Elon Musk on the most important lesson he learned at PayPal

One of the things that was important then in the creation of PayPal was kind of how it started, because initially the initial thought with PayPal was to create an agglomeration of financial services, so you have one place where all of your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and work smoothly. And then we had like a little feature which was to do email payments. And whenever we'd show the system off to someone, we'd show the hard part, which was 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, I think it's important to take feedback from your environment. You want to be as closed loop as possible. And so we focused on email payments and really try to make that work. And that's what really got things to take off. But if we hadn't responded to what people said, then we probably would not have been successful. So it's important to look for things like that and focus on them when you see them and correct your prior assumptions.