Paypal Mafia Quotes

The founders of start-ups as varied as YouTube, Palantir Technologies, and Yelp all worked at PayPal. Another set of people—including Reid Hoffman, Thiel, and Botha—emerged as some of the technology industry’s top investors. PayPal staff pioneered techniques in fighting online fraud that have formed the basis of software used by the CIA and FBI to track terrorists and of software used by the world’s largest banks to combat crime. This collection of super-bright employees has become known as the PayPal Mafia—more or less the current ruling class of Silicon Valley—and Musk is its most famous and successful member.

Companies holding broad patents and trial lawyers specializing in class actions must have seen easy money when they looked at Paypal, and without laws to discourage frivolous lawsuits there was nothing to deter them.

Schumpeter chose the term "creative destruction" to describe the introduction of new innovations into the economy for a reason—as the case of PayPal shows, it's a strife-filled process. A half-dozen startup competitors were quick to follow PayPal's lea before eBay got in on the act. And that's just representatives of the so-called new economy. The fact that many banks either entered the online payments market directly or lobbied for regulations against it showed that the old guard was not prepared to go silently into the night.

Law enforcement generally seems a step behind in fighting online crime; if your customers are at risk, evidently you'll need to protect them yourself, and if the Russian mafia targets your company, you're the one who's going to have to defend it.

[...] government regulation will continue to pose a risk to PayPal into the foreseeable future.

Lingering fraud and regulatory problems aside, the post-integration PayPal is certainly better positioned now than it was during its starry-eyed startup days to revolutionize money transfers and wrest control of currencies away from corrupt governments.

PayPal staff pioneered techniques in fighting online fraud that have formed the basis of software used by the CIA and FBI to track terrorists and of software used by the world’s largest banks to combat crime. This collection of super-bright employees has become known as the PayPal Mafia—more or less the current ruling class of Silicon Valley—and Musk is its most famous and successful member.

From the start, I wanted PayPal to be tightly knit instead of transactional. I thought stronger relationships would make us not just happier and better at work but also more successful in our careers even beyond PayPal. So we set out to hire people who would actually enjoy working together. They had to be talented, but even more than that they had to be excited about working specifically with us. That was the start of the PayPal Mafia.

The regulatory system turned out to be perhaps the greatest obstacle for our young business. Once PayPal became a publicly traded company, regulators seemed willing to pursue their own agendas whenever the laws were murky.

the autonomous-driving side of things, Alphabet (formerly Google), which has logged several million self-driving-car test miles, continues to lead the pack. At the end of 2016, it created a new business division, called Waymo, for its autonomous driving technology. In May 2017, Waymo and Lyft announced that they would work together on developing the technology, and later in the year, Alphabet invested $1 billion in the start-up. Others, like Cruise Automation (which GM acquired for $1 billion) and Comma.ai, which offers open-source autonomous driving technology in the same vein as Google’s Android mobile operating system, are chasing hard. Baidu, China’s leading Internet search company, has an autonomous-driving research center in Sunnyvale. Byton—backed by China’s Tencent, Foxconn, and the China Harmony New Energy auto retailer group—has an office in Mountain View, as does Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-sharing company in which Apple invested $1 billion. Many of these companies have taken not just inspiration but also talent from Tesla. Part of the value of an innovation cluster like Silicon Valley lies in the dispersal of intellectual labor from one node to the next. For instance, PayPal is well known in the Valley for producing a number of high performers who left the company to start, join, or invest in others. The so-called PayPal Mafia includes Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn; Max Levchin, whose most recent of several start-ups is the financial services company Affirm; Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and President Trump–supporting venture capitalist who cofounded “big data” company Palantir; Jeremy Stoppelman, who started reviews site Yelp; Keith Rabois, who was chief operating officer at Square and then joined Khosla Ventures; David Sacks, who sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion and later became CEO at Zenefits; Jawed Karim, who cofounded YouTube; and one Elon Musk.

De modo que decidimos contratar a gente que realmente disfrutara trabajando junta. Tenían que ser personas talentosas pero lo más importante era que tenían que estar felices de trabajar específicamente con nosotros. Ése fue el comienzo de la Mafia PayPal.