Originally, PayPal was a money-transfer service offered by a company called
Confinity, which was acquired by
X.com in 1999. Later, X.com was renamed PayPal and purchased by
eBay in 2002.[3] The original PayPal employees had difficulty adjusting to eBay's more traditional corporate culture and within four years all but 12 of the first 50 employees had left.[4] They remained connected as social and business acquaintances,[4] and a number of them worked together to form new companies and venture firms in subsequent years. This group of PayPal alumni became so prolific that the term PayPal Mafia was coined.[3] The term[5] gained even wider exposure when a 2007 article in Fortune magazine used the phrase in its headline and featured a photo of former PayPal employees in gangster attire.[5]
Members
Individuals whom the media refers to as members of the PayPal Mafia include:[5][4]
Peter Thiel, PayPal founder and former chief executive officer who is sometimes referred to as the "
don" of the PayPal Mafia
Jeremy Stoppelman, former vice president of technology at PayPal who later co-founded Yelp
Yishan Wong, former engineering manager at PayPal, later worked at
Facebook, became the CEO of
Reddit, and founded Terraformation Inc.
Yu Pan, was one of the co-founders of PayPal and played a role in designing the company's user interface and user experience. Who later involved in
private ventures and some of the successful startups.
Legacy
The PayPal Mafia is sometimes credited with inspiring the re-emergence of consumer-focused Internet companies after the
dot-com bust of 2001.[7] The PayPal Mafia phenomenon has been compared to the founding of
Intel in the late 1960s by engineers who had earlier founded
Fairchild Semiconductor after leaving
Shockley Semiconductor.[3] They are discussed in journalist
Sarah Lacy's book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. According to Lacy, the selection process and technical learning at PayPal played a role, but the main factor behind their future success was the confidence they gained there. Their success has been attributed to their youth; the physical, cultural, and economic infrastructure of
Silicon Valley; and the diversity of their skill sets.[3] PayPal's founders encouraged tight social bonds among its employees, and many of them continued to trust and support one another after leaving PayPal.[3] An intensely competitive environment and a shared struggle to keep the company solvent despite many setbacks also contributed to a strong and lasting camaraderie among former employees.[3][8]
Politics
Some members of the group, such as Peter Thiel, David O. Sachs and Elon Musk, later expressed
libertarian and
conservative political views.[9]