Peter Thiel's comments on the a16z podcast, highlighting the ambitious American tech companies.

In early March 2000, we merged Confinity and X, the latter being a company founded by Elon Musk. At that time, PayPal was made up of me and Max Levchin. The merged company had 15 million dollars in the bank. Due to a referral program, new registered users could receive 10 dollars, and the referring registered users could also receive 10 dollars, resulting in exponential growth of our customer base. This meant a customer acquisition cost of 20 dollars. The customer base grew at a compound growth rate of 5% to 7% per day, reaching 100,000 users by February 3, 2000, and 1 million by mid-April 2000. However, this exponentially growing customer base was matched by an exponentially growing burn rate, as we had no revenue and, of course, no profit. The CFO projected that the 15 million dollars would be exhausted in about six weeks.