Produced by Odaily
Author | Sui Xin, Cha Liang, Lu Xiaoming
Editor | Lu Xiaoming
Editor | Lu Xiaoming
The Facebook blockchain team is forming their "little PayPal gang".
In order to lay out the blockchain, the social giant Facebook has specially formed a new blockchain department based on its corporate structure. Now it seems that the lifeblood of this project is in the hands of members of the "Paypal Mafia".
Among them, the largest proportion (one-fifth) is the former Paypal employee, also known as the "PayPal gang". Such a team composition is related to the head of the department. David Marcus, who formed the Facebook blockchain team, was the president of Paypal, so he is naturally more familiar with Paypal's culture and employees.
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Silicon Valley's Most Powerful Entrepreneurial Gangster
The term PayPal Mafia ("PayPal Mafia") was first coined by Fortune magazine in 2007 to refer to a group of former PayPal employees and founders.
PayPal, a payments company in Silicon Valley, has lost most of its employees since it was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.
After they left PayPal, they participated in the creation or investment of almost all well-known technology companies in the world, including Facebook, Youtube, Tesla, LinkedIn, Yelp, Flickr, Mozilla, Airbnb, etc. Even hundreds of billions of dollars.
The "PayPal gang" has also become the most widely connected and influential group of people in Silicon Valley. Six of its members have become billionaires.
These people include real-life Iron Man and Tesla founder Elon Musk, YouTube founding member Steve Chen, and LinkedIn founder Hoffman.
Among them, of course, the godfather of the gang, that is, PayPal founder Peter Thiel. He is perhaps more well-known as a venture capitalist, having invested in quite a few unicorns. His early $500,000 investment in Facebook for a 10 percent stake is now worth billions of dollars.When it went public in 2001, PayPal had revenues of just $50 million a quarter and employed 600 people. from employees
In terms of the ratio of successful unicorn creation, PayPal is 350 times that of Google.
In other words, the high success rate of the Paypal gang’s re-entrepreneurship is eye-catching. As early as 2007, Fortune magazine sorted out their investment “landscape” which was already very large.
This staggering entrepreneurial success rate stems from the Paypal gang itself.
The experience of working together at PayPal obviously established some kind of trust or bond for them. The godfather played by Maran Brando advocates the loyalty of helping each other and relying on each other within the gangster family."Basically, we were kicked out of our homes and our temples were destroyed. So we were scattered all over the world and had to build new homes." David Sacks, former Paypal COO and former Yammer CEOThe home of the mouth is Paypal
, the destroyer is eBay.
After the merger into eBay, the corporate culture and structure seemed to have made PayPal's employees feel at a loss. Most of the key employees chose to leave eBay, but their bonds remained, staying in touch and helping each other.
"The PayPal Mafia is a network through which we can develop our business more smoothly, make our distribution more smooth, and we can better compete with other companies, including defeating banks and so on.
…Different businesses have their own distinct networks. There is a trait here that is about entrepreneurship. As a network, the main influence comes from the first 100 people...they have the real core resources, and at PayPal Mafia we were founded by the first people. "From one of the above Paypal Mafia eldersIt can be seen that the Paypal gang is a bit like an alumni association or an entrepreneur club in China. In the technology industry where entrepreneurship is a near-death experience, the PayPal gang has a higher entrepreneurial success rate than any entrepreneurial club.
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Unique corporate culture: meaningless meetings cannot survive three minutes
Why Are the PayPal Mafia So Successful?
All this may be attributed to Paypal's unique corporate culture. Only a strong enough company can nurture so many outstanding investors and entrepreneurs.media summary,
PayPal's corporate culture is: anti-mainstream.
Crazy and sharp words are the labels of the founders. For example, 4 of the 6 founders of PayPal built bombs in high school. For example, their employees will not be MBAs, consultants, fraternity members, or athletes, because the founder believes that "everyone I knew in college who liked to play basketball is an idiot."
