Scarce Skills

Max Levchin was really into security and developing software for handheld devices. It was a scarce skill combination in the 1990s. He described these skills as “sort of an art and science unto its own.” His assumption was that enterprises would build and use handheld devices as their primary communication — pretty right today. The demand for cryptographic-type operations was growing too complex and poorly understood at the time. No one really wanted to dig deep into it because of this, but Max started reverse-engineering what existed. He wanted to combine his scarce skills to start a company encrypting handheld devices. Those niche skills were what birthed the beginning days of PayPal. All developed based on a hypothesis for how the world would move.