Experience is only as good as it gives you the proper foundations to build on, not as the roof that sets your potential and limits. They didn’t consider experience as just pure benefit, oppositely to what we are used to seeing in the corporate world. “We also realized that assembling a crew of people who are very smart, very fast learners was kind of key to success to a startup as opposed to trying to get someone who had you know if they had ten years experience doing something that’s great, but the more fundamental characteristic is would they learn fast on the new problems and challenges“ They praised that skills to a certain extent, not for the sake of just learning, but as the foundation that allows you to be adaptable, which is crucial in the dynamic and ever-changing world of startups. The most fundamental aspect is the ability to learn fast new things and new ways of doing things. They found common ground and drew a couple of conclusions, especially considering success in the world of technology and startups. Peter Thiel in the conversation with Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn on Startups for Forbes, reminisced the story of PayPal and its crucial success factors. “What we had learned from the kind of PayPal experience was a really interesting learning and that you could actually go revolutionize an industry with people who are really smart, working hard, and deploying a technology that people hadn’t seen before“ - Reid Hoffman Being adaptable and fast learner as the foundations. And I wanted to understand what happened there and then also to understand what little imprints did it leave or what are some of the stories that time forgot?“Īnd the learnings from the PayPal mafia can be applied not only in the startup world but as guides and mental models overriding our thinking patterns and decision-making process in various areas of our lives. “What happened if you had an entire company of some of the most interesting, brightest minds from that era that all work in one place? That couldn’t have been an accident. And the question Jimmy Soni asked himself is: The history of PayPal is the story of the young, most interesting, and greatest minds from the late 1990s who work on new technologies in one place. Jimmy went in-depth about the PayPal story, connecting the dots and trying to draw conclusions that made the entrepreneurs who shaped Silicon Valley such successful. I studied the PayPal mafia and took a couple of valuable takeaways and revelations that I think could serve you well.Īdditionally, I wholeheartedly recommend Jimmy Soni's book "The Founders". Learning *exactly* what happened there, why, and whether/how we can reliably replicate it seems like it could be the most important meta problem in the world. The PayPal mafia is ridiculously understudied. The inspiration for this blog post was one of the tweets that I came across and found highly insightful: And studying what exactly was behind the PayPal Mafia could have a crucial effect and impact on our lives, not only in terms of careers but as a whole path. But there must be something special that happened in the early days of PayPal that set their members on such a successful path after leaving the origin company. The list of these people makes a great impression. Steve Chen, Jawed Karin, and Chad Churley - co-founders of YouTube To give a sense of how successful the PayPal mafia is, I’ll name a few most famous members: The imprint these young, successful, and highly-driven people left is remarkable, not only in Silicon Valley but in the whole space of startups and technology. Most of the PayPal Mafia members attended Standford University or the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. PayPal Mafia is the famous term for a group of former PayPal founders and early employers who brought PayPal into existence and then founded or developed a lot of successful tech companies such as YouTube, Tesla, LinkedIn, Yelp, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, Yammer, and so on.
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