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Consider the example of PayPal. While PayPal was a great success, the company was badly managed—and I write that statement as one of its senior managers. We did a few good things, such as making sure that every employee had a clear primary job and staying focused when working on certain important p…

This means talking with other smart people, often, so that you can learn from their successes and failures. It’s usually easier and less painful to learn from another’s mistakes than from your own. When I need to learn about a new subject, I’ll definitely devour some books on the topic, but I almos…

One of the key ways to assess whether you’re being an ethical pirate or a sociopath is to ask, “Am I trying to change the rules for everyone, or just trying to get away with a personal exemption?” At PayPal, we broke the rules, but we did so because we were working toward a better set of rules for …

The reality is that many start-ups are like pirates: they lack formal processes and are willing to question and even break rules. This flexibility is critical in the early stages of building a great company. Pirates don’t convene a committee meeting to decide what to do when an enemy ship is appr…

You’re also adding qualitatively different kinds of people to the team. One metaphor I use to explain this shift is to take yet another analogy from military history: the marines take the beach, the army takes the country, and the police govern the country. Marines are start-up people who are used …