PayPal mafia: What did they went on to build?

What is common between Tesla, LinkedIn, Yelp and YouTube? The founders of these companies have worked at PayPal.

Many of the early employees of PayPal went on to build tech companies and venture capitals, founding, funding and building successful companies after eBay bought PayPal.

1. Peter Thiel (PayPal founder): Founded Confinity in 1999 which later merged with X.com to become PayPal. Thiel cofounded big data analysis firm Palantir in 2003. He was one of the early investors of Facebook.

2. Max Levchin (PayPal cofounder and CTO): After eBay bought PayPal, Levchin founded a media-sharing service called Slide, which Google later bought. He was an early investor in Yelp and founded fintech company Affirm.

3. Ken Howery (PayPal cofounder and CFO): After eBay bought PayPal, Howery stayed on as eBay’s director of corporate development until 2003. After PayPal’s acquisition, he served as cofounder and partner of Founders Fund alongside Peter Thiel.

4. Elon Musk: Founded x.com which merged with Thiel’s Confinity to become PayPal. Most of all the PayPal mafia, Musk went on to oversee companies like Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink.

5. Roelof Botha (PayPal’s director of corporate development, vice-president of finance, CFO): Botha is now a partner at Sequoia Captial. He is one of the top tech investors and served on board at companies like Square, Weebly, Tumblr, Instagram and YouTube.

6. Reid Hoffman (board of directors at PayPal, COO): Founded LinkedIn. Hoffman was an early investor in Facebook, Flickr, Care.com and many more. In 2017, he joined the board of Microsoft.

7. Russell Simmons and Jeremy Stoppleman: Simmons was an engineer and Jeremy was the vice president of technology after joining PayPal from X.com. They founded Yelp.

8. Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen: They met at PayPal during its early days. Karim and Chen were engineers whereas Hurley was a web designer. In 2005, the trio launched YouTube.

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