A Startup Is Trying to Buy PayPal… Craziest Deal of 2026! | E2312

**Alex Wilhelm** (0:00)
Hey, everybody, welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex. Today is July 15th, 2026, and that means it's a Wednesday, and that means it's time for yet another Venture Capital Roundtable. And we're recording this right after news broke that Stripe wants to buy PayPal. We're also going to talk about AI's next bottleneck, how startups can build defensible software, and more. But to help me grok the market, I have brought along two Cracker Jack VCs, and they are Eric Bahn, one of the founders of Hustle Fund, a super early venture capital firm currently investing out of its fourth fund. Hustle Fund is backed by companies like Webflow, agree.com, Boom, CharterSpace, and others. Eric, welcome to the show.

**Eric Bahn** (0:37)
Thank you so much, Alex. Happy to be here.

**Alex Wilhelm** (0:38)
We also have Jeff Morris Jr. He's the founder of Chapter One, investing out of its third fund. Chapter One has backed companies like Superbase, Mercury, Flex, and Metafly, a company that I also love. Jeff, welcome to the show.

**Jeff Morris Jr.** (0:50)
Great to be here, Alex. Thanks for having me.

**Alex Wilhelm** (0:52)
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Did this deal surprise you? Do you think it's smart? What was your kind of first page analysis?

**Jeff Morris Jr.** (1:52)
Yeah, I think it did surprise me. When you picture PayPal and you hear the name, you just think they're not acquirable, right? And you have this private company, Stripe, who really is in world-building mode and wants to, as a private company, buy this iconic payments platform. And I think it's just a headline that's very surprising. It shows, I think, some of the benefits of staying private, though, because Stripe can do these things without the scrutiny of the public markets and presumably has a balance sheet to make it happen. And so, yeah, it is surprising. I think it's, you know, it's like one of those things you hear about the PayPal mafia and you think, think of this iconic coming and now it's, honestly, it makes me feel old.
My first reaction and, you know, it's just a sign of the times everybody's out to world-building. M&A is obviously a great way to do that.

**Alex Wilhelm** (2:45)
I was going back to very early Stripe coverage and I think when they were worth like $20 million both Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, two of the best known PayPal mafia members also backed it. So this is actually kind of revenge of the same team, if you will, Jeff. But your point about, you know, the flexibility of the private markets allowing you to do more stuff, that to me implies that you think that if Stripe had been public when they executed this transaction, and it's not confirmed yet, et cetera, et cetera, that it would have been poorly received by the markets?

**Jeff Morris Jr.** (3:13)
I wouldn't say it would be poorly received. I think there's just more considerations as a public company when you do anything SNA related and Stripe being a private company just has flexibility to take a longer term point of view on what this acquisition might mean for their company going forward without impacting their public market cap in the near term. I think when you're private, you can just do things that are a bit more like YOLO.
This is definitely for me a sign of the times.

**Alex Wilhelm** (3:45)
Eric, I know you and your firm invest incredibly early, so you're the person we should always talk to when it comes to super late stage unicorns buying public companies.
But I'm really curious what your thoughts were about this. PayPal's share price peaked above 300 back in the 2001-2022 era, and they're going to go private maybe for 16.5 bucks a share, kind of a shocking decline in worth.