There is this Silicon Valley mythology or perhaps legend saying that when PayPal employees become founder or co-founder, their venture would be the biggest capital firms. They become the key people creating powerful and the most successful network said Jimmy Soni who named them ‘The Founders’ in his book.
PayPal surely is not that big capital compared to Amazon or Apple, but its founders and employees are honchos to global top capital firms. Who and how come?
Two founders of PayPal; Elon Musk and Peter Thiel own Tesla and Palantir Technologies respectively. Its alumni create YouTube; Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. Reid Hoffman leads LinkedIn. Then, Luke Nosek who was the co-founder of PayPal now leads SapceX. These are just example from some of the most successful.
To mention complete member they are Jawed Karim, Jeremy Stoppelman, Andrew McCormack, Premal Shah, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, David O. Sacks, Peter Thiel, Keith Rabois, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Roelof Botha, Russel Simmons. Elon Musk. In which later they are known as The PayPal Mafia.
Back in 2002, it started from scrappy startup to profitable business. Mr. Thief co-founded Confinity, a software beaming money between PalmPilots, a must-have device for business people. Then Mr. Musk co-founded X.com he called it as ‘the Amazon financial services’. X.com provides financial ease from mortgages, credit cards to insurance. From this brief beginning, it is no question that Mr. Thiel and Mr. Musk were foes or competitors. But then they merged, giving birth to PayPal.
But PayPal’s steppingstone was not a fairytale. It faced severe turbulence and almost called as money fraud. Jimmy Soni in his book ‘The Founders’ mentioned the rollercoasters on how they survive and thrive in their startup business. Review from The Economist responds that Soni lacks in telling why the PayPal gang have been so successful. It claims that the book only narrates theories about the wildness in startup business, with little telling of their outreach.
Bombarded with such a nickname ‘PayPal Mafia’, some of the members are not quite comfortable with it. They said that mafia is far better organized than they are.
