

Ex-Googlers penetrating Silicon Valley startup hierarchy - grellas
http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_17574915?nclick_check=1

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nostrademons
I think one of the biggest obstacles to the formation of a "Google mafia" on
par with the PayPal mafia is that by-and-large, Googlers don't want to leave.
Many of the key figures in the development of the search engine are still
working on search, in high-up leadership positions. Googlers generally have a
fair bit of latitude to pick their projects, so if they don't like what
they're doing, they can do something else within the company instead of
leaving and taking on the risk of founding a company.

Contrast that to PayPal, where _the whole company_ was bought by a big,
established competitor, one that they'd roundly trounced in the marketplace
beforehand. Of course a lot of the employees will leave - the culture of a
place usually completely changes after an acquisition.

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joshu
There are a LOT of ex-googles startups out there. Not a huge number of
successful ones but they are around.

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PakG1
I'd be curious to know how many of those ex-Googler startups were founded by
xooglers that were first-100 employees. Any "startup mafia" would seem to be
made up mostly from people in that group.

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bfe
At least one startup comes to mind to qualify under that criterion, Friendfeed
(Paul Buchheit).

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jonburs
I find it a bit amusing that articles of this sort only evaluate people's most
recent pre-startup employment. Sure, the Beluga folk previously were at
Google. Two of the three started at Microsoft after college, however -- I
worked with them both bac then. Of those two one went straight from MS to
Google; the other had a more complicated path.

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tansey
There were only a handful of Paypal founders and virtually all were extremely
successful. There were 3,021 pre-IPO Google employees [1]. Seems like an
unfair comparison.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google>

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joshu
No we aren't.

(I am an investor in both Weatherbill and Optimizely. Hmm.)

