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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.

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.

Technology has come a long way since PayPal.

There's the classic charitable contribution, which we receive thousands, and we're extremely grateful and they often come with notes from people, which are very heartwarming, about how much difference our products have made in their life on the Internet.

People wanna give you a $5 contribution online, but they have a million other things to do. But getting them to just sit still for 45 seconds and go in there and make the donation is, like, the hardest thing in the world.

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.

When the Haiti earthquake happened, I registered with UNICEF to set up an account, and posted to Twitter for people to donate to it. In a matter of a couple of hours, $30,000 had been donated. That, to me, was eye-opening.

It's amazing how people will give when you don't ask. Many of them send money because they believe in the message.

We had a mission at PayPal - which was to create a new financial system, a new world currency, and we failed. We were a financial success, but we didn't succeed at the purpose of our company.

The Internet Treasure companies tend to go public rather than get acquired, although there are clear exceptions, like Instagram, YouTube, Skype and PayPal.