there's no need even to have a college degree at all or even high school the um i mean if somebody
graduated from a great university that may be an indeed that may be an indication that they will be
capable of great things but it's not necessarily the case you know if you look at say people like
bill gates larry ellison steve jobs these guys didn't graduate from college so you know just
looking just for evidence of exceptional ability and if there's a track record of
exceptional achievement then it's likely that that will continue into the future
um i think certainly being focused on something that you're confident will have
high value to someone else and just being really rigorous in making that
assessment because people are attend tend to a natural human tendency is wishful thinking
so a challenge for entrepreneurs is to say well what's the difference between really believing
in your ideals and sticking sticking to them versus pursuing some unrealistic dream that
doesn't actually have merit and it's it's that is a that is a really difficult thing to to tell
you can you tell the difference between those two things you know so you need to be sort of
very rigorous um in your self self analysis um i think certainly extremely tenacious
and then just work like hell i mean you just have to put in you know 80 hour 80 to 100 hour
weeks every week that all those things improve the odds of success i mean if if other people
are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you're putting in 100 hour work weeks then even if
you're doing the same thing you know that in in one year you will achieve what they achieve
you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve when i was young i i
i didn't really know what i was going to do when i got older people kept asking me and and but
but then eventually i thought that the idea of inventing things would be would be really cool
and the reason i thought that was because um i i read a quote from author c clock which
said that a um efficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and and that's
really true um if you think if you go back say 300 years the things that we take for granted today
uh would be you'd be burned at the stake for um you know being able to fly um that's crazy
uh being able to see over long distances being able to communicate having um effectively uh
with with the internet a a a group mind of sorts um and having access to all the world's
information instantly from almost anywhere on the earth this is this is stuff that that really
would be magic it would be considered magic in times past in fact i think it actually goes
beyond that because there are many things that we take for granted today that weren't even imagined
in times past they weren't even in the realm of magic so that it actually goes goes beyond
that so i thought well you know if if i can do some of those things basically if i can
advance technology then that that's like magic and that would be really cool um and the the
i also had sort of a slight existential crisis because i was trying to figure out
what does it all mean like what's the purpose of things and um i came to the conclusion that if if
we can advance the the the knowledge of the world if we can do things that expand the scope and
and scale of consciousness then we're better able to ask the right questions and become more
enlightened and and that's really the only way forward and and i think maybe it's helpful to
say one of the things that was important then in the creation of paypal
was which was kind of how it started because initially the initial thought
was with paypal was to create an agglomeration of financial services so to have one place where
all your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and um and and work smoothly
and then we had like a little feature which was to do email payments um and whenever we'd show
that show the system off to someone i would show the hard part which was the um the agglomeration
of financial services which was quite difficult to put together nobody was interested then we'd show
people email payments which was actually quite easy and everybody was interested
so this is uh i think it's important to to take feedback from your environment
you know it's it you want to be as closed loop as possible um and uh it's so we focus on email
payments and really try to make that work and and that's what really got things to take off um
but if we hadn't if we hadn't responded to what people said then we would we probably would not
have been successful so it's important to look for things like that and and focus on them when when
you when you see them and you correct your prior assumptions so i actually went to i went to russia
three times to look at buying um a refurbished icbm because that that was the best deal
and uh i can tell you it was very weird going there in 2000 late 2001 2002 going to the russian
rocket forces and saying i'd like to buy two of your biggest rockets but you can keep the nuke
that's a lot more um and uh it was that was 10 years ago i guess so
um they they they they thought i was crazy but but i did have money so that was that was okay
uh and aft after making several trips to to russia i came to conclusion that that actually uh
my initial impression was was wrong about uh because my initial thought was well that
that there's not enough will to explore and expand beyond earth and have a mars base and that kind of
thing but i can't conclusion that that was wrong um in fact there's plenty of will particularly in
the united states because the united states is a nation of explorers of people who came here from
from other parts of the world i think the united states is really a distillation of the spirit of
human exploration so um but if people think it's impossible then oh it's going to completely break
the federal budget then they're not going to do it so after my third trip i said okay
what we really need to do here is try to solve the space transport problem and uh and started spacex
and this this was against the advice of pretty much everyone i talked to um one friend made me
sit down and watch a bunch of videos of rockets blowing up um let me tell you he wasn't far wrong
uh i think it was it was tough going there in the beginning uh because i'd never built
anything physical i mean i built like little model rockets as a kid and that kind of thing but um
i'd never had a company that built anything physical so i'd kind of figure out how to
how to do all these things and and bring together the right team of people and
um and and so we we did all that and and then failed three times um it it was tough
tough going um because thing about a rocket is that the the passing grade is a hundred percent uh
and uh you don't get to actually test the rocket in the real environment that it's going to be in
so i think so the best analogy for for rocket engineering is it's like if you
want to create a really complicated bit of software you could you can't run the
software as an integrated hole and you can't run it on the computer it's intended to run on
but the first time you put it all together and run it on that computer it must run with no bugs
that's that's basically the essence of it i think a lot of people think i must spend a lot of time
with media or on businessy things but actually almost almost all my time like 80 of it is spent
on engineering design in engineering and design so it's um developing next generation product
at that's eighty percent of it um but um i i think the the the overarching point i wanna make
is that um you guys are the magicians of the 21st century you know don't let anything hold you back
imagination is the limit and go out there and create some magic
you