Top Highlights

• “You have folks like Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Reid Hoffman. But when I first got to the company, it was the database administrators who were thought of as gods.”
• when I go into teams, I’m just looking for what is that magic that we saw in the early days of PayPal. And it’s rare, but it’s what we keep searching for.”
• “Calling us a mafia is an insult to mafias,” joked John Malloy, an early board member. “A mafia is far better organized than we were.”
• Many remembered the company as a crucible—cutthroat as it was creative, and unforgivingly intense.
• Eno called it “scenius.” “Scenius,” he said, “is the intelligence of a whole… operation or group of people.