Company culture is this marvelous thing, one thing founders don’t necessarily pay too much attention to. Why was Paypal different? One of the reasons why Elon Musk didn’t have an easy landing on Paypal was, company Culture. Not so different from the other Company Forensics we’ve done. So far, this sounds like the story of a ‘regular’ startup. This bank was founded by none other than Elon Musk, who was brought in as CEO. In March 2000, Confinity merged with an online bank called X.com and took their name. After experimenting with a few solutions, the one idea that stuck was a payment system called PayPal that would allow users to transfer money digitally, which would become the golden ticket. The few small online businesses that existed had nothing close to a good platform for online transactions. The company was originally called Confinity to focus on the world of digital payments. And market reach is even bigger in countries like Germany.Īnyway- it was Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Luke Nosek that started this in 1998. But say what you will about Paypal, chances are you have an account. If you want to buy stuff on eBay you sort of have to use Paypal. I’ve had my fair share of not so great Paypal experiences. A necessary evil is what I would call it. 377 million users, and a total of 15.4 billion payments had gone through the platform. OK, some quick stats about what Paypal is today. Let’s look into the origins of this Mafia. It’s all pretty clear if you dive deep enough into the story of Paypal and the type of people that the founders liked to hire. Let’s look into it. What secret sauce made this group become THE most relevant tech investors and entrepreneurs. There isn’t a secret sauce. Steve Chen, Chad Hurley- the other Youtube co-founders. I mean what happened. There’s also Yishan Wong, who was CEO of Reddit from late 2011 to 2014. Made people a lot of money because its stock grew by over 700% the last year, and we might have to thank him in a few years for putting a man on Mars. His calendar was already too busy to make it to the photo, but the most well-known member of this gang is no other than Elon Musk. These guys are investors in Uber, Apple, Airbnb, RobinHood, NVidia, Doordash…Īnd what connects them all? They were all early Paypal founders or employees. This guy, Roelof Botha, is a partner at Sequoia Capital. He has also invested in Facebook, Flickr and joined the Microsoft Board in 2017. This guy is Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn you might have heard of it. These are some of the most important tech companies in the world. I’m not just saying ‘among others’, their investment list goes on and on. These two guys ( Luke Nosek, and Kenny Howery), along with Peter Thiel, are managing partners The Founders Fund a firm that has invested in Figma, Stripe, Compass, Zocdoc, Airbnb, Facebook and Spotify- among others. Russel Simmons is also in this photo, another Yelp co-founder and the formet CTO. This is Jeremy Stoppelman, one of the co-founders of Yelp and still, the company CEO. The first video ever on Youtube was Karim at the zoo. This is Jawed Karim and you are watching this video thanks to him. We kinda owe him the =whole fire hydrant thing? He was relentless in developing technology to prevent fraud, such as the Captcha test's earliest versions. Thiel is a controversial figure, no doubt, being an open Trump donor and supporter, one of the few outspoken republicans in the liberal spheres of tech.Īnd that’s all I have to say related to politics. He co-founded Palantir, was THE first investor on Facebook, enough to earn him a scene in the movie. He is kind of THE best known investor in the Bay Area. Or rather, if your company reaches massive scale, chances are you are going to come across one of them. In a certain way, they control Silicon Valley. This is a photo by Fortune Magazine on an article that coined the nickname, ‘The Paypal Mafia’. An investor or a fellow founder will name drop them and yeah, you have to know who they are. If you are a tech entrepreneur, knowing who these guys are is like common culture.
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