At PayPal, the YouTube founders had a reputation as more of the B team.

Graham: That was my first introduction to something that turns out to be a very important lesson for startups: it's never a deal till the money's in the bank. So many things can go wrong with deals, and they all do. Before we ultimately got bought by Yahoo, we probably had nine or ten different acquirers that we were talking to, and things always w

Three senior executives recall meeting privately in a conference room that year to write a list of all of Bezos’s successes and failures on a whiteboard. The latter column included Auctions, zShops, the investments in other dot-coms, and most of Amazon’s acquisitions. It was far longer than the first column, which at that time appeared to be limite