Quotes by Jessica Livingston

The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three of four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as its practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.

..determination is the most important quality in a founder, open-mindedness and willingness to change your idea are key, and all startups face rejection at first.

The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you cant really work anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesnt matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.If that one didnt work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I dont think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, wed figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, Were trying this, this week. Every week you go to investors and say, Were doing this, exactly this. Were really focused. Were going to be huge. The next week youre like, That was a lie.

A lot of the machines that Google is built on—commodity is the polite word for them—theyre regular PCs and so theyre not always the most reliable.

Paul Buchheit: Then you have what we do with PCs, and thats technically pretty challenging—to take this big network of machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it.

The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you cant really work anyone else. You have to start your won thing. It almost doesnt matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.If that one didnt work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I dont think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, wed figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, Were trying this, this week. Every week you go to investors and say, Were doing this, exactly this. Were really focused. Were going to be huge. The next week youre like, That was a lie.

Paul Buchheit: Im suddenly reminded that, for a while, I asked people if they were playing Russian Roulette with a gun with a billion barrels (or some huge number, so in other words, some low probability that they would actually be killed), how much would they have to be paid to play one round? A lot of people were almost offended by the question and theyd say, I wouldnt do it at any price. But, of course, we do that everyday. They drive to work in cars to earn money and they are taking risks all the time, but they dont like to acknowledge that they are taking risks. They want to pretend that everything is risk-free.