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PayPal Mafia
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David Sacks is having an excellent Memorial Day weekend
David Sacks, the former COO of PayPal turned first Hollywood producer and now CEO of Geni.com, seems to be enjoying himself. Even if, we suspect, he's not following his own advice about Twitter and alcohol.
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appearances
paypal mafia
Here's the real takeaway from Fortune's long-expected profile of the PayPal mafia: "Peter Thiel has a butler." The former PayPal CEO is living large in Pacific Heights. But he's hardly idle. With PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, masterminding a wide array of startups founded by some of his star hires at the payments company he sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. He's now on the board of Facebook, with a stake worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and stakes in Yelp, LinkedIn, Slide, and others besides. He may not quite be the capo di tutti capi imagined by Fortune's photo editors — who cleverly staged a Godfather-inspired shoot, above — but he's created a gang that can run free from the rules of the traditional VC game. Sand Hill Road hates him for it. I say, more power to him — and the rest of his mafiosi. (Photo of Thiel and Levchin by Robyn Twomey/Fortune; Godfather still from IMDB)
Is Peter Thiel Silicon Valley's godfather?
Here's the real takeaway from Fortune's long-expected profile of the PayPal mafia: "Peter Thiel has a butler." The former PayPal CEO is living large in Pacific Heights. But he's hardly idle. With PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, masterminding a wide array of startups founded by some of his star hires at the payments company he sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. He's now on the board of Facebook, with a stake worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and stakes in Yelp, LinkedIn, Slide, and others besides. He may not quite be the capo di tutti capi imagined by Fortune's photo editors — who cleverly staged a Godfather-inspired shoot, above — but he's created a gang that can run free from the rules of the traditional VC game. Sand Hill Road hates him for it. I say, more power to him — and the rest of his mafiosi. (Photo of Thiel and Levchin by Robyn Twomey/Fortune; Godfather still from IMDB)
jackpot
Max Levchin has more money, less sleep than you
Sunday's New York Times profile of PayPal and Slide founder Max Levchin tackles the phenomena of serial entrepreneurs. What makes them start multiple companies after a multimillion-dollar IPO or sale? The short answer: Money, but not in the way that you think. Levchin talks about how Slide's exit needs to be more than the $1.5 billion PayPal received, plus inflation, for him to be pleased with the outcome. (Look no further than fellow PayPal Mafia membes Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who sold YouTube for a PayPal-topping $1.65 billion, for another example of this behavior.) Netcape cofounder Marc Andreessen, who was interviewed for the article, points out the obvious in Silicon Valley: No one here really cares about money in the consumption sense, but everyone cares about having more than the other guy. San Francisco society blog SF Luxe begs entrepreneurs to become conspicuous in their consumption, and we'd like to agree. It's more fun for the rest of us. More »
followup
More PayPal Mafia mugshots
Thanks to commenter yarbles, we were alerted to evidence of two more members of the PayPal Mafia posing, like YouTube founder Jawed Karim, in mafioso costumes. Pictured, above, Yelp cofounders Russell Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. (Stoppelman's the one with the fake mustache. At least, we hope it's fake.) Any more evidence out there? Join the gang.
picture of the day
The PayPal Mafia personified
Seen here, in YouTube founder Jawed Karim's Facebook profile page, the current Stanford grad student (and former PayPal engineer) dressed in disco-era gangster gear. The reason? Karim comments:lol — yes there is a story. basically a magazine is doing a story about the "PayPal mafia" — a group of ex-PayPal people who have worked together to create companies after PayPal. they took a group photo of us posing as mafia guys, so everyone underwent a full transformation for the photo ;)Why Karim? We've heard that YouTube's better-known founders, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, were missing from the shoot. We're sure that the magazine wanted at least one representative from last year's $1.65 billion acquisition — a purchase price, some have noted, that seems carefully calibrated to be 10 percent higher than the $1.5 billion PayPal went for. We bet Google's unimaginative PR drones nixed the gangster-gear appearance. More »
