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Elon Musk Built the Hard Thing at PayPal. Nobody Cared. Then He Built the Easy Thing.

By Elon Musk · Leadership · 1 min read

PayPal's big vision was a financial services aggregation. Nobody was interested. The tiny email payment feature — which was easy to build — got everyone excited.

Key Points

PayPal started as an aggregation of all financial services — nobody was interested
The simple email payments feature got all the excitement
Take feedback from your environment — be as closed-loop as possible

We'd show people the hard part. Nobody was interested. We'd show email payments. Everybody was interested.

The Hard Part Nobody Wanted

Musk: The initial thought with PayPal was to create an agglomeration of financial services. One place where all your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and work smoothly. Then we had a little feature which was to do email payments.

Whenever we'd show the system off to someone, we'd show the hard part — the agglomeration of financial services, which was quite difficult to put together. Nobody was interested. Then we'd show people email payments, which was actually quite easy. And everybody was interested.

We'd show the hard part. Nobody was interested. We'd show email payments. Everybody was interested.

Be Closed-Loop

Musk: I think it's important to take feedback from your environment. You want to be as closed-loop as possible. So we focused on email payments and really tried to make that work. That's what got things to take off.

If we hadn't responded to what people said, we probably would not have been successful. It's important to look for things like that and focus on them when you see them. And correct your prior assumptions.

Take feedback from your environment. You want to be as closed-loop as possible.