Hacker News Reader

I think the fact that he started businesses in those fields is somewhat self explanatory. What's so special about paypal, other than it was there for the rise of Internet 2.0 / ebay or whatever? Getting into coal and mobile phones before the past decade when both of these have exploded in growth is the same kind of thing.

View on HN

Coal, at least, sounds like something that requires a great deal of upfront capital to establish. A business like Paypal, less so. The hard part for that is tying into payment systems, but that doesn't require a lot of upfront money, more a network effect.

So the question remains, where did this initial capital come from?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com