Last year, PayPal&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/paypal" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">PYPL</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/companies/paypal">+0.6%</a>&nbsp;CEO Dan Schulman commissioned a study to understand how many of his employees were financially strapped. “I was almost positive the response would be, ‘No, we’re not, because you’re paying so well,’” Schulman said Wednesday at Forbes’ JUST 100 virtual summit. Internal research had shown that staff salaries were at or above market rates.



But the study’s results painted a different picture. “In all of our call centers and among our entry-level employees—more than 10,000 people inside of PayPal—two-thirds of that employee base struggled to make ends meet. That was such a huge wake-up call for me,” he said.&nbsp;



Hedge fund manager and philanthropist Paul Tudor Jones II spoke on the panel with Schulman and noted that, for every year he has done research for the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/just-companies/#11977d772bf0">JUST 100 list</a>&nbsp;of the most responsible public companies, “The number-one element of what makes a just company is pay and living wage.” The research polls thousands of Americans to identify what factors they deem most important in defining fair corporate behavior.



In October 2019, Schulman responded to the troubling survey results by lowering the cost of healthcare for employees by 60%. He gave every worker equity in PayPal, raised salaries and rolled out a financial education program to encourage saving. The changes reportedly cost <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90490899/how-paypal-ceo-dan-schulman-is-leading-a-more-inclusive-way-forward" target="_blank">tens of millions</a> of dollars. 



ee if the changes had an impact. “Employees were four times more engaged, and three times less likely to leave the company,” Schulman said.



Higher morale creates a workforce that serves customers better and leads to better shareholder returns, the CEO believes. His company’s stock has risen nearly 90% this year, reaching a market value of $235 billion. “This idea that making a profit and having a purpose as a company are at odds with each other is fundamentally wrong. I actually think if you don&#8217;t have a purpose as a company, you don’t see your workers as your most valuable asset and you minimize your profitability.”



-By Jeff Kauflin, Forbes Staff

Fast Company Innovation Festival – Day 3

PayPal CEO Dan Schulman Explains His Strategy For Investing In Employees’ Financial Health

Where would we be without globalization? What if media was restricted to reporting within its own national boundaries? What if we all lived in isolation? It’s a scary picture and one where humanity would have not progressed as broadly as it has.
To fellow African entrepreneurs, I want to say one thing: the more you are exposed to, the bigger you can dream.
Industrialization progressed by further developing what had been done before. Only after working with renowned inventor Thomas Edison, could Nikola Tesla go on to create his own inventions.
Andrew Carnegie worked under the leading businessman, Thomas A. Scott. This mentorship allowed Carnegie to define an era by starting a generation of industrialists, pioneering the philanthropic movement, and becoming an epitome of self-development.
The key word here is exposure.
There are countless occasions where entrepreneurs only discovered their flair by observing other entrepreneurs or studying companies that transformed industries. Some even became competitors of their former employers.
Adrian Gore, the Founder of Discovery Holdings, was exposed to the dealings of the insurance sector early in his career. He worked for Liberty Life but resigned to build his own insurance company. Today, Discovery is the leading medical insurance company in South Africa.
Isn’t it surprising that many companies were started by entrepreneurs who thought they could do it better? Deciding to improve something can shape your destiny. Decisions like these act as the force that pushes us on in our lives.
Look at the former employees of PayPal – today known as the PayPal Mafia. After leaving the famous tech company, these individuals went on to found and fund other mammoth companies like LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Tesla, SpaceX and they are not finished. At the moment, they are investing in Artificial Intelligence.
These gentlemen were exposed to a revolutionary business and they now all share a drive to change the world as we know it to a better world, one that they see in their minds.
Exposure can give you something other than experience, it can also get you through certain doors that were previously shut. Let’s look at two entrepreneurs; both are looking to seal separate deals. Entrepreneur X closes a $1.8 billion deal, while entrepreneur Y gets a $274,000 deal.
Both worked tirelessly to get these deals but the rewards are not the same. It is likely that entrepreneur X has been exposed to certain levels, while entrepreneur Y was operating independently. They might have both known about the $1.8 billion deal, but knowing about it does not mean you have access to it. You need to run in certain circles to get exposed to deals that involve other entrepreneurs in those circles.
What led Aliko Dangote to manufacturing? While trading commodities, he took note of the huge market in Nigeria and decided it was better to manufacture what he was importing.
Before founding Apple, a 12-year-old Steve Jobs landed a summer job at HP and the rest is history. It is this type of exposure that allows entrepreneurs to gravitate towards their destinies.
If you look at the rain, you will never plant. Get out there; attend conferences, travel to various countries, network with successful business leaders and read as much as you can. Whatever you are exposed to can only broaden your current view on the world around you.
By exposing yourself, you also expose your company to other markets and greater opportunities.
You can’t afford to stand idly by and wait for everything to fall in place. Business, and life, is a fight for territory – the moment you stop fighting for what you want, is the moment you will have lost.

