PayPal Mafia | Hacker News Reader

PayPal Mafia

en.wikipedia.org

162 pointsrobzyb63 comments

Elon Musk is missing from the famous photo (http://victorstuff.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/paypal.jpg) because he received an innovator of the year award in Chicago at the same time as when the picture was taken.

The YouTube founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, were not allowed to participate in the photo because the corporate handlers at Google didn't want them to be linked to the mafia ;)

Wow I had no idea you need your employer's permission to be in a photo..

You do when you work for Google and the picture is going to be in a magazine. :)

Or what, they'll get fired? Could a company do so without risk of a lawsuit?

Yes, it was probably part of their employment agreement, that all public appearances are at the approval of Google. That's pretty typical, even for an acquired startup.

And if they get fired with cause, they most likely loose a lot of their acquisition payout, so it is in their best interest to follow the rules.

And these guys are YouTube founders - pretty sure exceptions can be made for them. Also, they deserve to be in the photograph considering the relevance.

> And these guys are YouTube founders

And once they were acquired, no different than any other Google employee. That is the cost of "selling out" as they say.

Can't you get fired for pretty much anything in America?

It's crazy to think, in 10 years, who will be the grandchildren of these legends..

Lucky guy- dodged the bullet on that photo staying around for eternity

To be a great entrepreneur you have to build a Mafia around you. Every successful one I know (including my mother) has had to do that. If you can't do that you fail as an entrepreneur.

You build a Mafia, by being so motivated you out-execute everyone who bets against you and earn the respect of the smart people around you. The trick here is to surround yourself with smart people you can learn from in the first place.

A good startup Mafia picks its people veeery carefully and pulls in those it wants. (a people hire a people, b people hire c people). It forms through action, not job postings - you have to burn through the same fire everyone else in your group is made of. Which is why a great startup Mafia sticks together, and keeps leveraging the network to amplify its people in their second, third and fourth attempts, while drawing a clout of deal flow towards itself. Execution gets better and better, and deal-flow means they also see the best opportunities coming their way to the point where the usual odds don't apply anymore.

I'm reminded of the Traitorous Eight too.

Many times the restrictions placed on creative technologists can act as the fuse that triggers immense amounts of creativity when it is unleashed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

From what I heard growing up, Noyce was pretty much just like Elon.

These guys were able to cash out and start their own companies relatively soon after. I'm surprised we don't see this on a smaller scale amongst engineers in the valley. They get paid such high salaries they could easily fund little side ventures using designers and engineers from other parts of the country to build the products. They'd act as managers, overseeing the construction of their own app ideas while maintaining a full-time position at some company.

They wouldn't be employed long if they were consumed by running a side business. And who are these employees making enough to fund multiple other employers.

Such positive and negative... SpaceX and fucking Palantir...

I'm curious what you have against Palantir in particular. As far as government contractors go, they don't seem especially problematic.

muaha. read about HBGary. Palantir is scum of the earth. they participated in targeting Glenn Greenwald. only thing they haven't done is flying drones themselves to kill people. they are probably #1 in help NSA with their programs.

Palantir cut ties with HBGary.

If government/banks/etc are going to use tools to pursue their objectives, they could do much worse than use Palantir tools. One important feature of Palantir's tools is the "need-to-know" capabilities built-in to restrain dissemination.

well, I have about as much respect for them as people in the arms trade, oil or mercenary business. fact of the matter is they designed a program to target journalists. so they are actively building a distopian future. can you imagine where this goes in 10-20 years? the Western world is pretty much galloping to non democracy. how about building tools which improve democracy instead of destroying it? Peter Thiel, the libertarian. honestly all of these trends are really very troubling. I've worked in AI research, and is the top researcher in the field building? killer robots. brilliant.

The author of this Wikipedia entry will probably sleep with the phishes very soon.

Every time a fish is sold on eBay it'll be delivered to the author, and eBay will say "Delivered to customer".

"Arctic Startup" published an article recently about the #estonianmafia hashtag that was coined by none other than Dave McClure of the PayPal Mafia: http://arcticstartup.com/2014/01/28/tyler-crowley-dave-mcclu...

I expected a mafia which extorts businesses get the "protection money" via PayPal. But this is more impressive of course.

It's not what you know but who you know. But what you know about who you know helps too. ;)

That's an impressive list of overachievers.

http://www.foundersfund.com/

Talk about hiring the best people.

But I thought Silicon Valley was a meritocracy where connections didn't matter!! [/troll]

Look back 4 or 5 years prior to the founding of X.com/Confinity/PayPal: Elon Musk was a South African-born undergrad at Pennsylvania, Peter Thiel was a German-born lawyer trading derivatives at Credit Suisse, and Max Levchin was a Ukrainian-born undergrad at Illinois. Now, which comes first in Silicon Valley: merit or connections?

> Elon Musk was a South African-born undergrad at Pennsylvania

Who first emigrated to Canada, where he attended Canada's most prestigious business school for two years before transferring to the United States' most prestigious business school.

