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.

A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed.

Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.

Now it’s either about technology that doesn’t work or about technology that’s used in bad ways. The anthology of the top twenty-five sci-fi stories in 1970 was, like, ‘Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon,’ and in 2008 it was, like, ‘The galaxy is run by a fundamentalist Islamic confederacy, and there are people who are hunting planets and killing them for fun.’

If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now?

Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way. And if you can’t monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you’ll be stuck with vicious competition.

Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.