David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, yeah, I think that’s interesting. Okay. I’ve got it. Well, I really want to dive in here. This is somewhat related to the acquisition but I think we would just be remiss if we didn’t really talk about… I mean, for me, this is the PayPal Mafia. I think you could make a very valid argument. It might even be hard to argue against a thesis that this single event, this acquisition of PayPal by eBay was the catalyst to create everything that we now know of as Silicon Valley and the technology startup ecosystem. We’ll unpack this but just the chain of events set in motion by this acquisition is really incredible, when you think about the people that were at PayPal. There’s a great article on the Tech Republic – we’ll link to it in show notes – it’s titled, I believe, How the PayPal Mafia Redefined Success in Silicon Valley. Many of the founders of PayPal talk about how they were all these incredibly young ambitious people and they’ve just been through this super difficult but exhilarating experience at PayPal where they had to figure out a whole bunch of stuff that it had never been done before. Like we were saying, it was really hard. Then they made a bunch of money and then they showed up at eBay, and it was a complete culture clash, and they hated it there, and they all left quickly. But they were all still really young and ambitious and wanted to prove themselves. So I’m going to talk about two sets of companies here. The first are companies founded by PayPal alums: LinkedIn, Yammer, Yelp, YouTube, Palantir, SpaceX, Tesla, and then Reddit was not founded by YouTube alums but it was the CEO of Reddit for a while, Yishan Wong was YouTube alum or a PayPal alum. So that company is actually founded by this group of people. Then, other companies in Silicon Valley and related environs where PayPal Mafia alumni were very early investors or advisors instrumental in starting the company – Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, Square, Pinterest, Stripe and it just goes on and on and on. Yeah.…

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