YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Portnoy

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2022-06-15
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2022-06-15
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  1. “Feeling, yeah, the distance and the feeling. I wasn't even, yes, I was doing these bad things, but they couldn't be contributing to the distance because she doesn't know about them. I mean, that doesn't make any sense. Sounds ridiculous when I say it. But that's the narrative that was playing in my head. And so about six months after our daughter was born, maybe seven months, we were so far apart. I felt like I either need to quit my job or I'm going to get divorced. It was that clear. I decided I'm going to quit my job. And I don't want to get divorced. I'm going to quit my job. I'm going to try to, you know, turn this around. And I started working with a marriage therapist. She started talking to a marriage therapist. Then, you know, there was a bunch of different therapists in the mix. And then I wound up finding this life coach. But there's actually, there's.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “It changed about Six months after our daughter was born and I had disappeared on her and then our daughter was born which is of course very you know is a big event in any family and we were just far apart at that point and I could feel that at the time I blamed it a lot on how much I was working but the distance”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “The story was different. The story had evolved out of in our relationship I wanted to have sex more frequently than Anne-Marie did. And at some point, it turned into like resentment that we're not having as much sex in our relationship as I want. And I'm a successful man and successful men go out and they get what they want. And so I am entitled to this thing that I want and I'm going to go out and get it because I deserve to. And that was the narrative I was telling myself in my head”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “She's now my wife, yes. And actually, we were married at the time. That these things were happening. By then. And I was just gone, like in a different world.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Yeah, looking back, I don't know how I was doing that. I guess the way I was doing it was I completely disappeared on Amory. I was just gone. That's your way.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yes, but I feel like I was way off the deep end relative to that. Yeah. So let's hear about it. So it went from, you know, I've already said it went from porn to Craigslist. And then Craigslist at some point turned into online escort websites. And then, you know, I had that kind of going on in the background. In addition to porn. And then I wound up meeting someone at an event and starting an affair. And that lasted for months. And so all of this stuff is happening. I don't even know how I had time for all of that.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “In some ways. And then you mix in the money. And I feel like my ego just started to really grow and to swell. And then I went to Palantir. And then Palantir became kind of Peter's next big thing, a big Silicon Valley story. I'm the CFO. Marie and I invested a bunch of my bonus money from clarium into Palantir early on. And so we were making a lot of money on paper, and my ego just was swelling and I just, I thought I could do anything. I thought I deserved anything I wanted. And that was the first kind of peak of bad behavior where I was just spinning like a top. I just had lost all direction.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “The moment where it really felt like I was kind of spinning out of control. Just rewinding a little bit. I'd been at PayPal for about three years, made some money. Not that much even by today's standards, certainly, but more than I thought I would see in my 20s. So I was still pretty young. And then I went to Clarium Capital, Peter Tiels. The hedge fund did really well. And I made big bonuses. And I started investing that money in startups. So again, there's like more money flowing in. Peter's worth is climbing. And he's becoming more famous. And I was part of that group working for him. And so it felt like we were close to this guy who's becoming kind of a celebrity.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Things. And so when she was home, she was kind of distant. You know, she was like either in bed or if she was awake and walking around. She was a little bit distant, maybe not fully there because of this medication stuff. And there were good times, but then there were not so good times. And I think that lasted pretty much through most of all of middle school and most of high school. And, you know, those are formative years for kids. We're trying to figure ourselves out. And I think that affected me too. And I don't want to be really clear. And I say this towards the end of my book. I don't blame my parents for the things that I did as an adult. It's not their fault. I'm just showing the linkage between an unhealed childhood trauma that then maybe impacts your behavior as you get older.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “That I think it affected me. You know, I didn't understand how it affected me until I was in my 30s. So it took a really long time. But I think whenever, again, I don't think this is super controversial to say when a primary caregiver leaves, it is very difficult on a child. The second thing that happened for me was that my mother, once I got into about middle school age, started a little bit before that, but sixth grade was my first awareness of it really. She started battling with depression. And so she was in bed a lot, medicated, the medical community was really still trying to figure out what to do with depression and anxiety. I feel like they still are, but there was all these medications, prozac.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I had some traumas in my childhood that I didn't even really understand at the time were as traumatic to me as they were. The first was when my parents got divorced when I was young, I was four or five or six years old. My father moved away. And”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Yeah, I didn't understand it at the time. It took me a very long time to understand what was going on under the surface. And this goes to kind of one of the major themes of the book, which is this idea that unheal traumas from our childhood Can really affect our behaviors as we grow into adults. So I believe we are all kind of programmed in our childhood. And then we go out into the wild and we experience new situations and we compare the situation to our programming to figure out what we're supposed to do. This is a very adaptive human psyche development. I don't think any of that's controversial.