This article is an excellent read for those interested in creating a better business. Worth re-posting the entire article:

Source = Primitus

Why did so many successful entrepreneurs and startups come out of PayPal? I long have been fascinated by the extraordinary achievement from the ex-Paypal team and wonder about the reasons behind their success. In the past, mass media tried to answer this question several times but still couldn’t give us a clear answer.

I once asked David Sacks the same question during an event in Los Angeles. He told me the secret is that Paypal has built a “scrappy” culture. No matter what problems they faced, they would find a way to solve them. I kind of got the idea, but was still confused about the execution details.

So when I saw some of the past Paypal employees answering this question on Quora, I was super excited! After all, they should be the only ones who can tell people the inside stories.

Below are some highlights of their answers. *If you want to check out the sources or leave your comments, please go to here and here.

On Talent Management
“Peter and Max assembled an unusual critical mass of entrepreneurial talent, primarily due to their ability to recognize young people with extraordinary ability (the median age of *execs* on the S1 filing was 30). But the poor economy allowed us to close an abnormal number of offers, as virtually nobody other than eBay and (in part) google was hiring in 2000-02.” (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal)

“Extreme Focus (driven by Peter): Peter required that everyone be tasked with exactly one priority. He would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your #1 initiative. Even our annual review forms in 2001 required each employee to identify their single most valuable contribution to the company.” (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal)

“Dedication to individual accomplishment: Teams were almost considered socialist institutions. Most great innovations at PayPal were driven by one person who then conscripted others to support, adopt, implement the new idea. If you identified the 8-12 most critical innovations at PayPal (or perhaps even the most important 25), almost every one had a single person inspire it (and often it drive it to implementation). As a result, David enforced an anti-meeting culture where any meeting that included more than 3-4 people was deemed suspect and subject to immediate adjournment if he gauged it inefficient. Our annual review forms in 2002 included a direction to rate the employee on “avoids imposing on others’ time, e.g. scheduling unnecessary meetings.” (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal)

“Refusal to accept constraints, external or internal:We were expected to pursue our #1 priority with extreme dispatch (NOW) and vigor. To borrow an apt phrase, employees were expected to “come to work every day willing to be fired, to circumvent any order aimed at stopping your dream.” Jeremy Stoppelman has relayed elsewhere the story about an email he sent around criticizing management that he expected to get him fired and instead got him promoted. Peter did not accept no for answer: If you couldn’t solve the problem, someone else would be soon assigned to do it.” (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal)

“Driven problem solvers: PayPal had a strong bias toward hiring (and promoting / encouraging, as Keith mentions) smart, driven problem solvers, rather than subject matter experts. Very few of the top performers at the company had any prior experience with payments, and many of the best employees had little or no prior background building Internet products. I worked on the fraud analytics team at PayPal, and most of our best people had never before done anything related to fraud detection. If he’d approached things “traditionally”, Max would have gone out and hired people who had been building logistic regression models for banks for 20 years but never innovated, and fraud losses would likely have swallowed the company.” (by Mike Greenfield, former Sr. Fraud R&D Scientist of Paypal)

“Self-sufficiency – individuals and small teams were given fairly complex objectives and expected to figure out how to achieve them on their own. If you needed to integrate with an outside vendor, you picked up the phone yourself and called; you didn’t wait for a BD person to become available. You did (the first version of) mockups and wireframes yourself; you didn’t wait for a designer to become available. You wrote (the first draft of) site copy yourself; you didn’t wait for a content writer.” (by Yee Lee, former Product & BU GM of Paypal)

On Culture & Ideology
“Extreme bias towards action – early PayPal was simply a really *productive* workplace. This was partly driven by the culture of self-sufficiency. PayPal is and was, after all, a web service; and the company managed to ship prodigious amounts of relatively high-quality web software for a lot of years in a row early on. Yes, we had the usual politics between functional groups, but either individual heroes or small, high-trust teams more often than not found ways to deliver projects on-time.” (by Yee Lee, former Product & BU GM of Paypal)

“Willingness to try – even in a data-driven culture, you’ll always run in to folks who either don’t believe you have collected the right supporting data for a given decision or who just aren’t comfortable when data contradicts their gut feeling. In many companies, those individuals would be the death of decision-making. At PayPal, I felt like you could almost always get someone to give it a *try* and then let performance data tell us whether to maintain the decision or rollback.” (by Yee Lee, former Product & BU GM of Paypal)

“Data-driven decision making – PayPal was filled with smart, opinionated people who were often at logger-heads. The way to win arguments was to bring data to bear. So you never started a sentence like this “I feel like it’s a problem that our users can’t do X”, instead you’d do your homework first and then come to the table with “35% of our [insert some key metric here] are caused by the lack of X functionality…” (by Yee Lee, former Product & BU GM of Paypal)

“Radical transparency on metrics: All employees were expected to be facile with the metrics driving the business. Otherwise, how could one expect each employee to make rational calculations and decisions on their own every day? To enforce this norm, almost every all-hands meeting consisted of distributing a printed Excel spreadsheet to the assembled masses and Peter conducting a line by line review of our performance (this is only a modest exaggeration).” (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal)

