The most famous gang in Silicon Valley: If you don't know the PayPal mob

PayPal

Do you know what Tesla Motors,linkedin,spacex,yelp,yammer has in common with these companies? In addition to their market capitalisation of more than 1 billion dollars, their founders are a PayPal gang (PayPal Mafia), if the history of Silicon Valley knows, you must have heard of the famous "gang." How is this gang formed and what is the profound impact on the culture of Silicon Valley? Today, the Programmer's Inn www.proginn.com to give you a steak.

　　The start of PayPal – like-minded partners

In 1998, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek founded Confinity, and the company's main business was to develop a mobile payment solution for PDA devices, but a confinity employee successfully developed an e-mail transfer method, This product eventually became the company's main product – the PayPal we know now. In March 2000, Confinity merged with rival X.com, and the company decided to use PayPal, the most popular product, as its official name.

When Peter Thiel started the company, he told Max Levchin that he wanted to create a company where everyone was a good friend, and no matter what happened in the company would not affect the friendship between each other, and this sentence is really used in PayPal's initial partner recruitment strategy. Thiel from Stanford to Keith Rabois (currently the square chief of Operations), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder), David Sacks (Yammer co-founder) and other friends, and Max Levchin also from his alma mater, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to join the students. This kind of staff introduced their recognized friends or classmates to join the recruitment method, so that the founding employees, in addition to the concept of the company, but also a lot of friendship and tacit understanding.

　　PayPal's growth and crisis – the test of stress resistance and loyalty

PayPal Services launched in February 2000 to the same year in April, the number of users grew from 100,000 to 1 million, the average daily increase of 5~7% users, two years to use more than 13 million people, PayPal light charge transaction fee revenue of more than 100 million U.S. dollars, although the surface looks very successful , but this growth rate is to use "money" heap out, because at that time in order to seize the market, as long as the user registered members can get 10 dollars, recommend a friend can get 10 dollars, plus the problem of network fraud, so the financial quickly appeared problems.

With the advent of the dotcom bubble, they do not have enough time and energy to think about the future, and the way to deal with stress is "crazy concentration", focusing on how to keep the ship from sinking every day. Diamonds and graphite are the same elements, the only difference is "pressure", this group of people also think of many ways to let PayPal survive. This time they stay together to face the pressure, some people are responsible for resisting ebay, some people are responsible for opening the market outside of ebay, but also because PayPal grew up very fast, this group of people is the same, eat together, work overtime together, rest, play games together, each other as the social circle of this time , which is one of the reasons why we can continue to see PayPal mafia when we leave.

Fortunately, despite the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000, e-commerce platforms such as ebay, Amazon and Zappos have been loved by users, and the number of Internet users has continued to climb, allowing PayPal to raise enough money to operate before the dotcom bubble, Even after the 911 terror attacks, announcing plans for an IPO and selling it to ebay for $1.5 billion in July 2002, although not everyone was satisfied with the decision to be bought by ebay, Peter Thiel still decided to sell PayPal after all the visits.

　　After leaving PayPal-mafia molding

After the sale of PayPal, because of organizational structure and corporate culture changes, the original elders have to take the dividends of the distribution left ebay, some people become investors began to invest in new ventures, some people start another entrepreneurial journey, they have the courage to venture and the ability to solve problems, So instead of being prepared for a successful situation, you are ready to put in more challenges.

The connections that have been made at PayPal have allowed this group of people to stay in touch with each other even when they leave ebay, and many of the early employees, like Chad Hurley and Mr Chen, were former PayPal colleagues when they started YouTube. And the first investment by Sequoia Venture Capital is by PayPal former financial long Roelof Botha, to later Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn Peter Thiel is also very important gold master. This group of people will support each other even in different places, either personally, in advice or financially, and that's why PayPal mafia more than Google and Microsoft. Unicorn "Company's place, if the proportion of employees to calculate the success of the establishment of 1 billion dollar value company PayPal is 350 times times Google.

Take a look at what PayPal Mafia has achieved in Silicon Valley these past few years, and you'll know why they're so amazing, and if the new startups they invest in will be even more impressive, such as the $500,000 angel money on Facebook, which is led by Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman also invested in Airbnb, Flickr and other well-known startups.

　　Shin Chong Co., Ltd.

Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons,yelp (IPO, Market capital of $3.5 billion. ）

David Sacks and Mark Woolway,yammer (purchased by Microsoft for $1.2 billion). ）

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen,youtube (Google buys for $1.65 billion). ）

Peter Thiel and former PayPal employee, Palantir (valued at $15 billion). ）

Reid Hoffman and former PayPal staff, LinkedIn (IPO, market capitalization of $31.5 billion. ）

Elon Musk,tesla (IPO, market capitalization of $26.1 billion) and SpaceX (valued at $12 billion). ）

　　VC and Accelerator

Peter thiel,founders Fund and Clarium Capital.

Reid Hoffman,greylock Partners.

Keith Rabois,khosla Ventures.

Roelof Botha, red shirt capital.

Dave mcclure,500 startups and angel investor.

Luke Nosek and Ken howery,founders Fund.

PayPal's success has allowed this group of people to learn all about their skills, their family-like emotions, and the rewards they have earned from PayPal, giving them the ability and experience to start a company, help their friends or other startups, and return what they get to the entrepreneurial environment. Such a positive cycle has made their group's achievements so prominent in Silicon Valley.

Of course, in addition to Silicon Valley, there are many places in the mafia, the earliest Skype was acquired by Microsoft, the group also brought money and experience back to Switzerland to cultivate local new creation, the United States, New York Tumblr by Yahoo's high-priced acquisition of the so-called Tumblr Mafia, the development of Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe and other well-known new ventures Y Combinator also gradually appeared YC Mafia, sharing experience and resources to help more people succeed.

The most famous gang in Silicon Valley: If you don't know the PayPal mob