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Yeah, that's exactly right. So my apartment lease was going to expire soon. I went on to Craigslist to look for a new apartment. That's what everyone did back then in the Bay Area. And I noticed this new, I don't know how new it was, but I had never noticed it before. There was a link in the personal section called Casual Encounters. Maybe it even had a little news sign next to it or something. I don't know. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And I clicked on it. And it was just pages and pages of people looking for hookups.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “That kind of took it to a whole new level. And then I got into what I would refer to as a shame cycle And I didn't know it then, and it took me a long time to figure that out and get out of it. But that's when that started”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Yeah, it's pretty high. And so. It was one thing to keep that a secret and lie about that. But once I started hooking up with people in the real world.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “So at some point, still images weren't good enough, then it was then video download speeds increased and then there's video. Oh, that's good. But then at some point, even that wasn't enough for me. And then I started looking for hookups. And this is when I was in a committed relationship with my girlfriend, who's now my wife. And that is really when the snowball started to pick up steam. So it was one thing to look at. I felt, and maybe not tell my girlfriend about it. I mean, how many guys do that, right? Seems like a pretty...”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “It probably wasn't until 2013 or 14 when I felt like this might be a problem. I started looking at porn. In 1997, I think whenever I got my first laptop in college And I had an internet connection and it was super slow and it was the pictures took a long time to load. That's when I started looking at porn And then I just continue. I just thought it was normal Every guy does this, right? the volume of content is infinite effectively. If you're immersed in it, you just feel like, oh, everyone's doing this. And so the problem for me turned out to be that it didn't just stop with the porn. And it was a little bit of kind of a, I say, in the book, it was a gateway drug for me.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “If something is happening in your life that you want to take a closer look at, you might assign that behavior to a specific identity. And what it does is kind of takes it off of you. And so then you can look at it with a little less shame and maybe a little less judgment and say, hey, I'm not a bad person. This identity of mine is doing this thing that I don't like. Let's figure out why. And she called that identity porn star. And the first time she said it, we both laughed, and it was funny. And then the name stuck. And then in subsequent coaching sessions, we'd get on the phone and she'd say, so how's Pornstar doing this week? And just like the levity around it and her curiosity around it. actually encouraged me to start sharing things that were otherwise would have been very embarrassing to share.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Sure. Well, it goes well together. It certainly gets people's attention. The name porn star came from my life coach and we haven't really talked much about the book yet but I went on this journey and part of that journey was a realization that I was addicted to online porn. And after several years of trying to stop the habit and not being able to, I finally realized that I should tell my life coach this because maybe she could help me. And I told her and we started working on this as part of my work. And she has this technique or tool where we would say that a person has a lot of identities in their universe.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Think were so certainly started out that way, but I know that they've made a lot of progress in diversifying their business lines into commercial spaces. I couldn't tell you the percentage difference. So, I think two percentages there'd be like US versus foreign would be one question and then government versus commercial And I don't feel versed enough on the data today. But certainly at the beginning. The first customers were the US government, who was really struggling. Remember, this was not that long after 9-11. And one of the things that we learned from the 9-11 experience was that, yes, we had all of this data, but we couldn't do anything with it.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Just so people have an idea. Yeah. So at a high level, at the highest level, they help people who have really big, biggest of the big disparate data sources, disparate meaning they've got data in silos all over the place. They help them bring that data together into one cohesive place so that they can extract insights out of that data. And the thing that we would talk about is it's not necessarily the answers. It's what questions can you ask of the data that really starts to define the value of that data? And so Palantir would pride itself on saying we allow you to ask more and more interesting questions from your data.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “So I was at Clarium Capital, Peter's Hedge Fund. And at the time, he and four other people co-founded a company called Palantir. And that's how I found out about it. So Peter invested in it. And while I was at Clarium, we were also, me and others were helping Peter build a family office. And so we were starting to manage some of his investments. Manage just means he had breakfast with someone, agreed to invest in their company, and then would send an email to us and say, hey, make it happen. And so we would do those things. So that's how I first met the CEO of Palantir. That's how I first found out about the company. I was super excited about it right from the beginning. And what the company does is uses, and you know, Palantir as a company is very”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Counterintuitive things. So at PayPal, PayPal merged with X.com and X.com had a lot of former financial industry people. And over time, gradually the executives from the PayPal team who had no prior experience in the financial services industry wound up ascending in the corporate culture and hierarchy. And I think possibly because they weren't weighed down by legacy ideas of how things should be done. It's done this way. Why? Because it's always been done this way. Whereas someone like Reed Hoffman would say, That doesn't make any sense. We should do it this way because this is the right way. And that served PayPal really well.