| 商家名称 | 信用等级 | 购买信息 | 订购本书 |
 |
 |
The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth |  |
 |
|
The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth | |
Eric Jackson directed the marketing operations for PayPal, the world's leading on-line service, and was instrumental in turning the company into one of the few profitable dot-coms. He graduated from Stanford University with a degree in economics and serves on the Board of Directors of the Stanford Review, a non-profit dedicated to improving education at his alma mater.
网友对The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth的评论
书内容不错，具体可参考下方的美亚读者评论，但包装非常差，用一个塑胶袋装起来，袋子磨破，书角很脏，扣了一星
Item as described.
Great read but not sure whether it's a true account of events as they transpired.Author clearly has an axe to grind with Elon.Seems a little bit sycophantic and author must have been a periphery player.Also, as described by others, author clearly idol worships , Thiel.
Of all the members of the Paypal sream team,Elon appears to have faired better.He has since gone on to found SpaceX and is managing Tesla, envisioned Hyperloop etc.,He's also worth 5+billion.Thiel is worth 1.6billion.
I'd say the proof is in the pudding.Elon's contribution is most likely not accurately potrayed .They should probably have listened to Elin more!
As the title of the book suggests, this is a first hand account showing what a rough ride the entrepreneurial & startup journey can be. With the never ending list of challenges from different segments to internal conflicts within the team itself, this is an excellent read for any determined entrepreneur to be mentally prepared on a road very few chose to travel. The incidents documented in this book show an outright example of the battle between David vs Goliath (Paypal vs Ebay). It is a true testimonial of how innovative thinking and delivering solutions based on what customers require can overcome any kind of manipulative or power whiplash from the competitor who is not prepared as what to expect next.
Kudos to the initial Paypal team for their persistence and determination in overcoming all odds and rewriting history in the Silicon Valley circles. No wonder the Paypal Mafia has gone on to create more innovative startups and support a new breed of entrepreneurs ready to take on the world. The book delivers a key lesson in the words of Peter Thiel towards the end at the Paypal celebration party. Although I would not like to spoil it for future readers, the essential lesson is that the world encourages the spirit of entrepreneurism and likes to see risk takers come on out all front and deliver the unexpected. But at the same time it places a lot of hurdles in the path of an entrepreneur. It is up to the entrepreneur to chose whether to get knocked down by the hurdle or maneuver a way around it.
Eric M. Jackson's "The PayPal Wars" stands as one of the finest accounts yet written of the heady days of dot-com in 2000 and 2001. What makes Jackson's account so imminently readable is the author's sense of humility, and his reflexive empathy for the travails of his colleagues at PayPal.
Originally recruited away from Anderson by Peter Theil, Jackson writes from the vantage of one accustomed to the ways of the old economy-- strict hierarchy, clearly-defined roles, and an emphasis on structure. Jackson reported to work his first day to find that no one at PayPal was aware he had been hired; after getting over his initial panic, he quickly learned that the new economy prized a different set of values: speed, flexibility, egalitarianism, and, above all, talent. Despite having no prior marketing experience, Jackson quickly learned the ropes and ascended to a position of prominence within the fledgling organization.
Jackson's observations ring true to anyone fortunate enough to have worked in a high-growth tech startup:
* Customer service was playing catch-up to the company's emphasis on growth, with unanswered email queues exceeding 100,000 at times.
* Simple search queries used to generate internal usage reports would threaten to crash the public site due to scaling problems.
* Engineers sparred over which platform to use (Oracle or NT), ultimately developing for both in parallel.
* Upper-management preoccupied itself with inking biz dev deals to increase growth instead of fixing serious site problems that were causing users to leave.
Throughout his narrative, Jackson pulls few punches, and writes with convincing sincerity about the strengths and weaknesses of the company he helped to create:
"I'll certainly acknowledge that our company wasn't beyond media dissection. In fact, we deserved it! We had racked up $92 million in operating losses through the first three quarters of the year against revenues of just $6 million. CNET, The Red Herring, and other media outlets had every right to sink their teeth into a company with such a dangerous burn rate..."
