One of the fundamental lessons I learned from Peter Thiel at PayPal was the value of focus. And Peter had this somewhat absurd but classically Peter way of insisting on focus which is that he would only allow every employee to work on one thing and every executive to speak about one thing at a time. He distributed this focus throughout the entire organization so everybody was assigned exactly one thing and that was the only thing you're allowed to work on, the only thing you're allowed to report back to him about.

My top initiatives shifted around over the years, but I'll give you a few. One was initially a Visa/Mastercard really hated us. We were operating at the edge of their rules at the time, and my number one problem was to stop Mastercard particularly, but Visa a bit, from killing us. And so, until I had that that risk taken off the table, Peter didn't want to hear about any of my other ideas.

And then, once we put Visa/Mastercard into a pretty stable place, then eBay also wanted to kill us. Wasn't very happy with us processing 70% of the payments on their platform, so that was my my next problem.

Then 9/11 happened in the U.S Treasury Department promulgated regulations which would have required us, among other things, to collect social security numbers from all of our buyers, which would have suppressed our payment volumes substantially. So then my number one initiative became convincing the treasury department to not promulgate these regulations right post 9/11.

At some point we also needed to diversify our revenue off of eBay, so that became another initiative for me that one I did not solve that well, which somewhat led to us eventually agreeing to be acquired. I had another uh number one problem which was there's this publication called the Red Herring had published this on set of unflattering articles about us, and how to fix that and rebuild the communications team.

So Peter would constantly just assign me new things. He didn't like the terms of our financial services relationship with the vendors that we were using, so I took on that team and fixed the economics of those relationships, et cetera, et cetera, but they were not done in parallel. They're basically sequential.

The reason why this was such a successful strategy is that most people, perhaps all people, tend to substitute from a plus problems that are very difficult, very difficult to solve, to b plus problems which you know a solution to or you know a pat you understand a path to solve.

So you have a checklist every morning. Imagine waking up a lot of people write checklists of things to accomplish. Most people have an a plus problem but they don't know the solution, so they procrastinate on that solution and then they go down the checklist to the second or third initiative where they know the answer and they'll go solve those problems and cross them all off.

The problem is if your entire organization is always solving the second, third, or fourth most important thing, you never solve the first. And so Peter's technique of forcing people to only work on one thing meant everybody had to work on the a-plus problems.

And if every part of the organization once in a while can solve a problem that the rest of the world thinks is impossible, you wind up with an iconic company that the world's never seen before.