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “And so you often have to wear different hats. You often have to switch context a lot. And you kind of just have to be a good all-around utility player for some number of years until the organization scales to the point where you start hiring more specialized roles. So that was one thing. I think hiring for like general capability as opposed to specific skill set. I think another thing certainly at PayPal was and at Palantir to a large degree people who didn't have specific experience in the industry that the business was in, which sounds very kind of counterproductive, not counterproductive, but”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “So, two things come to mind right away. One is hiring for general ability. And I'm not exactly sure how to say that, but as opposed to saying, does this person have the very specific skills to do this very specific job, it would be more focused on, is this person just exceptional? In lots of different ways, because if they are, they're going to be exceptional at whatever job they have to do. And a lot of my experience in a working environment is at startups where even Clarium Capital was a startup. It was a hedge fund, it was a startup.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Go off and start all of these amazing companies Yelp, Yammer, Palantir, SpaceX, Tesla, YouTube, and I apologize to any of my PayPal friends if I'm leaving someone's company. But it's just really, the list is just crazy. And people always ask the question, why was that the case? And I'm not sure there's one answer, but part of it could be the idea that there was a lot of”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “I am going to take a chance, and I'm going to maybe help cultivate that potential in them. So if you look over the course of his career, he's launched so many people off in different directions in different things. And I think that's why. And it could be there's a lot of people ask, what was it about PayPal? Why was it so special? There were so many other...”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “And so he does the same thing with people. So he meets a person. That's a cool. He says, I think this person has potential that other people don't see yet.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Well, and because I know him is very thoughtful, I feel like he likes to invest in things that other people don't realize yet.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “And then I'm like, well, what should my title be? He's like, well, you should be the CFO. I'm like, I don't know anything about this. He was like, you'll pick it up quick. He had a lot of confidence and faith and we had work together for pretty closely for a while by that point. And so I feel like that was a good example. You know, I think he was thinking, where could I be, you know, in several years if we stayed on some kind of trajectory?”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Yeah, just I was like, I don't really know what hedge funds do. He's like, go read this book. You know, right? So I read the book. And I was like, okay, now I have a rough idea what hedge funds do. And then I thought I had to read the Wall Street Journal every morning. And I was so diligent about that for a while. It was looking back as kind of comical, but I would just, I was like, this is my education. Like this is how I'm going to do this.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Clarion capital. Yeah. So he's going to go back to his fund. He renames it and decides he wants to build this. This is going to be his next project. And so when I get there, this is pretty funny. So I had worked pretty closely with Peter because I was on the, I was a financial analyst and then I was the vice president of financial planning and analysis at PayPal. And so I was working a lot on the corporate financial model when the company went public. That was kind of a cornerstone of the IPO roadshow presentation. And I got to go sit in on some of those meetings, which was really cool. But anyway, I got to work really closely with him. And so when I said I was interested to go over to Clarium, I didn't know what a hedge fund was really. And he told me to read this book called When Genius Failed, which is about...”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “I was on the receiving end of that. So I was at PayPal for about three years. The company goes public, then gets acquired by eBay. And five or six of us leave to go help Peter start his hedge fund again.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “You know, he has busy boy, yeah, super busy. Well, even busier, I guess, the last couple weeks. But even to rewind 10 years, if he just had SpaceX and Tesla, I mean, those are two really big creations that he's working on. But I'm sure that he's pulling from one.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Or could you give an example? Well, like in Peter's case, he had been running a hedge fund slash VC fund prior to PayPal starting, had met Max. Max had this idea. They decided that they were going to work on it together. Peter invested money out of his fund to help launch the thing. And he still had the fund on the side, you know, probably wasn't more, I shouldn't even guess what percentage of his time. It wasn't a lot, but he still had something else that got a little bit of his attention while he was building PayPal. In Reed's case, I don't remember in detail, but I mean, even if you just look at Elon today.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “One of the biggest things I noticed, frankly, with Peter, certainly with Reed, also with Elon over time, is that they were never only doing one thing at a time, which I thought was very interesting. I would have thought, logically, oh, you're doing this thing, you focus on this thing, and you do this thing. But for them, and this is now spanning not just when I started, but I was at PayPal for about three years. So just kind of spanning that three-year time frame, watching them, they always tended to be doing multiple things. And I feel like they got a lot of benefit out of doing that because they would be getting exposed to different ideas or solving different problems or meeting different people. There was just all this stuff that they were interacting with. And then they would bring that back with them into the PayPal office.