I have two stories for you today.
Mafias of Silicon Valley
In 2002, eBay acquired Paypal, an online payments company, for $1.5 billion. Unfortunately, the founding members and early employees of PayPal couldn’t adjust to the new corporate culture. Shortly after the acquisition, they left eBay. A number of these ex-PayPal employees worked together to form wildly successful companies in subsequent years. You may recognize some of these names – Elon Musk founded Tesla and SpaceX, Reid Hoffman created LinkedIn, and Steven Chen built YouTube. This group of PayPal alumni became so prolific that a new term was coined for them –PayPal Mafia.
Fortune magazine popularised the term when it published a photo of these former PayPal employees in gangster attire.
The PayPal Mafia (Image Source: Wikipedia)
But PayPal mafia wasn’t the first Mafia group of Silicon Valley. The history goes back to a time when the Silicon Valley didn’t exist.
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