A Look at the PayPal Mafia’s Continued Impact on Silicon Valley
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
- country of origin (e.g. immigrants, I'd imagine a lot of them to be Indian or first or second generation immigrants of some sort)
- Domain/Field
- Applications/vs. accepted investments. I think the ratio might be a lot more important than the actual number of investments.
Tracking half that information is probably illegal in the US.
Another thing that rubs me the wrong way is the use of the word Mafia. I think clique is the right word. Sure, I would like to be a part of that club as well and yeah I'm jealous as well, but calling people that profited from a tech boom they actively participated in a criminal organization is a bit of a stretch.
- a hierarchically structured secret organization allegedly engaged in smuggling, racketeering, trafficking in narcotics, and other criminal activities in the U.S., Italy, and elsewhere. (in Sicily)
- ( lowercase )a popular spirit of hostility to legal restraint and to the law, often manifesting itself in criminal acts.
- a 19th-century secret society, similar to the Camorra in Naples, that acted in this spirit.
- ( often lowercase ) any small powerful or influential group in an organization or field; clique.
That said, "a popular spirit of hostility to legal restraint and to the law" sounds indistinguishable from how AirBnB, Uber & co operate.
And while the group is called PayPal Mafia, the article specifically keeps using that term over and over.
Besides the 5 times PayPal Mafia has been used in the article in compound there is a total 24 times the Mafia word has been used alone. That's a very clear framing of the article and most paragraphs contain it at least once.
The article certainly feels like the editorial stance in the Daily Bugle towards Spiderman given how they grasp so hard at a mere 2% difference and the guilt by association.
You don't need violence to run a Mafia. Makes things easier, yeah, but open violence primarily attracts cops.
On corporate scale, there are far more attractive and especially legal things available: use price dumping backed by cheap VC cash to force your competitors to either match or close down (which is the entire business model of Uber), buy up competitors before they get dangerous and/or copy popular ideas from them (just watch what FB did to Instagram and Whatsapp, and how it then used that mass to strangle Snapchat), prevent key employees from switching companies (which they all did via NDAs or secret agreements), buy up key suppliers or lock them into exclusive agreements (sort of what Tesla is attempting to do with the Gigafactory), force restaurant operators to pay with cash to have fraudulent "user reviews" removed, ...
They don't seem to be contributing either way, just following the status quo. Primary reasons may just as well lie elsewhere. Are less females trying to raise capital? Or are they raising capital differently that may cause this effect (different industries/motivations/methods)?
Last I checked there is nothing stopping women from doing what these guys did...
Why are these men the gate keepers to success? I don't know all of their stories but it seems that anybody can do what they did...
Edit: Added years these companies were founded.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
Now I think most people agree it's behind it's ceiling point. (most != all)
Of course before the first internet bubble also companies succeeded, but then when the bubble burst there was a dry phase.
The point of this article is how they invest their money not how they founded paypal
Further more, why is their money better for founding companies than somebody else's ?
On top of that. What is the suggestion? Sorry Uber I have already invested in my quota of companies founded by men ?
Even more being founders is not a job position nyou hire for. You have to have something to have a idea and plan. The assertion that they are telling women with amazing ideas that they won't invest them because they are woemen is silly.
Not every idea is a good one. They fund founders who they think have good ideas.
This whole article is silly and flame bait. I wish I had never replied.
> The assertion that they are telling women with amazing ideas that they won't invest them because they are woemen is silly.
The judgement of "amazing" is extremely subjective and vulnerable to unconscious bias on the part of those being pitched to.
Many millions are lost every year by friends and families helping start companies that fail.
As you've seen, there is a huge amount of luck involved as well.
Put another way, every interaction we have with other people, no matter how brief or long lasting, contributes to that person's "luck" based on whether those interactions ended up favorable or unfavorable. If there was a present unconscious bias in a group that slanted the probability of a person's interactions with everyone else in that group (even if it just slanted it a bit) due to a personal characteristic, that would manifest itself as "bad luck" for group of people that had this characteristic who received this statistical slight.
Even if I just read bits of information from Thiel's bio on wikipedia, I see quite a few "not everyone" moments:
" With financial support from friends and family, he was able to raise $1 million toward the establishment of Thiel Capital Management and embark on his venture capital career."
"his luck changed when Max Levchin, a friend of Nosek's, introduced him to his cryptography-related company idea, which later became their first venture called Confinity in 1998"
Many people have access to a million dollars, not many seem to have good ideas.
It's slightly odd that the article, which clearly intends to be pejorative, is focused on female founders when the data doesn't say anything interesting about female founders.
You've have thought with such a small dataset, they could have found something that appeared more damning.
The guy who was an outlier, supporting women founders twice as often as everyone else, was also forced to quit a position because of sexual harassment.