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Not yet. I don't think Reed was around yet. And Elon existed very nearby. So he had started a company called X.com. And that company was in an office also on University Avenue in Palo Alto, but down the street. And so when I started at PayPal, the two companies had not combined yet”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Peter's there. Max Levchin's there. There's probably. I think I was employee 34, so I don't want to list off 33 other people.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “We had one printer in the office, so I'd have to go load the checks into the printer, call the CFO on his desk phone, maybe cell phone, and tell him to hit print. Then he would sign them all by hand, and then I would stuff them in envelopes and send them out. Yeah, so those were very early days. We had, I think, when I started, we had about 14,000 PayPal users.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Well, one of the funny things, so back then people could Add money to their PayPal account in different ways. You could use a credit card, you could use a check, you could use a bank transfer, and you could get your money out of PayPal in those same ways. And so back then, a lot of stuff was still manual. So at the end of the week, I would get a list spit out on a printer of checks that we had to write.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “So I have my breakfast with Peter. We talk about the book. I jokingly say I must have read the right books because I get an email later that day, hey, great news. We'd like you to come in for some additional interviews. So I go in, I don't know, a few days later. I meet with a lot more people on the team, and then I get hired. And I start working there January 3rd of 2000. So this interviewing stuff happened in December. I start working in January. I mean, I have some fun stories from back then.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Yes, so I'm part of something called basis. It's the business association of Stanford Engineering students. They have a one credit, or I'm pretty sure it was one credit seminar on Friday afternoons where they bring in speakers from Silicon Valley, mostly business leaders. So I signed up to get this one credit and I was attending these Friday afternoon lectures essentially. And then there's a mailing list associated with that. And so that's where I got this.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “The Hemingway books really stuck with me for a while. I can't recall exactly why because it's been some time, but maybe just the imagery, the way he was writing, what he was writing about, like bullfighting in Spain and things. It was really, and I was probably reading that while I was on a train in Spain. Totally. So there was something about that whole thing, the art of war was definitely kind of fascinating as well.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “I think one was of mice and men. There was a bunch of Hemingway books. I remember that. I remember I read The Art of War. I remember I read the Tao De Ching. So it was a pretty eclectic mix of different things that I had just accumulated. People said, oh, you should read this book. Oh, you should read this book. And I had a list of them. And before I left for my trip, I went to a used bookstore and bought a whole bunch of them.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “No, that's There you go. So, wow. So we meet at Hobies. I'm wearing the company t shirt that I got from a buddy on campus. He thinks that's pretty hilarious. And he's telling me all about his background and Confinity's plans. And again, a lot of it's going over my head, but it sounds very cool and very interesting. And he's very nice. And then I casually mention that I had traveled around Europe the prior summer with my girlfriend and I had taken a backpack full of books to read. And then he's like, well, what were the books? And then that's all we talked about for the entire interview was what books I had read, what did I learn from them, what was interesting from them.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Very good natured joke. So the company was called Confinity. It was a company that had been started by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. And the intention was to allow people to be money to each other on their palm pilots. That was the way the product worked. I guess the intention was it was really the beginning of a cryptographic currency because they were going to digitize currency, make it easy to transfer money all around the world, very frictionless. All of that stuff was way over my head at the time. My first interview was with Peter at Aobie's restaurant in Palo Alto, California.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Well, you jokingly said I got hired because of the reading list, but he later joked that I got hired because I wore a company t-shirt to the interview.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “So the dog outfit worked. The dog outfit worked. So I applied there, didn't get a job there. So maybe again, life sending me the right things. I don't know. Shortly after that, I submitted my resume to a company that was advertising in a newsletter called Confinity. And then I got invited in for a job interview. And that”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Well, actually, there was a career fair around that time. So this was just to set the stage, I guess it was late 1999. The dot-com boom is in full swing. All these companies have tons of capital from Sandhill Road, venture capital investors, and they're hiring like crazy and they're on Stanford's campus. So there's a career fair. There's a guy running around in a dog costume. I think the company was called Fog Dog. I thought it was hilarious and I really wanted to work there.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “So the program that I was in had classes co-listed with the GSB. So I was sometimes attending classes. And a lot of these people had some prior work experience. And after a while, after a few months in school, I realized it was really helpful for them because they could contextualize the things that we were learning. And whereas for me, it was all very abstract. And so I decided I wanted to get a job. And that, if I should continue, like that is discontinued.”

    2022-06-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #600: Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and More — Porn Addiction, The Corrosiveness of Secrets, Healing Wounds, Escaping Shame Cycles, and Books to Change Your Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT