Four early-PayPal entrepreneurial culture norms

(in response to Quora question "Which strong beliefs on culture for entrepreneurialism did Peter / Max / David have at PayPal?")

Four aspects of early PayPal culture really stood out to me when I joined as a product manager:
1) self-sufficiency -- individuals and small teams were given fairly complex objectives and expected to figure out how to achieve them on their own.  If you needed to integrate with an outside vendor, you picked up the phone yourself and called; you didn't wait for a BD person to become available.  You did (the first version of) mockups and wireframes yourself; you didn't wait for a designer to become available.  You wrote (the first draft of) site copy yourself; you didn't wait for a content writer.

2) extreme bias towards action -- early PayPal was simply a really *productive* workplace.  This was partly driven by the culture of self-sufficiency.  PayPal is and was, after all, a web service; and the company managed to ship prodigious amounts of relatively high-quality web software for a lot of years in a row early on.  Yes, we had the usual politics between functional groups, but either individual heroes or small, high-trust teams more often than not found ways to deliver projects on-time.

3) data-driven decision making -- PayPal was filled with smart, opinionated people who were often at logger-heads.  The way to win arguments was to bring data to bear.  So you never started a sentence like this "I feel like it's a problem that our users can't do X", instead you'd do your homework first and then come to the table with "35% of our [insert some key metric here] are caused by the lack of X functionality..."

4) willingness to try -- even in a data-driven culture, you'll always run in to folks who either don't believe you have collected the right supporting data for a given decision or who just aren't comfortable when data contradicts their gut feeling.  In many companies, those individuals would be the death of decision-making.  At PayPal, I felt like you could almost always get someone to give it a *try* and then let performance data tell us whether to maintain the decision or rollback.

Those four cultural attributes actually make up a lot of the attitudes and beliefs that you'd expect to see in great entrepreneurs -- i.e., multi-disciplinary, self-sufficient, action-oriented, data-driven experimentalists.  So it's no surprise to see the number of successful startup ventures founded by PayPal alums.  To be sure, PayPal is/was not unique -- I would expect any company that established these kinds of cultural norms to produce a lot of entrepreneurs.

Four Viral Loop Drivers [updated]

I was noodling about different categories of viral loops and started making a list...

Viral Loops typically center on:

1. Contact Lists -- e.g., inviting new people thru the process of finding/adding new contacts to a contact list


2. Conversations -- e.g., inviting new people by adding them to chats, events, groups, etc.


3. Media -- e.g., inviting new people by sharing media/content with them


4. Incentives -- e.g., inviting new people to unlock functional or financial incentives

Any others that you can think of?

Five Points for Better Exec Summaries and Briefings

Here's a quick five-point format for executive summary/briefing documents.  This is intended to be a short "get to know you" briefing for prospective investors.  It's also supposed to be a scalable document -- that is, you can expand it into a full business pitch deck by fleshing out each section more.  Or you can compress it all the way down into a single paragraph by just putting the punchlines together.

I'd recommend doing this in a single page (it's good discipline to be brief).   The bullet points of each section should all build towards the punchline.

1) Team

• Bullet points: Quick recap of team members' experience


• Punchline: why your team has the right experience and/or unique industry connections that give you an unfair advantage in this business

2) Market size

• Bullet points: who are your paying customers?   who are your users (for ad/audience-driven businesses)?  what's the overall industry size?  what specific segment (or sub-segment) of that industry are you going to dominate?  how big is that segment (e.g., how many customers/users are there in your target initial segment multiplied by your expected penetration of that segment multiplied by anticipated customer lifetime value)?


• Punchline: there's a believable path for the company to get to $100MM in annual revenue

3) Customer tests

• Bullet points: if working alpha/beta product, then what are the customer/user activity stats like?  if no product yet, then what surveys, smoke tests, or mockup tests have you run?


• Punchline: we're not just sitting in an office making up a business plan; we've gone out to talk with real customers or users, lots of them.  We've tested working product or realistic mockups with customers/users and they like it.

4) Distribution strategy

• Bullet points: how will your customers/users learn about your service?  how much do you need to pay per customer/user acquisition?  how will you drive a customer/user adoption curve that is doubling every month?


• Punchline: we know how to reach customers/users.  we're not gonna end up blowing your money on building something that it turns out we can't sell.

5) Deal and Milestones

• Bullet points: how much are you looking to raise?  what will that money be used for; e.g., what milestones will you hit?  what questions will you be able to answer with this investment?  which risks will be de-risked with this investment?  how long will these milestones take to achieve?


• Punchline: your money is going to buy significant reductions in risk (and therefore significant increases in the next valuation)

Hope that's helpful.  Did I miss anything?  Leave any questions or edits in the comments section...  Thanks!