomes integrated with your tea. We basically got dissolved within Yahoo, and a

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