> Peter Thiel was a German-born lawyer trading derivatives at Credit Suisse

After which he ran his own hedge fund for two years, then co-founded PayPal.

These guys certainly had more merit than many people, but to hold them up as people who succeeded with merit over connections is silly.

Musk first arrived in Canada alone at 17 with very little money and worked manual labor jobs to make ends meet. When he first got to Silicon Valley he basically spent his first six months there locked away in his room coding the initial version of Zip2 which he co-founded with his little brother. What more do you want to decide someone succeeded by their own intelligence and drive as opposed to connections?

Can we agree that, to a certain extent, both are necessary?

How about, can we agree that when you spend years achieving great successes, you tend to form relationships of trust with high-performing colleagues who learn to value your drive and intelligence and to look forward to helping you or working with you again?

That still seems like a boundary value at one end of the personal merit vs. connections continuum of drivers of success, as contrasted with the other end of the continuum, which we might define as being a VP at JP Morgan because your dad is on the politburo standing committee of the PRC.

Cannot agree more.

Knowing how to do business networking is a talent and a skill that can be trained, so I would say being well connected is a subset of this thing called meritocracy.

FFS, why would people with merit not have connections?

Many of them were pretty well-connected even pre-PayPal, mostly in finance. Peter Thiel, for example, was a already a hedge-fund manager by the time he co-founded PayPal.

Obviously connections matter. Trying to hire the best people is much much harder if you don't have connections to make the introductions and vouch for you.

Right, but there is a pervasive belief that tech (and particularly Silicon Valley) is purely meritocratic - despite all evidence to the contrary.

What is 'pure meritocratic'? I don't know how you would even come up with a definition where everyone agrees that a system should be judged by 'these given rules' to be declared 'pure meritocratic'. At the end, life is much more nuanced.

E.g. let's say we both decide to create competitor to Yelp. We both are smart, driven and we will produce a high quality, spam free alternative to Yelp. However, we need funding to achieve this goal. We both went to school with someone who is now partner at VC firm. But I was his very good friend v/s you, who was just a classmate to him. He is very well aware that both of us are smart, hard working individuals. Who do you think is he going to fund? Do you think it's un-meritocratic for him to pick me over you?

Life is not black and white, it has five million shades of grey. We do not have perfect solutions for everything but rather a 'best solution' for the situation at end.

I believe that Silicon Valley is the most (not pure) meritocratic place on earth.

This is similar to the debate of capitalism. Capitalism is not perfect, it has many problems. But compared to all the other alternatives human race have tried (socialism, anarchism, communism), it is the best option.

The two aren't opposites, hiring someone you've worked with before and who's skills you've seen in action is different from hiring your drinking buddy regardless of their skill level.

You can create that 'meritocratic rep' by creating something that not many other people can do, with software. As you become involved in the community providing value, people would want to work with you more just by the results of your work. That is what is meant by 'meritocratic'.

I really like that the folks at Github recently changed their stance on this. http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug

[edit] Wow, those comments. Lewis' Law in action... maybe I should have linked somewhere else.

Had to look up Lewis' Law:

"the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Lewis_(journalist)#Lewis....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning

I think it's sad, mostly.

The rug is really cute. I hadn't seen it before; I wish they'd kept it.

I think "meritocratic" also means that if I'm good, I can ask someone, who will refer me to someone, who will refer me to someone who will give me a job / invest in my startup, because the people recommending trust each adjacent link in the chain that it won't suggest someone who isn't good.

Such recommendations, on average, might be even better than job interviews as a way to find talent.

That's baloney, no one thinks that. Connections matter but if you're good, you can get good jobs, found companies and raise money.

Connections may not matter, but being super smart and having a lot of money certainly helps.

Also... connections matter.

Of course connections do matter. They are actually very important. You need to hire. You need to market. You need to sell.

And who is actually saying that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy?

[ I did noticed, that VCs and especially incubators will sometimes say that "connections didn't matter" and they only "invest based on meritocracy" because they want show to others (the next people in chain of investment) that they always fund "best of the best". But VCs and incubators are investors so why to take their view of society as correct? ]

I don't care. I want my space rocket and electric car!

Seems like Yelp took the "Mafia" part a little too seriously...

So, did PayPal actually kick-off the Silicon Valley?

You've gotta watch Steve Blank's "The Secret History of Silicon Valley". Goes back to its post-war roots in 40's and 50's. A real gem and quite surprising.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

Thanks!

Silicon Valley as a startup hub is much older than PayPal. Indeed, Silicon Valley was a major startup hub (in hardware) before most of the PayPal founders were born.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/pla...

This was an amazing documentary and one of my favorites.

Not to pile on, but it's called Silicon Valley, not If-Statement Valley. :)

Is this a serious question?

Technology companies in that part of California date back as far as the 1930s.

HINT: Look up Fairchild Semiconductor

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