

The PayPal mafia - bandris
http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/13/magazines/fortune/paypal_mafia.fortune/index.htm

======
kilik
There were a lot of these industry insider, self-congratulatory articles
floating around the media back in 1999. The only difference then was that the
Sopranos was only in it's first season so it was not yet considered cool to do
a photo shoot in which you posed as an organized crime figure.

GIVE ME A BREAK.

Articles like this make me think that the latest tech boom is already over.
This is just a trailing indicator.

~~~
drubio
This article also gave me an eery 'deja vu' feeling, even though PayPal is not
a startup anymore.

I would also consider it a bad omen having it featured on CNN and Fortune.

~~~
marvin
Well...some of them are creating very valuable, tangible services. SpaceX is
an obvious candidate, Sequoia is obviously doing very valuable things, Tesla
Motors are successful outside of the ephemeral social networking world...

I actually think it looks like these guys have incredible talents for creating
value. Some of it could be foam, but most of it isn't.

------
plinkplonk
From the cnn article

"Musk became CEO of the combined company and decided it was time for a
technological overhaul. Specifically, he wanted to toss out Unix and put
everything on a Microsoft platform.

That may sound innocent enough to laypeople but not to Unix zealots like
Levchin and his team. A holy war ensued. Musk lost. The board fired him and
brought back Thiel while Musk was on a flight to Australia for his first
vacation in years."

In Founders At Work, Levchin says

    
    
                                   " The guy who ran X.com became the CEO, and

I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix.

So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was
convinced that Windows was where it's at and that we have to switch to
Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I
wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix.

    
    
         By summer 2000, it seemed like the Windows thing was going to happen because Peter was gone. He took a sabbatical to make sure there were no clashes between the CEOs. 
    

So, this other guy was pushing me toward accepting that Windows was going to
be the platform. I said, "Well, if this is really going to happen, I'm not
going to be able to provide much value, because I don't really know anything
about Windows. I went to a school that was all Unix all the time, and I spent
all my life coding for Unix."

I had this intern that I hired before the merger, and we thought, "We built
all these cool Unix projects, but it's kind of pointless now because they are
going to scrap the platform. We might as well do something else." So he and I
decided we were going to find ourselves fun projects. We did one kind of mean
project

where we built a load tester package that would beat up on the Windows proto-
type (the next version was going to be in Windows). We built a load tester
that would test against the Unix platform and the new Windows one and show in
beautiful graphs that the Windows version had 1 percent of the scalability of
the Unix one. "Do you really want to do that?"

So it looks like what happened was a bit different from what the cnn article
implies - that Musk was ousted because he had philosophical differences with
Levchin. I doubt the idea of replacing unix with windows on a heavily server
centric system was a "philosophical" mistake. Sounds like a typical PHB
decision to me.

    
    
     levchin actually compared Windows vs Unix performance and even used "beautiful graphs".  :-)

------
wschroter
All that ass kissing aside in the article, it really is amazing how many
people blossomed from that one startup. It's cool to see people that make a
ton of jack and yet are still very young and idealistic about the world.
Thiel's singularity ideas may sound "off" in mainstream media but the fact
that he can still manage the money and resources to support those ideas in a
meaningful way is sweet.

------
byrneseyeview
"Thiel and Levchin also wanted workaholics who were not MBAs, consultants,
frat boys, or, God forbid, jocks."

It's a small sample, but the guy who wrote "The Paypal Wars"
([http://www.amazon.com/PayPal-Wars-Battles-Media-
Planet/dp/09...](http://www.amazon.com/PayPal-Wars-Battles-Media-
Planet/dp/0977898431/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195073176&sr=8-1))
was a consultant before getting hired by Paypal.

------
choward93
'We can't hire the guy. Everyone I knew in college who liked to play hoops was
an idiot.'

This rule still applies.

~~~
adrianwaj
Still don't know what 'hoops' are.. does that make me a genius?

~~~
dcurtis
Hula hoops, of course!

------
adrianwaj
I'd say that the PayPal mafia have personal enemies - from those whose
accounts they illegitimately cancelled, and resulted in sites like:
<http://www.paypalsucks.com/>

~~~
ivankirigin
Many big, often quality services inspire sites like that. It doesn't take much
to be hated.

~~~
dcurtis
But PayPal's service was so horrible that I think some people called in bomb
scares to the eBay offices.

Actually, I think this just happened again yesterday, but I don't know if it
was attributed to PayPal.

------
edw519
Who knows, maybe in a few years: the Y Combinator mafia?

~~~
ereldon
Which one of the YC partners will wear the thick gold chain currently on Reid
Hoffman's neck?

[http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0711/gallery.pay...](http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0711/gallery.paypalmafia.fortune/4.html)

~~~
pg
Trevor, unquestionably.

