" PayPal Mafia " is a term used to denote a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since established and developed additional technology companies such as Tesla Motors, LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, YouTube, Yelp and Yammer. Most of the members attended Stanford University or the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at some point in their study. The six members, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, and Keith Rabois, have become billionaires.
Video PayPal Mafia
History
Initially, PayPal was a money transfer service offered by a company called Confinity that was acquired by X.com in 1999. Then X.com changed its name to PayPal and bought by eBay in 2002. The original PayPal employees had trouble adjusting to eBay a more traditional corporate culture and within four years all but 12 of the first 50 employees have gone. They remain connected as social and business acquaintances, and some of them work together to form new companies in the following years. This PayPal alumni group became so productive that the term PayPal Mafia was created. The term even gained wider exposure when a 2007 article in Fortune magazine uses the phrase in its title and displays a photo of a former PayPal employee in gangster outfits.
Maps PayPal Mafia
Legacy
The PayPal Mafia is sometimes credited with the inspiration of the reappearance of a consumer-focused Internet company after the 2001 dot-com bust. The Mafia PayPal phenomenon has been compared to the founding of Intel in the late 1960s by engineers who previously founded Fairchild Semiconductors after leaving Shockley Semiconductor. They are covered 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 play a role, but the main factor behind their future. success is the confidence they get there. Their success has been attributed to their youth; Silicon Valley's physical, cultural, and economic infrastructure; and the diversity of their expertise. PayPal's founders encourage tight social ties among their employees, and many of them continue to trust and support each other after leaving PayPal. A highly competitive environment and a common struggle to keep the company free despite many setbacks also contribute to the strong and lasting friendship among former employees.
Members
Individuals who refer to the media as PayPal Mafia members include:
- Peter Thiel, PayPal's founder and former chief executive officer sometimes referred to as the "don" of PayPal Mafia
- Max Levchin, Founder and chief technology officer at PayPal is sometimes called "consigliere" of PayPal Mafia
- Elon Musk, is the founder of X.com who acquired the company Confinity. Musk later founded Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and was Chairman of SolarCity
- David O. Sacks, former PayPal COO who later founded Geni.com and Yammer
- Scott Banister, a former Ironport CTO member and PayPal board member
- Roelof Botha, former PayPal CFO who later became partner of Sequoia Capital venture capital firm
- Steve Chen, a former PayPal engineer who founded YouTube.
- David Gausebeck, former PayPal Technical Architect, one of the Gausebeck-Levchin test creators, co-founder of Matterport Inc., a 3-D digital modeling company.
- Reid Hoffman, a former executive vice president who later founded LinkedIn and was an early investor on Facebook, Aviary, Friendster, Six Apart, Zynga, IronPort, Flickr, Digg, Grockit, Ping.fm, Nanosolar, Care.com, Knewton, Kongregate, Last.fm, Ning, and Technorati
- Ken Howery, formerly a PayPal CFO partner at Founders Fund
- Chad Hurley, the former PayPal web designer who founded YouTube
- Eric M. Jackson, who authored The PayPal Wars and became chief executive officer of WND Books and founded CapLinked.
- Jawed Karim, a former PayPal engineer who founded YouTube.
- Rod D. Martin, a former special advisor to CEO Peter Thiel whose 10X Capital took over Galectin Therapeutics in 2009 and who founded Advanced Search Laboratories in 2012.
- Dave McClure, former marketing director of PayPal, a super angel investor for a new company and founder of 500 Startups that has reached 500 investments.
- Andrew McCormack, founder of Valar Ventures
- Luke Nosek, PayPal's founder and former vice president of marketing and strategy, partnered in Founders Fund with Peter Thiel and Ken Howery
- Jason Portnoy, former vice president of financial planning and analysis who later became CFO at Claire Capital Peter Thiel, CFO at Palantir Technologies, and founding partner at Subtraction Capital.
- Keith Rabois, a former PayPal executive who later worked on LinkedIn, Slide, Square, and currently Khosla Ventures, and personally invested in Tokbox, Xoom, Slide, LinkedIn, Geni, Room 9 Entertainment, YouTube and Yelp.
- Jack Selby, former vice president of corporate and international development at PayPal who founded Clarium Capital with Peter Thiel, who later became managing director of Capital Management Grandmaster.
- Premal Shah, a former product manager at PayPal, became the founding president of Kiva.org.
- Russell Simmons, a former PayPal engineer who founded Yelp Inc.
- Jeremy Stoppelman, former vice president of technology at PayPal who later founded Yelp, Inc...
- Yishan Wong, a former engineering manager at PayPal, then works on Facebook and becomes CEO of Reddit.
See also
- Eight traitors
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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