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Max Levchin:  The management team at PayPal was very frequently
incompatible. Management meetings were not harmonious. Board meetings
were even worse. They were certainly productive meetings. Decisions
were made and things got done. But people got called idiots if they
deserved it.

The next time around, at Slide, we tried to create a nicer
environment. The idea of having meetings where people really liked one
another seemed great. That was folly. The mistake was to conflate
anger with a lack of respect. People who are smart and energetic are
often angry. Not at each other, usually. Rather, they’re angry that
we’re “not there yet,” i.e. that they have to solve x when they should
be working on some greater problem y. Disharmony at PayPal was
actually a side effect of very healthy dynamics.

If people complain about people behind each other’s backs, you have a
problem. If people don’t trust each other to do good work, you have a
problem. But if people know that their teammates are going to deliver,
you’re good. Even if they are all calling each other idiots.

The danger is that you get soft. It’s hard not to get soft as you
train niceties. Pretty soon you spend more time thinking about how
nice everyone is than you do about how qualified they are. That is
death. If you think that an A- or B++++ person becomes an A person if
they have a good personality, you are an idiot. The rest of the
organization has already figured out that you’re just being soft. They
won’t respect the non-A player. And they certainly won’t respect you.

Even though people would physically fight on the engineering room
floor, if you ever asked PayPal people if they respected each other,
the answer was obvious. For a very long time, everyone believed in
everyone else. That was not true at Slide. There, the subtle passive-
aggressive lack of respect was allowed to develop too long. It proved
very costly. At some point, there had to be a relatively significant
bloodletting. It was stressful. The victims of the purge were so nice.
It was easy to like them. It felt like a very bad, mean thing to do.
But it was a good decision. Subsequently the company was run and
performed much better. Yes, the love dissipated. But you knew that
whatever remained was rooted in respect.