A History Of PayPal
Valleywag has posted an "alternate history of PayPal" written by X.com founder and former PayPal CEO Elon Musk. Readers might also enjoy today's post from Robert X. Cringely - it's mostly about Google although he uses an opening reference to PayPal's early history to lay part of the foundation for his story.
"I touched on this concept back in 1998 when I wrote my first column about PayPal, which at the time had been offering its core service for less than a year and already had eight million members. I wrote then that PayPal had already won the Internet payments race, which time has since showed they had. PayPal's confidence was based on analysis of its own growth. Understanding the potential range of growth, looking at the rate of subscriber acceleration, and using second derivative analysis of these data, PayPal was pretty darned sure, even back in 1998, that its competitors at the time would never be able to catch up."
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