
A Look at the PayPal Mafia’s Continued Impact on Silicon Valley - pionerkotik
https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/13/a-look-at-the-paypal-mafias-continued-impact-on-silicon-valley/
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rjzzleep
Maybe I live in a bubble, but IMHO investment statistics shouldn't be divided
in only male and female. I'd also be interested in:

\- country of origin (e.g. immigrants, I'd imagine a lot of them to be Indian
or first or second generation immigrants of some sort)

\- Domain/Field

\- Applications/vs. accepted investments. I think the ratio might be a lot
more important than the actual number of investments.

Tracking half that information is probably illegal in the US.

Another thing that rubs me the wrong way is the use of the word Mafia. I think
clique is the right word. Sure, I would like to be a part of that club as well
and yeah I'm jealous as well, but calling people that profited from a tech
boom they actively participated in a criminal organization is a bit of a
stretch.

\- a hierarchically structured secret organization allegedly engaged in
smuggling, racketeering, trafficking in narcotics, and other criminal
activities in the U.S., Italy, and elsewhere. (in Sicily)

\- ( lowercase )a popular spirit of hostility to legal restraint and to the
law, often manifesting itself in criminal acts.

\- a 19th-century secret society, similar to the Camorra in Naples, that acted
in this spirit.

\- ( often lowercase ) any small powerful or influential group in an
organization or field; clique.

~~~
pluma
The article indicates that this is what the group is already known as, it
didn't come up with the term.

That said, "a popular spirit of hostility to legal restraint and to the law"
sounds indistinguishable from how AirBnB, Uber & co operate.

~~~
rjzzleep
I don't disagree and to be honest Uber did actually operate like a Mafia.
Although I don't know if that's still the case. Rarely do we read it being
labeled that way however.

And while the group is called PayPal Mafia, the article specifically keeps
using that term over and over.

Besides the 5 times PayPal Mafia has been used in the article in compound
there is a total 24 times the Mafia word has been used alone. That's a very
clear framing of the article and most paragraphs contain it at least once.

~~~
Nasrudith
While I won't deny that Uber has a tendency to be scofflaws and engage in
dubious business practices it stinks of hyperbole unless there were cases of
extortion and outright murder we don't know about (even if they were negligent
in self-driving car deaths that doesn't qualify).

The article certainly feels like the editorial stance in the Daily Bugle
towards Spiderman given how they grasp so hard at a mere 2% difference and the
guilt by association.

~~~
mschuster91
> unless there were cases of extortion and outright murder we don't know about

You don't need violence to run a Mafia. Makes things easier, yeah, but open
violence primarily attracts cops.

On corporate scale, there are far more attractive and especially legal things
available: use price dumping backed by cheap VC cash to force your competitors
to either match or close down (which is the _entire business model_ of Uber),
buy up competitors before they get dangerous and/or copy popular ideas from
them (just watch what FB did to Instagram and Whatsapp, and how it then used
that mass to strangle Snapchat), prevent key employees from switching
companies (which they all did via NDAs or secret agreements), buy up key
suppliers or lock them into exclusive agreements (sort of what Tesla is
attempting to do with the Gigafactory), force restaurant operators to pay with
cash to have fraudulent "user reviews" removed, ...

------
soft_dev_person
So 13 percent of their investment targets had at least one female founder
which corresponds with the industry as a whole quite closely (15.5 percent).

They don't seem to be contributing either way, just following the status quo.
Primary reasons may just as well lie elsewhere. Are less females trying to
raise capital? Or are they raising capital differently that may cause this
effect (different industries/motivations/methods)?

------
mbrumlow
> The Mafia is all-male and has been accused of contributing to the lack of
> women in the technology industry

Last I checked there is nothing stopping women from doing what these guys
did...

Why are these men the gate keepers to success? I don't know all of their
stories but it seems that anybody can do what they did...

~~~
pjc50
Asserting that "anyone can do X" and then observing that very few people do X
in reality: don't you think there's a contradiction here?

Even if I just read bits of information from Thiel's bio on wikipedia, I see
quite a few "not everyone" moments:

" With financial support from friends and family, he was able to raise $1
million toward the establishment of Thiel Capital Management and embark on his
venture capital career."

"his luck changed when Max Levchin, a friend of Nosek's, introduced him to his
cryptography-related company idea, which later became their first venture
called Confinity in 1998"

~~~
mbrumlow
None of those seem to have anything to do with gender...

Many people have access to a million dollars, not many seem to have good
ideas.

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discopicante
The story would be more (or less) compelling if a comparison was made to a
wider group of VCs and/or an index of VCs who are credited for investing in
female founders.

~~~
lucozade
The article does mention a Crunchbase study that found that startups in
general have roughly the same proportion of female founded startups as Paypal
alumni funded, female founded, startups.

It's slightly odd that the article, which clearly intends to be pejorative, is
focused on female founders when the data doesn't say anything interesting
about female founders.

You've have thought with such a small dataset, they could have found something
that appeared more damning.

~~~
dwighttk
As a group they invest in women slightly less often, though not
extraordinarily less.

The guy who was an outlier, supporting women founders twice as often as
everyone else, was also forced to quit a position because of sexual
harassment.