Founder Peter Thiel takes a completely open approach, allowing all employees to see data on customer records, revenue streams, fraud losses, and capital expenditures.Then COO David Sacks established a principle:. Sacks would sit in for three minutes whenever he found a meeting in the company. If he felt that it was of no value, he would immediately interrupt the meeting. Under the influence of this corporate culture, the number of PayPal managers has been greatly reduced.
David Sacks summed up PayPal's entrepreneurial philosophy in an interview in 2011:
First, there is never a professional recruiting or headhunting firm to recruit employees, but a viral recruitment model, using the employee network to recruit. Therefore, the members they absorb have the same entrepreneurial passion and wisdom as the founders.
Secondly, I never believe in any entrepreneurial taboos, but regard trial and error as a process of accumulating experience. The more mistakes you make, the closer you are to success.
Also, insist on retaining visionary founders instead of hiring "professional" managers and leveraging the big company's platform to market your product.
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Finally, don't hire someone who left a big company if you don't want to throw the company into chaos. Because they usually like to do things according to the inherent patterns they have developed, and they are also used to making excuses that trying new things makes him unable to work normally. None of Yammer's top 15 employees jumped ship from other big companies.
Levchin, one of the founders, said, "We recruited people from our own private network. At that time, the technology bubble was about to burst, so everyone wanted to find a safe job, and going to a startup company was considered It’s a very scary thing. But almost half of the people we’re looking for come from a failed company. Because we’re looking for people who are very, very risk-taking.”Well, the secret of PayPal's success is to gather such a large group of the brightest and most motivated young people, and then put them into the wild to realize their greatest potential.
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Can Facebook's little Paypal gang recreate the myth?
Facebook's blockchain team is forming their "little PayPal gang" — that's how Bloomberg describes what's happening with Facebook's blockchain team.
David Marcus, who was responsible for the formation of Facebook's blockchain department, was previously the president of PayPal, and was later hired by Mark Zuckerberg to Facebook in 2014 as the head of Facebook Messenger products.
David Marcus has publicly stated that he "really likes Bitcoin", and served as a member of the Coinbase board of directors from December 2017 to August 2018.
He started to form this blockchain group in May 2018, exploring how to apply blockchain technology to Facebook's business from scratch. Soon, Marcus brought some old PayPal employees to join Facebook's blockchain group.
So far, 10 of the 50-member team have come from the Paypal gang, many of whom hold key positions.
Among them: Christina Smedley, former vice president of global brand and communications at PayPal, who later joined Facebook Messenger, where she will play a key role in the marketing and promotion of Facebook's eventual blockchain product; previously worked on risk monitoring and fraud at PayPal Tomer Barel, who has been working for ten years; John Muller, who has worked in PayPal and eBay for nearly 20 years. According to people familiar with the matter, John Muller will serve as the general counsel of Facebook Group.
Zheng Li, a financial analyst, analyzed Facebook's poaching strategy, "After Facebook hired former PayPal president David Marcus to run Messenger in 2014, it has been hoping to develop financial services. However, in the past year, Alipay and WeChat Pay are consolidating their businesses and going global, while Facebook has been stagnant and remains a digital advertising company.”
Today, Facebook's blockchain ambitions are another wild field for the small PayPal gang to venture out again.
Reference article:
Facebook’s Blockchain Team Is Assembling Its Own Mini-PayPal Mafia
How did the toughest "PayPal gangster" in Internet entrepreneurship come into being
How the 'PayPal Mafia' redefined success in Silicon Valley
The PayPal Mafia: Who are they and where are Silicon Valley's richest group of men now?
How the 'PayPal Mafia' redefined success in Silicon Valley
Why The PayPal "Mafia" Was So Great: Yammer CEO David Sacks Explains
"PayPal gangsters" meet in China, what do they think of "unicorns"?
Inventory of the legendary entrepreneurial stories of members of the "PayPal gang"