“Vigorous debate, often via email: Almost every important issue had champions and critics. These were normally resolved not by official edict but by a vigorous debate that could be very intense. Being able to articulate and defend a strategy or product in a succinct, compelling manner with empirical analysis and withstand a withering critique was a key attribute of almost every key contributor. I still recall the trepidation I confronted when I was informed that I needed to defend the feasibility of my favorite “baby” to Max for the first time.” (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal)

“Extreme Pressure – PayPal was a very difficult business with many major issues to solve. We were able to see our colleagues work under extreme pressure and hence we learned who we could rely on and trust.” (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal)

UN 'to Seek' End to CIA Drone Raids

U.N. Biodiversity Plan Demands Voice for Women :: "Women provide up to 90 percent of the rural poor's food and produce up to 80 percent of food in most developing countries, and yet they are almost completely ignored when policy decisions are made about agriculture and biodiversity."

Who's In Charge, China or Nigeria? :: "For some, the rapid growth of China's presence in Africa has been disquieting. Beijing is not always helpful where it has political influence. It occasionally colludes with corrupt and abusive governments, and its thirst for natural resources has raised the specter of a second “scramble for Africa.”"

Why Talking to Yourself Might be The Highest Form of Intelligence

Fast-tracking: Alternatives to college. How Zoho's internal program finds talent outside universities. :: "Sridhar's efforts at Zoho and their development center in Madras tell us something about how to develop a 21st century workforce by tapping into those who would not normally go to college. In short, his answer is not to prepare them for college but to prepare them to be productive in the workplace -- and to do that preparation in the workplace."

FTC: Scammers Stole Millions Using Micro Charges to Credit Cards

An Unexpected Apple Ally: Porn Industry to Drop Flash :: HTML5 is the new standard...bye bye Flash?

This is a great article over on Smashing Magazine - How to permanently delete your account on popular websites.

These sites are discussed:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• MySpace
• LinkedIn
• Google
• Ebay
• Wikipedia
• Flickr/Yahoo
• Windows Live
• Stubleupon
• Wordpress
• Amazon
• YouTube
• Paypal

The secret life of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange

Tiny dot speeds hi-tech future: 7-atom transistor

'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists: Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA.

Quantum teleportation achieved over 16 km

Source = Psyorg

Read the note here - Wikinews

"My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early ‘80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the “best”, high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the “big boys” were doing (except that we weren’t steeling [sic] from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done."

"The significance of independence, however, came much later during my early years of college; at the age of 18 or 19 when I was living on my own as student in an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My neighbor was an elderly retired woman (80+ seemed ancient to me at that age) who was the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on.

In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time. When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be “healthier” eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn’t quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself."

Campaign Case May Have Set Course for Supreme Court - by Joan Biskupic
WASHINGTON - As the Supreme Court nears the midpoint of its annual term and prepares to hear several momentous cases, one question looms: Will the justices' split decision reversing past rulings and allowing new corporate spending in political races set the tone for the term, or will Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission be an exception?
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Noam Chomsky: Iran Pursuing Nuclear Weapons Out of Fear
Scholar assails U.S. for hypocritical application of Non-Proliferation Treaty
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Why The US Occupation Makes Iraqi Women Miss Saddam - by Abdu Rahman and Dahr Jamail
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FCC loses key ruling on Internet `neutrality'
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Federal IT pros say U.S. at high risk for cyberattack

Source = Reuters

ROFL - Somebody forgot to hide that charge!

Here is how you do it:

You have to start by imagining how the human mind works. Works with information. For those on the upper level of intelligence..they can take in all that information and analyze it in the most different ways and forms, so much so, that it Brain) comes to an impressive summization = "concept". So it takes the BEST conclusion out of HUGE amounts of collected data. "Concepts" that are created and can be triggered when necessary to remember the multiple-levels of information and analysis.

So, open source, you get FREEDOM for anyone to see code and code with it...creating in essence the BEST systems currently possible. So, you get a system that can collect and analyze all open source "content", so quickly and efficiently, that it can create these "concept" programs that can be used as powerful tools.

The trick is to find the BEST code of ALL code .. together code .. translated/combined ... very efficiently by creating a DB System that is simple ... simple .. clean. simple code .. ref the concept, use it

The U.S. is so *blind*... because of new laws, sourceforge.net is blocked from sharing content with Iran...and others on the government's LIST. Get this: BY I.P. Address....what a joke. All this political B.S. is dragging this country down. Human Society suffers when anyone stifles creativity and collaboration and diversity.

--/ BRAINDUMP --\

And it is time this country started working together ... all the *bickering* greedy bastards in control still. Huge Fight inside of things... Country has suffered enough expense of their ways. JUST SAY NO is the chant apparently still...how many years can they hold on! haha LOL. Glad to see some dirty Democrats getting challenged too (hopefully "overthrown", ha). LIttle push their way