Nothing was Achieved  by Being Idle

Many would walk past him without a second glance. But this unassuming man, in a brown jacket and faded jeans, is the man who brought up a billionaire in Africa. This is Errol Musk, father to Elon – the $13.3-billion United States entrepreneur who founded PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and wants to go to Mars. Eroll’s son, Kimbal, is a millionaire and his daughter, Tasko, is a film producer.
“They’ve been doing well all their lives. It’s not like one suddenly jumps into it right now. It’s been like that as far as I can remember. [Elon’s] sister Tasko would say you can ask Elon to do a lot of things on his computer but don’t ask him to catch a bus. We traveled a lot in those days, their mother and I split up when they were quite young and the kids stayed with me. I took them all over the world. Elon was generally in the backseat, Kimbal, my other son who is just as energetic as Elon, would do all the guiding and navigating,” says Errol.
“Elon has always been an introvert thinker, so where a lot of people would go to a great party and have a great time and drink and talk about all sorts of things like rugby or sport, you would find Elon had found the person’s library and was going through their books. He’d find fun in that, not to say he wasn’t a person who would party every now and then.”
“The kind of things he would come up with as a youngster was always surprising. When he was very small, he would ask me ‘where is the whole world?’ when he was three or four. It was these sorts of questions that made me realize that he was a little different,” says Errol in an interview on radio station 702, in Johannesburg.
The Musk family is full of adventurers. Errol’s grandmother was Canada’s first chiropractor. His father and mother were the first to fly from South Africa to Australia in a single-engine plane. Errol, a pilot, sailor and engineer, raised Elon and Kimbal in the quiet suburbs of Pretoria.
Elon’s siblings also share the limelight. Toska is a producer and director. Kimbal owns a number of restaurant chains and spearheads a non-profit school education based program, The Kitchen Community, which grows vegetables in the United States.
“Kimbal is much more of a party animal. He is one of the two original directors of SpaceX and he’s a director of Tesla… But he’s in his own world [and has] gone into restaurants and catering. He has a number of very large restaurants. He is also part of one of the fastest growing fast foods spaces called Chipotle Mexican Grill.”
“Kimbal started a thing where he put fiberglass tubes in a snakelike shape to make a garden and taught children to grow vegetables… an article on FORBES said he was the Musk who is going to change how we eat.”
It’s a story that dates back to the 1980s in Pretoria. Errol made money by consulting and developing properties while the boys scribbled away at their desks at Pretoria Boys High School (PBHS).
“My impression is that Elon kept to himself and was relatively quiet and reserved. I believe he was involved with the computer club at school, but otherwise was not really visible in mainstream activities,” says Gavin Ehlers who was headboy at PBHS in 1988, the same year Musk finished school.
Not surprisingly, Elon graduated with distinctions in physical science and computer science, recalls Bill Schroder, the headmaster of the school from 1990 to 2009. Elon and Kimbal then emigrated to Canada with their mother, Maye, in part to avoid conscription in the South African army, before taking the plunge as entrepreneurs in the United States.
“In the mid-eighties I remember him showing me a box with a red light on it and he would say this is a modem. With this, computers can talk to one another. If that computer is on the line then I can talk to a computer in England and ask it questions. He was always switched on,” says Errol.
So what lies ahead for the billionaire Elon who wants to go to Mars?
On the cards is a possible return to Africa to install thousands of Tesla Powerwalls, a 15-centimeter sized battery box that can store up to 10kWh of free, cheap renewable energy for your house.. This is enough energy to keep your fridge cold for 600 hours, according to Eskom, South Africa’s national power utility, and could solve the country’s energy problems.
“As far as Elon is concerned, I worry, what now? What is there? I start to worry of boredom. I get worried that he is getting bored of sending stuff to NASA every week or two weeks. I mean this is becoming passé… He is one of those people, and certainly was as a boy, if he suddenly decides it’s not interesting anymore he just kind of drops it. I doubt he will though,” says Errol.
From Pretoria to the stars, Elon could go to Mars.

