The Paypal Wars

An Insider's View of the World's Leading Online Payment Service Fifty-six million people use PayPal to send and receive money through the Internet, but few of them know how close the popular payments service once came to destruction.
During your interview, Internet and marketing guru Eric M. Jackson tells an amazing story of the meteoric rise of the creative financial giant and how it survived and became a household name against all odds.As PalPal's first senior U.S. marketing director., Eric chronicles the early roots of the company including how the dotcom's first year of operation was rocked by three CEO changes, challenged by fierce competition from startups and banks, and saddled with a broken business model that was bleeding tens of thousands of dollars daily. To make matters even worse, eBay opened up its own payment service and became PayPal's top competitor overnight. But wait, there's more...

In Eric's new book entitled THE PAYPAL WARS: BATTLES WITH EBAY, THE MEDIA, THE MAFIA, AND THE REST OF PLANET EARTH (World Ahead Publishing, www.paypalwars.com), Eric documents challenges he and the PayPal team encountered including their battle with the Mafia who used stolen credit numbers and foreign crime rings to charge millions of dollars through PayPal and transferring the ill-gotten gains to bank accounts, sticking PayPal on the hook for their massive bill. 

Now a subsidiary of eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY), PayPal survived its early woes to become the first dot-com to issue an initial public offering, or IPO, following the terrorist attacks on 9-11. Soon the new public company faced multiple class action lawsuits and even had New York's aggressive attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, investigating its business practices.

The modern business environment turned out to be more hostile than even our fiercest competitor and the Russian Mafia was nothing compared to American regulators. It's miraculous that PayPal is around today given the odds we faced, concludes Jackson.

Having faced such a myriad of challenges at PayPal, Eric Jackson is able to share with your audience business success tips and pitfalls they should avoid.

ABOUT ERIC M. JACKSON

A former Silicon Valley businessman and an outspoken advocate of free markets, Eric Jackson is the chairman of World Ahead Publishing and serves on the boards of advisors for The Stanford Review and Vanguard PAC. Eric earned an economics degree with honors from Stanford University. Mr. Jackson has made numerous appearances on talk radio programs across the country, and he has been quoted in articles by Reuters, US News & World Report, among other publications. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The PayPal Wars was honored by USA Book News as one of the top business books in its Best Books 2004 awards. The Laissez Faire Book Club praised its suspenseful narrative, Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute hailed it as inspiring, and The Washington Times called it an absorbing insider's story.National Review contributor Michael New says "you'll be amazed by PayPal's death-defying origins."AuctionBytes calls the book intense from cover to cover.
 
ABOUT WORLD AHEAD PUBLISHING

World Ahead is a California-based publisher with a growing coterie of authors who advocate individual liberty and free markets.  World Ahead believes that freedom is the inalienable right of all human beings but the spread of liberty is by no means a foregone conclusion. To that end, World Ahead seeks to publish thought-provoking books that explore the significant issues facing the nation and the world.

Suggested Questions for Eric Jackson, author of THE PAYPAL WARS:

1.     For those of us who are unfamiliar with the Internet, what is PayPal?

2.     Most people know of PayPal as the way to make payments for eBay auctions. Was that always the vision for what PayPal would do?

3.     Before joining PayPal you were working for an "old economy" company. Can you describe what it was like coming out of that environment and going to work for a high tech startup?

4.     Unlike many business books that only focus on strategy, yours spends a good deal of time describing the people behind the company. Why did you decide to do that?

5.     Why did you choose the title The PayPal Wars?

6.     The subtitle of your book is Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth. EBay owns PayPal now, so why did you include them on this list of battles?

7.     Speaking of PayPals fierce competition with eBay, can you tell us about the time that you literally crashed their party?

8.     Your subtitle also mentions the Mafia. Is that just a joke? Did the Mafia actually come after PayPal?

9.     Can you give us a specific example of the Mafia problems that PayPal had?

10.  In February 2002, PayPal was in the process of becoming the first dot-com to hold an initial public offering (IPO) since 9/11. Things seemed to be going along smoothly, and then suddenly everything went wrong. Can you describe that for us?

11.  In the introduction to The PayPal Wars you praise something called "creative destruction." What does that mean?

12.  In the book you make the case that while PayPal ultimately succeeded as a business, its experience shows that American entrepreneurship is at risk. What kind of risk?

  20th-century evils, Silicon Valley wars

 By Arnold Beichman

February 13, 2005
    Eric M. Jackson's The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia and the Rest of the Planet Earth (World Ahead, $27.95, 344 pages) is an absorbing insider's story about two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel, a California hedge fund manager, and Max Levchin, a Ukrainian engineer, who six years ago launched an online payment Web site called Pay Pal. Every School of Business ought to put this book on its must reading list because it is "case history" analysis at its best.

    Pay Pal, miraculously survived the dot.com bust, a bitter battle with eBay, the auction giant, government regulators, trial lawyers, organized crime rings. In the process PayPal became so profitable that its officers, including the author of this hair-raising memoir, became millionaires. This is not exactly a "rags to riches" yarn but it's pretty close.
    
    Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for the Washington Times.

If you would like to interview Erick Jackson, Call Lloyd Carpenter
at: 626 791 1896  also see all our guests at: http://www.777radio.com