Too Long; Didn't Read
PayPal is one of the companies that built the startup playbook of the last decades. The company built a valuable company in an industry where the Internet was not necessarily a native technology. The first killer commercial applications comprised browsing, searching, media, and e-commerce. The story of PayPal has so many turns of events, that seem so improbable it survived in the first place, in hindsight. We can argue that PayPal (and a few other companies of the early Internet) built what we call today "a startup"