PAYPAL MAFIA COMPANIES MOVIE

PAYPAL MAFIA COMPANIES MOVIE

David Sacks, PayPal’s chief operating officer, produced a movie called “Thank You For Smoking,” before starting, an online genealogy service, and then Yammer, a social media platform for businesses.Within a couple of years, PayPal execs Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons had co-founded Yelp executive vice president Reid Hoffman started LinkedIn and engineers Chad Hurley, Steven Chen, and Jawed Karim started YouTube, which Google bought in 2006 for $1.6 billion. Cisco Systems alumni have produced a string of startups, while Oracle has spawned countless business software companies.īut the reach of PayPal alumni compares favorably to those, and is more impressive if you consider that the company had only about 220 employees, not counting a mid-western call center. Almost every chip company in the valley, including Intel and AMD, can trace its roots to that group. It would be hard for any network to top the impact of the “Traitorous Eight,” the employees who left Shockley Semiconductor to start Fairchild Semiconductor. In a region built on networks, the PayPal Mafia ranks as one of the most significant in the history of Silicon Valley.

Several PayPal alums have started companies since that initial flurry, while others have moved onto their next start-up, or have re-invested their wealth into their former colleagues’ ventures. They earned the nickname several years ago when PayPal alums started a string of successful companies.īut the acquisition of Slide, which was started by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, got me thinking about how this network’s influence has continued to grow. That’s the alumni of the online payment company that went public in February 2002 and was acquired by eBay eight months later. Google’s purchase of social media company Slide for a reported $182 million earlier this month marked the latest triumph of a remarkable group of entrepreneurs and investors whose impact on Silicon Valley in the Web 2.0 era is unrivaled:

Paypal mafia companies