by Rod D. Martin and Joe Theismann
January 13, 2015
Rod’s interview with Super Bowl-winning quarterback Joe Theismann. Rod talks PayPal, innovation and the decades ahead.
Transcript
[00:00] Joe Theismann: Hi, I’m Joe Theismann, world champion quarterback and entrepreneur, and I have the pleasure to be able to sit and visit with Rod Martin. And Rod, you have such an interesting background in technology. Tell us, first of all, how it started with PayPal.
[00:14] Rod D. Martin: Well, Peter Thiel gave me a call one day. I was doing other things, completely other things, and got a chance to go out and be part of all the start of that. I was part of the startup team before the IPO, and then during the IPO, and then after we merged with eBay. We went from zero to 25 million customers in two and a half years and created several million entrepreneurs in the process. It was pretty exciting.
[00:39] Joe Theismann: Was it just that particular time that you were afforded the opportunity to be able to grow the business that quickly? Or was it what you were doing combined with that particular period?
[00:51] Rod D. Martin: Oh, that period was the worst. We, you know, right before it, you’d had Yahoo shooting the moon and everything else. We were in the middle of the bust. We were getting headlines like Earth to Palo Alto trying to tell us we were insane, and the Internet was a scam, and it was all going away in a few years. Don’t give these people your money. But we built a multibillion-dollar company with a staff that had an average age of 23.
[01:17] Joe Theismann: Was that part of the reason why you were able to be successful? Because of the youth of your staff? They didn’t know any better. I mean, their whole life was ahead of them. Okay, if this didn’t make it, so what? Whereas if you had an older group of engineers and technical people, they might say, eh, I’m not sure. Was it the youthful enthusiasm that drove the company?
[01:38] Rod D. Martin: That’s absolutely correct. This was a bunch of people who didn’t know they could fail, and they worked every moment of every day like they could. I knew people who slept in their cubicles two days straight and just got up and kept going, and it was an amazing place. But, yes, the youthful vitality was key.
[01:56] Joe Theismann: I love that phrase, they didn’t know they couldn’t fail. It’s so apropos to so many different elements of people that want to accomplish something. I think society and people in general tend to focus on the failing aspect of a project, as opposed to the fact that this group that you were with, you were a part of, heck, we’re going to be successful. That’s the way it’s going to be. It’s like when I went to the University of Notre Dame. I was one of 13 quarterbacks.
[02:27] Joe Theismann: I was 5’10”, 152 pounds. And there were all these studs, 6’2”, 6’3”. And I wrote down on a piece of paper, and I put it in my dresser, I will be the best quarterback ever to play at Notre Dame. Now, it may have been a pipe dream to a lot of people, and whether I was or not really didn’t matter. It was basically, I didn’t think I was ever going to fail. It’s such a great idea. Is it lost on the youth, that attitude, or do you see it carry over into later stages of life?
[02:59] Rod D. Martin: Oh, I think it continues on. The PayPal group in particular is just amazing. Our crew, various members of our crew, many of them not very senior at PayPal, have started all these incredible things like YouTube. And Peter Thiel, for whom I worked, was the first money into Facebook. And just a thousand things. Elon Musk with SpaceX and Tesla Motors. And it’s been an incredible run the past 15 years as these people have really developed into all that God made them to be.
[03:33] Joe Theismann: Where does it go now? I mean, how much have we tapped the world of technology, and what is on the horizon?
[03:42] Rod D. Martin: Oh, we’re just at the beginning.
[03:43] Joe Theismann: Really?
[03:44] Rod D. Martin: I mean, we’re as though we’re in the early days of the Model T, and you can have any color you want as long as it’s black. We’re just beginning, and you’re going to see things in the next 20 years that boggle your mind.
[03:59] Joe Theismann: Like for instance?
[04:00] Rod D. Martin: Well, like for instance, we’re making incredible progress in biotech. Stanford has just done some research that has real promise for curing Alzheimer’s. And a company I’m very involved with is making great progress against liver and kidney fibrosis. We’re doing things in my companies in search technology that are really quite extraordinary. An entire new generation of software tools. And then you’re seeing things in aerospace that are just extraordinary.
[04:30] Rod D. Martin: Again, to mention Elon Musk. They’re doing things that are bringing down the cost per pound to orbit so dramatically, so quickly, so much different from the preceding 50 years, that our grandkids will travel to space as routinely as we travel back and forth across the continent.
[04:49] Joe Theismann: How many years before that happens?
[04:51] Rod D. Martin: Very quickly, actually, compared to what’s gone before. I mean, we’re at a stage not unlike that of the Wright brothers, really. And you’ll see this slow progression, and it’s going to be really neat, and you’re going to see this or that launch or whatever. And then one day, you’re going to be on the launch. And it’s going to be an extraordinary time.
