The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of the Planet Earth

This inspiring story of a scrappy startup and its crack team is a must-read for entrepreneurs, business owners, and even PayPal's upper management of today. Even as PayPal grew into a sizable company post-IPO, its irreverent and open culture kept innovation alive and overhead at a minimum, allowing its product development group to get features onto the site with as little notice as a couple weeks. In the two years since the acqusition, eBay's corporate heavy-handedness has systematically ground down the innovative and spirited drive that kept PayPal one step of eBay through the war described in this book. Product lifecycles are lengthening, defect rates grow as technology management short-sightedly cuts QA schedules (see their recent site outages), and strategy is micromanaged by uninformed executives instead of being delegated to those who know the marketplace and the technology. The empowerment of their staff by Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Max Levchin touted so often in this book is completely gone. If the current trend continues, the eBay community can expect the same oblivious, clumsy decisions made by eBay during the PayPal wars (SYI, Checkout) to be made by the "new" PayPal, instead of real product innovations to help real people. Make no mistake - while PayPal and eBay's services are highly complementary, their cultures are very different. This book shows how a vibrant, innovative, and merit-based culture emerged in PayPal through a trial by fire. In contrast, eBay's market success was assured nearly from the beginning, making its executive staff lazy and complacent. An inevitable network effect made eBay's expansion so easy that its management could rely on hamfisted corporate tactics to beat competitors - buying out Half.com, raising prices in response to Yahoo Auction's entrance into the arena - and developed a plodding, centrally-controlled product development process that made it utterly unable to compete with PayPal. It's no surprise that PayPal's empowered team of intense, talented individuals beat them off time and time again. PayPal was once envisioned as great global currency liberator, but having been taking over by eBay, it is being shoehorned into just another mediocre business unit used to serve the auction giant's needs.

The ultimate Silicon Valley insider's look at a fascinating time in business, mostly between the end of the 'dot-com boom' and the advent of the New War. Should be must-reading at business school entrepreneurship classes and for startup executives. Slickly gripping the reader through plans for world domination and revolutionizing banking and financial institutions, "The PayPal Wars" is a captivating and entertaining read. -Ken Berger, LogX Technologies (Venture Consultant)

Paypal Wars follows the story of its author, Eric Jackson, from his early beginnings toiling away at doomed consultant at Arthur Anderson until he eventually was asked to join a burgeoning startup called Confinity, Paypal's precusor. The book details Confinity's early obsession with electronic money transfer through handheld Palm Pilots. Eventually, looking for ways to diversify their user base, they stumbled upon the cyber-auction haven of Ebay, what better place to showcase their electronic money transfer plans that on a site with millions of users looking for an easy way to send and recieve money? Ebay had other ideas, the book details Ebay's monopolistic tendencies as they did everything within their power to reduce Paypal's influence on their website. In time forces both legal and illegal unwittingly conspired to damage Paypal enough to force Paypal executives to concede the war against Ebay and eventually sell their industry leading company to the auction giant or face a slow monetary bleed until their inevitable demise. Jackson has crafted a story of corporate intrigue and backroom dealings that offers a valuable insight into the mindset and pitfalls that come with starting a business.

The Paypal Wars is a great behind the scenes look at Paypal, an internet money transfer site. Eric Jackson gives an exciting account of all the trials and tribulations that the young company had to go through to get to its $1.5 billion payday. Jackson's detailed description of Paypal's constantly changing services and marketing really give the reader a sense of the crazy day to day highs and lows of working for a top-pedigree internet valley startup. Jackson also describes the sparing, strategic positioning and out right confrontations that dominated the highest levels as Paypal's colorfully brilliant entrepreneurs often had differing views on where to take the company. The Paypal Wars reads much more like a suspenseful thriller than a typical business book. I would recommend The PayPal Wars to anyone who is interested in learning about what actually took place during the internet boom. This book is very exciting and reads quickly. Jackson accomplishes his objective of telling the PayPal story from start to finish in an action-packed, personality-driven style. I get this book 5 stars.