Paypal Buys Braintree For $800M In Cash And All I Got Was This Story

It’s official, Paypal has acquired Braintree for $800M in cash. Congrats to Bryan Johnson, Braintree’s founder and a former client of mine. I met Bryan back in 2003 when he was working on a real estate development in Sandy, Utah. I still remember where I was a few years later when he was starting Braintree and called me to talk about maybe helping out with some marketing for the fledgling company. As I got mail from my PO box and cradled my cellphone against my shoulder, I told him it sounded interesting, but I was pretty busy. Maybe he should set up an affiliate program or a blog or something.

When Braintree started they didn’t take on small clients, except for me. Back then I dealt directly with Bryan. A year or two later I read about Braintree having companies like 37signals and OpenTable as clients. That’s the first moment I realized I had probably made a mistake in not helping Bryan out. Then there were the huge rounds of venture financing, and an email from Bryan when he was looking for a COO a year or two ago. Now this. Well, as Guy Kawasaki says about turning down the CEO role at Yahoo, “It’s not the billion dollars I would have made that bothers me, it’s the second billion dollars.”