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

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Summary: Thanks Mr. Jackson
Review: Having read many newspaper and financial press accounts over the past several years about PayPal's challenges in the business world, I knew there had to be some interesting "inside stories". I was curious enough to buy a copy of The Pay Pal Wars, fully expecting the book to read like a case study. Boy, was I wrong. I felt like I was reading an Indiana Jones novel! There was adventure, excitement, intrigue, fast cars (thanks for properly referring to the Jag as an E-type!), and romance. Every time a problem was solved, or an enemy neutralized, you could sense an even greater challenge at the next turn. Great writing style!!!

Does it get any better than that? It does, because of the content. While being entertained, you are hearing, from an inside source, the story of very successful dot-com company, from inception, to an established profitable company. One could not imagine the scope of challenges that this organization faced. That's an exceptional story in itself. Definitely a Five Star endeavor.


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Summary: 'The Little Engine That Could' meets "Liar's Poker"
Review: Part "The Little Engine That Could" and part "Liar's Poker". For anyone who wondered, here's an insider's look at PayPal from it's early beginnings through the aquisition by eBay. It's all true but reads like a good adventure tale as PayPal faces challenges from eBay, the media, the mafia and 'the rest of planet earth'

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Summary: An interesting look into an internet giant
Review: 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.

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Summary: Review by Steven D. Laib posted by Alex Moore
Review: The PayPal Wars
by Steven D. Laib, J.D., M.S.
23 September 2004

Eric M. Jackson's The PayPal Wars is an adventure story, a business case study, and the biography of one of Silicon Valley's most successful dot-com startups.

Eric M. Jackson has a real winner. It's an adventure story; it's a business case study; it's an adventure story and a business case study in one!

Quite frankly, if The PayPal Wars doesn't turn out a real winner, it will not be due to anything the author has or has not put into it. Simply put, this book is a biography of one of Silicon Valley's most successful dot-com startups as seen through the eyes of one of its key employees. Jackson, who oversaw much of PayPal's marketing strategy during his tenure with the company, was in probably the best vantage point from which to view the company's adventures from inception to maturity. He brings a lively style, well-documented facts and a sense of adventure (which I think I mentioned above) to what could otherwise be a fairly dry examination of how the company survived when many of its contemporaries did not.

For those who are not familiar with PayPal, it began as a service for transferring money between computer users. Some might see the science fiction in this, where people essentially carry their bank account around in a palm-sized computer that can talk with other people's computers when buying, selling, or otherwise engaging in financial transactions. Handhelds were PayPal's first target, but it didn't take long before they were involved in Internet transactions, acting as a cash transfer agent for everything from online auctions to people sending funds to their kids at college. Handhelds and PDA's eventually fell by the wayside.

The story's protagonist is the staff at PayPal, if not the entire company, and a good story needs a good antagonist, which appears in the form of auction giant eBay. Not that eBay was really a bad guy. It was just that competition threw them into that role. Jackson details how the rivalry developed and how it was eventually resolved while his company dodged government regulators, other competitors, the Russian and Nigerian Mafia and sometimes their own senior management when they lost sight of the company vision and goals.

What makes Jackson's work unique is that it also gives us an excellent view of how the marketplace works, and how today, more than ever before, businesses have to be aware of and respond to the needs and desires of customers. In fact, it was customer pressure that played a key role in bringing about the resolution of the PayPal/eBay rivalry. One might even suggest that the customers knew what was best and the management of both companies needed to understand what should have been obvious from the start. This same customer driven evolution has made the difference for many other companies.

Jackson also journeys into how the modern electronic marketplace functions on a basic level. He covers customer relations, the problems with fraud operators, and how government regulators frequently can screw things up when they don't understand what is going on, or when they become the tool of entrenched interests, such as major banking interests in this instance.

Jackson and his colleagues set out to change the financial world. They almost achieved their goal, and while their total success may have been postponed for a more enlightened market, what they achieved was, nonetheless, a major change in how people can do business. Their invention allowed people to dispense with credit cards for Internet transactions. It made the practice of wiring money potentially obsolete. It also made it possible for any two people with access to an email account to send and receive funds virtually anywhere in the world. Not too shabby for a bunch of what were mostly less than thirty year olds with nothing more than their brains, a dedication to the cause and a "world domination index" window on their computer screens.

Business case studies are rarely page-turners. I should know, having survived graduate business school. This one is. The PayPal Wars is strongly recommended reading for anyone interested in Internet business, business in general, or who just wants a darned good book to read.




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Summary: Jackson Strikes Gold with The PayPal Wars
Review: 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.


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Summary: Superb business case study
Review: 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)

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Summary: A true-told novel of the Internet
Review: This book revives the Internet era pandemonium of which everybody wanted a piece, and the book fondly brought me back to those exciting times. An easy and interesting read providing an insider perspective of the real trials and tribulations of a company that went from start-up to mammoth. For a person like myself who only observed the Internet boom and did not actively participate, PayPal Wars was intriguing from start to finish. I would recommend it to any reader.

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Summary: Must-read for PayPal mgmt
Review: 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.

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Summary: Amazing Story
Review: Who knew that Paypal, the online paying service, had such a story? This book gives you a first-hand view of what really happened at Paypal, and is an amazing story of silicon valley startups and entrepreneurship that parallels the Pirates of Silicon Valley (story of bill gates vs steve jobs). I give it 5 stars, and I'm getting a few copies for friends and family for Christmas!