a couple months after paypal's launch the confinity team discovered a strange phenomenon paypal's email payment service was being used by people who needed it for a site that they had never heard of ebay when max found out he looked up the site and was taken aback this is like a den of illicit commerce he exclaimed not realizing it was merely a site to auction any kind of item including collectibles antiques and furniture i need to block them from using paypal after several failed attempts peter asked max what he was working on max told them about the ebay users and complained they're like cockroaches you try to block them off and they keep coming in through a different entrance that's what's called a market poll peter responded all these people trying to pay online don't have anything better to use a market poll refers to a market demanding a particular product and in ebay's case buyers wanted an easier way to send payments to sellers since they had to mail checks before receiving their item in the mail when max and peter shared this realization with scott and reid they all agreed to only focus on paypal's email payments since palm pilot payments weren't growing at all soon after the confinity team realized paypal's pivot came too late ebay purchased an online credit card payment service billpoint to integrate into their site and compete with paypal and while there was no news of bill point expanding into online payments a direct rival entered the market dot bank like paypal dot bank allowed users to transfer money through email however the company also offered features that were on paypal's to-do list for quite some time a feature for generating an electronic invoice to request payment and another feature to request money from several people at once for things like splitting dinner bills with large groups get the dot bank features live on paypal before christmas peter instructed even though the holidays were less than a week away paypal's engineers willingly stepped up to the challenge they were committed to paypal for many reasons most personally knew max peter or the launch team and some dropped out of college to start working for paypal immediately they also believed that paypal would one day change the world and were willing to risk everything to make it happen paypal placed a high value on people who were not only talented but had that kind of tenacity meanwhile other tech companies like google cared more about people with phds we wanted kids who had nothing to lose who were going to go big or go home every time and basically think this is their final training ground max later revealed their next company is going to be their own two days after the challenge was set the confinity team discovered even more crushing news x an online financial services company pivoted into email payments and was giving every new user twenty dollars and another ten dollars for every user they referred the company also made it easy for users to refer others by providing a customized url the confinity team was taken aback they had once worked in the same building as x which was just down the street from its current office after confinity moved out x actually took over their old office it was likely hard for many to believe that x's pivot coincided with confinities but the decision was made before the two knew about each other nearly a year before paypal pivoted to email payments NUMBER_TOKEN year old stanford dropout elon musk funded x as an online financial services firm that would offer bank accounts email
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