The first team that I built has become known in Silicon Valley as the “PayPal
Mafia” because so many of my former colleagues have gone on to help each other
start and invest in successful tech companies. We sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion
in 2002. Since then, Elon Musk has founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla Motors;
Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn; Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim
together founded YouTube; Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons founded Yelp;
David Sacks co-founded Yammer; and I co-founded Palantir. Today all seven of
those companies are worth more than $1 billion each. PayPal’s office amenities
never got much press, but the team has done extraordinarily well, both together and
individually: the culture was strong enough to transcend the original company.
Mafia” because so many of my former colleagues have gone on to help each other
start and invest in successful tech companies. We sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion
in 2002. Since then, Elon Musk has founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla Motors;
Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn; Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim
together founded YouTube; Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons founded Yelp;
David Sacks co-founded Yammer; and I co-founded Palantir. Today all seven of
those companies are worth more than $1 billion each. PayPal’s office amenities
never got much press, but the team has done extraordinarily well, both together and
individually: the culture was strong enough to transcend the original company.