Sorry I annoy you, but that’s how I roll in these videos and am sticking to it. It is meant to be a conversation and I am sorry you don’t like my style.

But I will try to stop saying “right” as it is a bad habit.

The constant “right … right … Myspace …. right” did not add to but rather subtracted from the interview.

Peter Thiel was intersting to hear. Unfortunately, in addition to the background track of “right, right,” he was interrupted several times to respond to snarky observations which were mostly off target.

Although may I offer some constructive criticism?

You (and many other interviewers) have any annoying habit of interrupting your subjects responses, cutting them off mid-sentence, showing a little lack of respect for your subjects point of view.

I know, starbux and tight deadlines, make for a need to keep things moving forward, but harried and interruptive, does not make for a good interview(er)

While your information is always great, topical and right on target…sometimes your (mid-response) commentary moves us (the audience) alway from your subject and topic (our interests) and onto your personal opinions, and sometimes that message gets muddled.

Otherwise its a pleasure to read your articles.
FWIW

@Marek: you’ve got a few errors there, and you’re also missing the point.

PayPal & X.com merged, and while Elon certainly brought a lot of capital to the table, PayPal also had many assets as well (i believe the deal was a 55-45 almost merger of equals, with X getting the slightly larger stake). In hindsight, PayPal’s business model & payments infrastructure were likely the more beneficial factor to the company’s later success, rather than X.com’s banking model, Elon’s other contributions notwithstanding.

Furthermore, given the many payment companies in the space, don’t you think more credit should be given to the company that survived, made money, & eventually dominated the space over any of the earlier entrants? As they say, excellence is all about 2% inspiration & 98% perspiration.

I think the does of reality goes more like this: PayPal was both innovative & practical, and changed its business model several times to eventually become the leader in the space. Other companies failed to match them, and fell by the wayside. Peter along with others at PayPal deserves a hell of lot of credit for guiding the company to its eventual IPO & acquisition.

- dave mcclure

Quite some time before PayPal changed course and got into the eBAY payment world, both Billpoint (which eBAY bought) and BidPay had long established relationships with eBAY and were offering ewallet type payments.

PayPal was the late bloomer to the game and ‘claimed’ for themselves the title of ‘orignal online payment service’. Using what was left of that massive investment for BEAMING MONEY they sent $10 to anybody who would sign up for a PayPal account and the original service was extremely cash flow negative with major operational problems.

So Facebook, being the what 50th social networking site to come along now becomes ‘original’.

Like I said, he’s a nice guy and quite good at what he does but a does of reality never hurt anybody either.