Basically, with their CEO that they brought in, they had a three-to-two board majority no matter what. And they said, "We're going to run this company. We're going to make all the decisions, and you're just going to be a figurehead."

None of us ever doubted that we were going to succeed. And none of us ever stopped to question whether or not we trusted the other. We never had to look at our back.

So for a while we were fighting, tooth and nail, crazy eBay people: "Go away, we don't want you." Eventually we realized that these guys were begging to be our users. We had the moment of epiphany, and for the next 12 months just iterated like crazy on the website version of the product, which is today's PayPal.

Levchin: We kept the stuff under wraps for a very long time. We never really showed IGOR to anyone. We never talked about it in the press. I was definitely very paranoid.

And the people doing the second system are just too naïve; they haven't worked on this problem before, and they're young, maybe, and they just don't realize that it was hard. Fred Brooks said that the second system is always late; sometimes years later than you expect. And in fact, because of the ambition, usually it won't solve any of the problems.