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If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done.

Elon Musk with PayPal revolutionized banking.

Technologies like PayPal foster competition because they enable people to shift their funds from one jurisdiction to another, and I think that ultimately will lead to a world in which there's less government power and therefore more individual control.

I often talk about the PayPal mafia out of San Francisco, people that were in PayPal and got out of PayPal and continue to reinvest in other start-ups and create a huge pay-it-forward type of network there.

The moment we put up the PayPal button, some guy donated $300. That's when we realized that if you give somebody a chance to support something on the Internet, they'll do it.

Nowadays people talk about PayPal's founders as prescient geniuses who would inevitably change the world. It was, however, not so obvious that PayPal would taste its first major success by helping people sell Beanie Babies on eBay. But they had a vision, a hope, and the perseverance to try multiple iterations until they got it right.

One of the things we did at PayPal was collaborative filtering and machine learning: looking at patterns of human behavior. We used it there to predict when people would try to cheat the system to get money. But you can predict pretty much any behavior with a certain amount of accuracy.

Well, another market is being created now out of Internet technology.

Trade on the Internet is becoming very widespread. The problem is our laws have not caught up with electronic commerce.

To bring out a new technology for consumers first, you just had a very long road to go down to try to find people who actually would pay money for something.