Peter Theil emerges as a true visionary, having originally conceived of PayPal as a way of allowing citizens across the world bypass currency-devaluing actions of their local governments by letting them transfer savings into foreign-denominated currency. While this vision never came to pass, the encompassing nature of his vision seized the imagination of those who toiled to make PayPal succeed. Theil also had the financial acumen to realize that unless he closed his venture round quickly in the spring of 2001, the continuing slide of NASDAQ would scare away the investors he had so carefully brought to the table. He closed a $100 million round just in time by instructing the investment bank not to haggle over the company's valuation-- just to close the round as fast as possible. Had he waited even a few more days, his investors would have fled to safety, and PayPal would have run out of cash.
Some of the most delicious passages of Jackson's account are those which describe the culture of PayPal's ultimate buyer, eBay:
"EBay employees seemed trained to make phone calls to everyone who might have even the remotest interest in the matter and invite them to the yet-to-be-scheduled meeting. After at least two dozen invitations had been extended, a meeting time and location would be scheduled about a week in advance. The following day, like clockwork, the meeting would be rescheduled because of a calendar conflict of a peripheral stakeholder. After several rounds of schedule shuffling, attendees filing into the summit would be handed a thick set of PowerPoint slides filled with bullet points, tables, and an aphorism or two... The duration of the meeting would then be devoted to wading through the voluminous set of slides, with the usual outcome being an agreement to set up a follow-up meeting wo that the issues raised by the slides could be further discussed."
Ultimately, the usurpation of PayPal's innovative culture for eBay's beauracratic one led Jackson, as well as most of his fellow PayPal colleagues, to depart. The strength of PayPal's bench can be readily seen by considering what its members did later--
* Peter Theil became a major figure in the venture arena, where he helped build the then-nascent social network, Facebook.
* Reid Hoffman went on to take the helm of LinkedIn, which has since gone through a successful IPO.
* Chad Hurley and Steve Chen founded YouTube (later acquired by Google).
* Jeremy Stoppleman and Russel Simmons founded Yelp.
* Premal Shah founded Kiva.
* Dave McClure founded SimplyHired.
One of the few downsides of Jackson's compelling account is his insertion of political positions which he presents as if his readers will naturally share his outlook. While not over-wrought, his endorsements of Milton Freidman, Bernie Goldberg, and his sweeping denunciations of regulatory agencies wear on the reader who is otherwise inclined to affirm Jackson's observations on life in a high-growth company. In an afterword which describes the threat posed to eBay and PayPal from an ascendent Google, Jackson intones that "Google's management appears to be overwhelmingly left-wing"-- a pronouncement which is intended to spook the reader.
Despite his politics, Eric Jackson has penned a wonderful time-capsule of the heady days of the dot-com blast. If you are looking for a highly-readable volume which avoids the standard cant while offering a first-hand account of what life is really like in a startup, look no further.
I found this account of PayPal's rise from ambitious internet start-up to a internationally established money transfer system very engaging. The author, while being close enough to be privy to many of the key decisions he details in the book, was not one of the executives calling the shots. I found that this was a perfect vantage point to tell this story. Any higher up in the company, and it would've felt like a victor trying to write history. In fact, there are moments in the book where it feels like the author was citing research material that he had to read about his own company, since he was not involved enough in certain decisions to write from personal knowledge. Which leads me to my one criticism of the book, which is that Eric M. Jackson, the author, is not a writer or journalist by trade, so sometimes the level of writing feels more like a college essay then an established writer with a strong voice. But, what he lacks in craft, he makes up for by giving the reader a sense of being in the various cubicles, offices, and conference rooms where these young dot-com entrepreneurs fought off countless internal and external struggles to take the concept of revolutionizing the way individuals trade currency and make it a reality.
Anyone interested in the challenges that face entrepreneurs in the digital age, as well as the countless people who rely on PayPal and eBay for their livelihood, would find this book well worth reading.
喜欢The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth请与您的朋友分享,由于版权原因，读书人网不提供图书下载服务