How To Raise A Family Of Genius Billionaires

You have to be a rare kind of an entrepreneur to believe you can build a city on Mars; South African-born Elon Musk wants to do this. Musk has an extraordinary habit of making fortunes out of dreams. At 43 years old – 26 years after he left Pretoria Boys High School (PBHS) – the $9.4-billion inventor, according to FORBES, is the 47th richest man in the United States (US).
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“I’d like to go to Mars. I suppose it depends on how old I am when I get there. If I’m quite old then maybe I don’t come back. If I’m young enough I would come back. I’d like to see what my kids look like when they grow up. But it’s not about me going to Mars. We’re developing new technologies to enable a large number of people to go to Mars and be able to develop a self-sustaining city on Mars,” says Musk.
Musk is no stranger to innovation. He is the inventor who built a rocket that can go backwards. He created the world’s first electric sports car and is the brainchild of the Hyperloop, a railway that has capsules floating on a cushion of air through a 615-kilometer tube from Los Angeles to San Fransciso in 30 minutes.
He is also the founder of PayPal, which changed online shopping forever, and Zip2, the web software maker company that banked Musk a cool $22 million when he sold it in 1999 to Compaq Computer.
Musk, one of TIME’s 2013 100 most influential people in the world, was born in Pretoria in 1971. From the age of 12, Musk taught himself programming and sold a computer code for a video game for $500.
The tycoon, whose flamboyant image is said to have inspired Tony Stark’s Iron Man character, led the calmer life behind his school desk at PBHS.
“My impression is that Elon kept to himself and was relatively quiet and reserved. I believe he was involved with the computer club at school, but otherwise was not really visible in mainstream activities,” says Gavin Ehlers who was head boy at PBHS in 1988, the year Musk finished school.
Ehlers is the co-founder of Expertron Group (Pty) Ltd, a South African company specializing in mobile IT system development.
Not surprisingly, Musk graduated with distinctions in Physical Science and Computer Science, recalls Bill Schroder, who was headmaster of the school from 1990 to 2009. Musk then emigrated to Canada, in part to avoid conscription in the South African military service, and furthered his studies in physics before taking the plunge as an entrepreneur.
These days, Musk is more about the future than his past. SpaceX, Musk’s rocket building company, has a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to resupply the International Space Station. In the entrance of its reception, in Los Angeles, hangs two pictures of Mars; one as the red planet, the other as a colonized Mars, complete with oceans, forests and green mountains. It’s a sign of dreams to come.
“Where I think [space exploration] makes sense is to use a commercial organization like SpaceX to do rocket transport. Traditionally, it has been done by NASA in the US but it’s more sensible to be done by a private enterprise because there are a lot of flights. Three quarters of our launches are actually for commercial satellites here at SpaceX – it’s about one quarter for NASA,” he says.
Musk believes that the future of space travel will be done through public and private partnerships.
“A lot of people think it’s a competition, but NASA is our biggest customer. What NASA has decided to do for the most part is get out of the rocket game and focus on the payloads and scientific experiments,” he says.
It has not always been smooth sailing for Musk. Tesla Motors, his electric car company, survived bankruptcy in Christmas of 2008.
“We tried to keep a car company start-up alive during the biggest recession since the great depression, all while General Motors and Chrysler were going bankrupt. We had a new, unproven technology – it was excruciatingly difficult. So I had to put down every bit of money that I had, with nothing left, just to keep the doors open,” he says.
Musk managed to pull through some financers at 6PM, an hour before investors went on holiday. It was a tense hour as he escaped bankruptcy by a whisker.
“We had to lay off a bunch of people just to reduce our cash burn, which was a difficult thing. The media was crapping on us every day, multiple bloggers were maintaining a ‘Tesla death watch’,” he says.
Tesla cars can be found across Europe and China. The Model S sedan can be bought for around $63,000 in the US, after rebates. Musk paid the full price for one of his own.
“Yes, full price, not even a discount. It’s actually important that I do it so that if a big A-list celebrity comes and says ‘hey, you gotta give me a discount because if somebody sees me driving your car it’ll be a big promotion’ I can tell them ‘look, I don’t even give myself a discount, nobody gets a discount.’ A lot of times, it’s all about ego, so long as people know that nobody gets a discount, they’re okay.”
It looks like Musk’s plan is all about cars, rockets and not giving a discount.
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With special thanks to the Pretoria Boys High School Old Boys Association for contacting Musk’s former colleagues.

Tag: PayPal

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

PayPal CEO Dan Schulman Explains His Strategy For Investing In Employees’ Financial Health

Nothing was Achieved by Being Idle

How To Raise A Family Of Genius Billionaires

From Pretoria To The Final Frontier