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You worked there at the time?
by leobg 2y ago
You worked there at the time?
- FireBeyond 2y agoNo - this is all from Max Levchin (who actually did build the MVP of PayPal) in Founders at Work. Musk made some amusing comments that he thought were insightful about this that showed how little he really knew: He also suggested that PayPal should have written its front end in C++ (because C++ in 2000 was an excellent choice for front-end web development?!?), and later cited Blizzard writing WoW in C++ as proof that this was the correct decision that Max and the board never understood. (Oh, and "Microsoft has a DLL library for anything you could possibly ever want to do, but you can't get Unix libraries for anything.") He also said that Max "never really understood this" despite Musk's efforts to educate him, and that these decisions are also why PayPal "hasn't been able really add any new features". He then complained about the Board's decision to fire him as making him "more careful about who he allowed to invest in his companies in the future": 1) he was the largest shareholder, but it was not "his" company, he only held a fraction of it, and 2) the idea wasn't even his! Really what he means here is "I want to make sure to hand-select a bunch of yes-men so I get what I want regardless of whose idea it is, how good the idea is, and what I want to do with it."