Startup Korean Quotes

In Korean Zen, the belief that it is good to branch out beyond what we already know is expressed in a phrase that means, literally, “not know mind.” To have a “not know mind” is a goal of creative people. It means you are open to the new, just as children are. Similarly, in Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called “beginner’s mind.” And people practice for years to recapture and keep ahold of it. When a new company is formed, its founders must have a startup mentality—a beginner’s mind, open to everything because, well, what do they have to lose? (This is often something they later look back upon wistfully.) But when that company becomes successful, its leaders often cast off that startup mentality because, they tell themselves, they have figured out what to do. They don’t want to be beginners anymore. That may be human nature, but I believe it is a part of our nature that should be resisted. By resisting the beginner’s mind, you make yourself more prone to repeat yourself than to create something new. The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely.

On February 16, 2000, the Wall Street Journal ran a story lauding our viral growth and suggesting that PayPal was worth $500 million. When we raised $100 million the next month, our lead investor took the Journal’s back-of-the-envelope valuation as authoritative. (Other investors were in even more of a hurry. A South Korean firm wired us $5 million without first negotiating a deal or signing any documents. When I tried to return the money, they wouldn’t tell me where to send it.)

To me, we had to infuse the subconscious of every reporter and every insider that Mike’s victory was so inevitable that predicting—or trying to bring about—anything else would only make them look foolish. This was a campaign where perception not only had to shape reality, it had to control it. That started with a plan that produced some derision but ultimately succeeded, especially with the reporters mocking us for it. It seemed a little crazy at the time: an endorsement every single day, seven days a week, from the day we launched the campaign in late March through Election Day. It didn’t matter who the endorser was: Sometimes it meant global figures like Al Gore, Colin Powell, or Bono, and sometimes it was hyperlocal organizations like the Korean Grocers Association. What mattered was that it never, ever stopped—that every single day, the big, bad, overwhelmingly powerful Bloomberg campaign machine was sweeping up support from every corner of the city.