[05:12] Joe Theismann: Is it because of the advanced technologies that are available in so many different elements of life and in the world? You talk about biotech and technology. It’s like it used to take 15, 20 years for something to happen. And then that was reduced to 10 to 15 years. And then it was reduced to 8 to 10 years. Now, the window of progression when it comes to technology and the advancements in it has been reduced to low single digits. Is that fair to look at it that way?
[05:49] Rod D. Martin: Certainly. Einstein is reputed to have said that there’s no more powerful force in the universe than compound interest. That’s kind of how this is working. It’s compound technology. But I have to emphasize, you don’t see this in other parts of the world. You see this in America because America is free. And if a 23-year-old or a 29-year-old or a 45-year-old wants to go out and just do something crazy and new, they have the liberty to do that. And they have capital markets that are built around that.
[06:20] Rod D. Martin: And they have an ability to pitch an idea that makes no sense and doesn’t seem to solve a problem that people feel a need for. But all of a sudden, it’s the most important thing in the world. You didn’t need an iPhone until it existed and you needed it desperately. And they say in just a few years, we’re going to have 5 billion smartphones in the world. You didn’t think about needing a polio vaccine until Jonas Salk invented it.
[06:49] Rod D. Martin: And we live in Destin, Florida. And you’ve got all that pretty white sand out there. It’s just amazing. The thing about technology and the thing I love about it and the thing that motivates me and my team and my companies to get up every day and do what we do is that sometime in the past, some conquistador landed on that coast and they saw that pretty white sand. And it was pretty, but it was useless. They couldn’t grow anything in it. You couldn’t build a house there because a hurricane would just smack it and you didn’t know when it was coming. But somebody saw that sand and they said, you know what?
[07:22] Rod D. Martin: I could make glass out of that. And then another guy comes along a little later and says, you know what? I could make glasses out of that or microscopes or telescopes. And then another guy comes along, a lot of times past, they say, hey, I could make a silicon wafer out of that. And pretty soon they have satellites up in space to predict the hurricanes. Somebody else comes along and says, well, now that we know how to get out of the way, let’s turn this into a beach resort. And every one of those things dramatically improved the human condition.
[07:53] Rod D. Martin: Every one of those things created untold sums of wealth that never existed before. Because wealth isn’t in the ground. Wealth is in the mind. And that’s what we do when we’re pursuing these technologies and when we’re building these companies. It’s not about the money, though the money’s fun. It’s about making the world better. It’s about giving poor kids, you know, like I grew up in a little bitty town in Arkansas. It’s about giving all those poor kids a chance to be everything God made them to be.
[08:23] Joe Theismann: What do you see as one of the great challenges for technology going forward?
[08:29] Rod D. Martin: The biggest challenge is really political more than any other. You know, government has to be willing to stay out of the way of innovation. And it has to be willing to let people fail. Too often, government tries to protect us from ourselves. Nobody was protecting the Wright brothers, you know. And if they crash that thing, they’re getting hurt. You know, you have to be able to fail. And we’re in a time when a lot of people want to protect everybody from any kind of failure.
[09:00] Rod D. Martin: That’s a disaster. Well, you’re out there on the football field. If people were trying to keep you from getting hurt, you couldn’t play. That’s the big thing.
[09:07] Joe Theismann: I think that is truly one of the biggest elements that we deal with is it seems like the government wants to, as you say, create the safety net for so many different industries and so many different types of people. That they’re afraid that if one element fails, there may be a domino effect into other areas. But that’s something we have to live with. I mean, that’s something we’ve lived with all our lives.
[09:26] Rod D. Martin: That’s how progress happens.
[09:27] Joe Theismann: Yeah. It’s sort of two steps forward, you know, somebody trips. And two more steps forward and somebody trips.
[09:33] Rod D. Martin: And sometimes you trip headlong into the future.
[09:37] Joe Theismann: What was, last question I have for you and then we’ll mosey on here and I appreciate the chance to be able to visit with you. What was the greatest hurdle for PayPal when it first started?
[09:48] Rod D. Martin: The biggest hurdle was really the climate at the time. You know, we were in that time when people didn’t believe in the Internet and they had been burned because they had just believed in it a lot. And you had a bunch of, you had a degree of negativity that was simply unparalleled in the history of this part of technology. And that was hard to overcome. But again, you believe in yourselves. You believe in what you’re doing. You believe that it will make a difference in the world.
[10:20] Rod D. Martin: That it will make people’s lives better. And you just persevere through the negativity. You just don’t let it get you down. We knew we had a winner. And we believed in it and we pursued it and it’s unquestionably one of the greatest things anybody ever created out there. I was really honored to get to be a small part of it.
[10:38] Joe Theismann: And it’s one of the simplest lessons that people can learn just to believe. Now, how would people get in touch with you?
[10:46] Rod D. Martin: Well, they can go to my website personally at RodMartin.org. And our companies are at MartinOrganization.com. And you ought to check us out. There’s an awful lot of good stuff going on there.
