You want to be the last company in a category. Those are the ones that are really valuable.

I do think Bitcoin is the first [encrypted money] that has the potential to do something like change the world.

EVERY MOMENT IN business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

If you invest in Microsoft or Oracle, or a number of other companies for that matter, you're fundamentally making a bet that there's going to be no innovation. So an investment in Microsoft is a bet that the operating system is going to stay the same, it won't be replaced by Linux, Google Docs, or a mobile platform like iOS or Android.

For a new payment product, you always have to ask, how much better is it than the current solution? So when we started Paypal, for eBay micro merchants, it was much better than getting the 7 to 10 days process of cashing a check in the mail. When you look at stores or physical worlds, places, a lot of these places are already set up to take cash or credit card. Apple Pay may be an incremental improvement, maybe a little bit better. But when you have something that's pretty good and you go to something that's perfect, sometimes it's very hard to drive adoption because the delta is not that big.

Education needs to be rethought. Education does not just happen in college, but it also happens in developing skills which will enable people to contribute to our society as a whole.

If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.