PayPal Mafia From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"PayPal Mafia" is a term used to indicate a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and developed additional technology companies[1] such as Tesla Motors, LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer.[2] Three members, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Reid Hoffman, have become billionaires.[citation needed]
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History[edit]
Originally, PayPal was a money-transfer service offered by a company called Confinity which was acquired by X.com in 1999. Later X.com was renamed PayPal and purchased by eBay in 2002.[3][4] The original PayPal employees had difficulty adjusting to eBay's more traditional corporate culture and within four years all but 12 of the first 50 employees had left.[5] They remained connected as social and business acquaintances,[5] and a number of them worked together to form new companies in subsequent years. This group of PayPal alumni became so prolific that the term PayPal Mafia was coined.[3] The term[4][6] gained even wider exposure when a 2007 article in Fortune Magazine used the phrase in its headline and featured a photo of former PayPal employees in gangster attire.[4][7][8][9]
Legacy[edit]
The PayPal Mafia are sometimes credited with inspiring the re-emergence of consumer-focused Internet companies after the dot com bust of 2001.[10] The PayPal Mafia phenomena has been compared to the founding of Intel in the late 1960s by engineers who had earlier founded Fairchild Semiconductor after leaving Shockley Semiconductor.[3] They are discussed in journalist Sarah Lacy's book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. According to Lacy, the selection process and technical learning at PayPal played a role, but the main factor behind their future success was the confidence they gained there. Their success has been attributed to their youth; the physical, cultural, and economic infrastructure of Silicon Valley; and the diversity of their skill-sets.[3] PayPal's founders encouraged tight social bonds among its employees, and many of them continued to trust and support one another after leaving PayPal.[3] An intensely competitive environment and a shared struggle to keep the company solvent despite many setbacks also contributed to a strong and lasting camaraderie amongst former employees.[3][11]
Members[edit]
Individuals whom the media refers to as members of the PayPal Mafia include:
- Peter Thiel, PayPal founder and former chief executive officer who is sometimes referred to as the "don" of the PayPal Mafia[5]
- Max Levchin, Founder and chief technology officer at PayPal sometimes called the "consigliere" of the PayPal Mafia[4][12]
- Scott Banister, former Ironport CTO and PayPal board member
- David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO who later founded Geni.com and Yammer[3]
- Roelof Botha former PayPal CFO who later became a partner of venture capital firm Sequoia Capital[citation needed]
- Steve Chen, former PayPal engineer who co-founded YouTube
- Jawed Karim, former PayPal engineer who co-founded YouTube
- Chad Hurley, former PayPal web designer who co-founded YouTube[8]
- Elon Musk, is founder of X.com which acquired the company Confinity. Musk later co-founded Tesla and SpaceX, and is the Chairman of Solar City[3][8][13]
- Eric M. Jackson, who wrote the book The PayPal Wars and became chief executive officer of WND Books and co-founded CapLinked.[14]
- Russel Simmons, former PayPal engineer who co-founded Yelp Inc.
- Jeremy Stoppelman, former vice president of technology at PayPal who later co-founded Yelp, Inc.[3][3][5][7][15][16]
- Premal Shah, former product manager at PayPal, became the founding president of Kiva.org.[4]
- Keith Rabois, a former executive at PayPal who later worked at LinkedIn, Slide, Square, and currently Khosla Ventures, and personally invested in Tokbox, Xoom, Slide, LinkedIn, Geni, Room 9 Entertainment, YouTube, and Yelp
- Reid Hoffman, former executive vice president who later founded LinkedIn and was an early investor in Facebook, Aviary,[17] Friendster, Six Apart, Zynga, IronPort, Flickr, Digg, Grockit, Ping.fm, Nanosolar, Care.com, Knewton, Kongregate, Last.fm, Ning, and Technorati[3][18][19]
- Dave McClure, a former PayPal marketing director, a super angel investor for start up companies[20] and founder of 500 Startups which has hit 500+ investments. [21]
- Yishan Wong, a former engineering manager at PayPal, later worked at Facebook and became the CEO of reddit.[22]
- Luke Nosek, PayPal co-founder and former vice president of marketing and strategy, became a partner at The Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and Ken Howery[23]
- Ken Howery, former PayPal CFO who became a partner at The Founders Fund[24]
- Andrew McCormack, co-founder of Valar Ventures [25][26]