![]() ![]() ![]() However, he soon became more interested in another startup called Confinity, which had its headquarters down the street from his Palo Alto office. In 1999, Elon Musk founded a company called X.com, which he originally conceived as a “one-stop shop” for financial services. Comment what’s your opinion about this information “Why So Many CEOs Started Off at PayPal”.Originally published at on October 12, 2020. The PayPal mafia went on to create seven “unicorn” companies – privately held start-ups valued at over $1 billion. And not only survive but thrive which goes to show how important networking and surrounding yourself with the right people really are. PayPal was one of the few start-ups to survive the crash. There was even talk in Silicon Valley that consumer tech might be dead. The dot-com bubble of the late nineties destroyed the dreams of many when it burst in the early 2000s. There were few investors looking to write cheques at the time. Thiel would walk away with more than $1 billion dollars. He reportedly arranged the first meeting between Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg which led Thiel to smartly invest half a million dollars into Facebook in return for a 10% stake. If you wanted to start a company, this was the guy to know. Some PayPal executives went on to become prolific angel investors, like Hoffman. Botha then got Sequoia to invest in YouTube. Bathoa is a partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that has backed big names like Apple and Google. Rabois later told PayPal’s former chief financial officer, Roelof Bathoa, about it. While at a backyard BBQ, Karim showed the site to his friend, Rabois, the former PayPal executive. And that’s where their PayPal connections came in handy. Karim uploaded the first-ever video to YouTube, “Me at the zoo”, on Apwhich now has almost 200 million views! But the bond between three PayPal bros wasn’t enough to make YouTube successful. And Jawed Karim helped with both the design and the programming. Three former PayPal employees came up with the idea for a video sharing platform when they couldn’t find any videos of the famous Superbowl halftime incident involving Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson in 2004.Ĭhad Hurley designed the logo and look of YouTube. Others put their money into supporting startups by PayPal alumni. Musk took his $180 million in PayPal earnings from the eBay sale to become one of the major funders of Tesla while also starting his rocket company SpaceX. He reportedly sent an email to Tesla employees saying large meetings are a waste of time.Īnd people are free to walk out of one or drop off a call if they’re not adding anything of value. This is something Elon Musk has taken to heart as CEO of Tesla. There was great emphasis on individual accomplishment and as a result, COO David Sacks wasn’t a fan of big meetings. As Reid Hoffman, a former executive vice-president at PayPal put it: “Nothing focuses your attention quite like losing money.” And the focus was the name of the game.įormer PayPal executive Keith Rabois explained on the question and answer site Quora that PayPal was driven by the “extreme focus” of each individual on a single task. They had to deal with fraud, stiff competition from credit card companies as well as eBay’s own payment system. They had to figure out how to stop PayPal from losing millions of dollars each month. ![]() The problems they solved at PayPal served them well as they built their own companies. That got Jeremy Stoppelman, a former VP of engineering at PayPal, and Russel Simmons, one of the brilliant engineers behind PayPal, talking about a website where people could review services. At one point the conversation turned to how hard it was to find a good dentist. Most of the friends who showed up to Levchin’s 29th birthday at an upscale Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco were former PayPal colleagues. The pace at PayPal was so intense that employees didn’t have a life outside of work. A start-up involves long hours and a lot of pressure, but not a lot of sleep. And very importantly, they hired workaholics. ![]()
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