4 ms·

A Look at the PayPal Mafia’s Continued Impact on Silicon Valley

50 points by pionerkotik 8y ago

mbrumlow 8y ago
> The Mafia is all-male and has been accused of contributing to the lack of women in the technology industry Last I checked there is nothing stopping women from doing what these guys did... Why are these men the gate keepers to success? I don't know all of their stories but it seems that anybody can do what they did...
- rebuilder 8y ago
  It seems hard to leverage wealth made in the early days of the IT boom for power if you didn't gain that wealth back then in the first place.
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    When was this IT boom exactly? Cause we got companies like Facebook (2004), Slack(2013), GitHub (2008 - now Microsoft, but that's a testament to their success), Atlassian (2002) and others who are still growing and expanding. Edit: Added years these companies were founded.
    - rebuilder 8y ago
      Paypal - 1998.
    - rjzzleep 8y ago
      They're talking about PayPal mafia [1] in the article. So it's specifically about PayPal, Confinity and X.com. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com
      - giancarlostoro 8y ago
        "IT boom" sounds more generic though so I wasn't sure, I am not as familiar with the PayPal Mafia term till this article came about. I may of heard it briefly in the past and dismissed it. I was aware of some of those people running PayPal once upon a time, but I didn't really think too much about it.
    - erikb 8y ago
      Shortly after 2008 till around 2017 was when Silicon Valley, HN, and the start-up world in general surged heavily. Now I think most people agree it's behind it's ceiling point. (most != all) Of course before the first internet bubble also companies succeeded, but then when the bubble burst there was a dry phase.
- lexs 8y ago
  > Why are these men the gate keepers to success? The point of this article is how they invest their money not how they founded paypal
  - mbrumlow 8y ago
    And my point is they founded companies without taking money from themselves. So anybody else should be able to do the same as they did. Further more, why is their money better for founding companies than somebody else's ? On top of that. What is the suggestion? Sorry Uber I have already invested in my quota of companies founded by men ? Even more being founders is not a job position nyou hire for. You have to have something to have a idea and plan. The assertion that they are telling women with amazing ideas that they won't invest them because they are woemen is silly. Not every idea is a good one. They fund founders who they think have good ideas. This whole article is silly and flame bait. I wish I had never replied.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Thiel got started with just a million dollars from his family. Surely anyone can do that, right? > The assertion that they are telling women with amazing ideas that they won't invest them because they are woemen is silly. The judgement of "amazing" is extremely subjective and vulnerable to unconscious bias on the part of those being pitched to.
      - mbrumlow 8y ago
        So you are telling me these were the only guys ever to have friends and family with that sort of cash to help out ? Many millions are lost every year by friends and families helping start companies that fail.
        pjc50 8y ago
        > Many many many millions are lost every year by friends and families helping start companies that fail. As you've seen, there is a huge amount of luck involved as well.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Asserting that "anyone can do X" and then observing that very few people do X in reality: don't you think there's a contradiction here? Even if I just read bits of information from Thiel's bio on wikipedia, I see quite a few "not everyone" moments: " With financial support from friends and family, he was able to raise $1 million toward the establishment of Thiel Capital Management and embark on his venture capital career." "his luck changed when Max Levchin, a friend of Nosek's, introduced him to his cryptography-related company idea, which later became their first venture called Confinity in 1998"
  - mbrumlow 8y ago
    None of those seem to have anything to do with gender... Many people have access to a million dollars, not many seem to have good ideas.
rjzzleep 8y ago
Maybe I live in a bubble, but IMHO investment statistics shouldn't be divided in only male and female. I'd also be interested in: - country of origin (e.g. immigrants, I'd imagine a lot of them to be Indian or first or second generation immigrants of some sort) - Domain/Field - Applications/vs. accepted investments. I think the ratio might be a lot more important than the actual number of investments. Tracking half that information is probably illegal in the US. Another thing that rubs me the wrong way is the use of the word Mafia. I think clique is the right word. Sure, I would like to be a part of that club as well and yeah I'm jealous as well, but calling people that profited from a tech boom they actively participated in a criminal organization is a bit of a stretch. - a hierarchically structured secret organization allegedly engaged in smuggling, racketeering, trafficking in narcotics, and other criminal activities in the U.S., Italy, and elsewhere. (in Sicily) - ( lowercase )a popular spirit of hostility to legal restraint and to the law, often manifesting itself in criminal acts. - a 19th-century secret society, similar to the Camorra in Naples, that acted in this spirit. - ( often lowercase ) any small powerful or influential group in an organization or field; clique.
- pluma 8y ago
  The article indicates that this is what the group is already known as, it didn't come up with the term. That said, "a popular spirit of hostility to legal restraint and to the law" sounds indistinguishable from how AirBnB, Uber & co operate.
  - rjzzleep 8y ago
    I don't disagree and to be honest Uber did actually operate like a Mafia. Although I don't know if that's still the case. Rarely do we read it being labeled that way however. And while the group is called PayPal Mafia, the article specifically keeps using that term over and over. Besides the 5 times PayPal Mafia has been used in the article in compound there is a total 24 times the Mafia word has been used alone. That's a very clear framing of the article and most paragraphs contain it at least once.
    - Nasrudith 8y ago
bunkydoo 8y ago
They arent a 'mafia' if they have 0 whacks under their belt
discopicante 8y ago
The story would be more (or less) compelling if a comparison was made to a wider group of VCs and/or an index of VCs who are credited for investing in female founders.
- lucozade 8y ago
  The article does mention a Crunchbase study that found that startups in general have roughly the same proportion of female founded startups as Paypal alumni funded, female founded, startups. It's slightly odd that the article, which clearly intends to be pejorative, is focused on female founders when the data doesn't say anything interesting about female founders. You've have thought with such a small dataset, they could have found something that appeared more damning.
  - dwighttk 8y ago
    As a group they invest in women slightly less often, though not extraordinarily less. The guy who was an outlier, supporting women founders twice as often as everyone else, was also forced to quit a position because of sexual harassment.
soft_dev_person 8y ago
So 13 percent of their investment targets had at least one female founder which corresponds with the industry as a whole quite closely (15.5 percent). They don't seem to be contributing either way, just following the status quo. Primary reasons may just as well lie elsewhere. Are less females trying to raise capital? Or are they raising capital differently that may cause this effect (different industries/motivations/methods)?

50 points by pionerkotik 8y ago

> The Mafia is all-male and has been accused of contributing to the lack of women in the technology industry Last I checked there is nothing stopping women from doing what these guys did... Why are these men the gate keepers to success? I don't know all of their stories but it seems that anybody can do what they did...

rebuilder 8y ago
It seems hard to leverage wealth made in the early days of the IT boom for power if you didn't gain that wealth back then in the first place.
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  When was this IT boom exactly? Cause we got companies like Facebook (2004), Slack(2013), GitHub (2008 - now Microsoft, but that's a testament to their success), Atlassian (2002) and others who are still growing and expanding. Edit: Added years these companies were founded.
  - rebuilder 8y ago
    Paypal - 1998.
  - rjzzleep 8y ago
    They're talking about PayPal mafia [1] in the article. So it's specifically about PayPal, Confinity and X.com. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confinity [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com
    - giancarlostoro 8y ago
      "IT boom" sounds more generic though so I wasn't sure, I am not as familiar with the PayPal Mafia term till this article came about. I may of heard it briefly in the past and dismissed it. I was aware of some of those people running PayPal once upon a time, but I didn't really think too much about it.
  - erikb 8y ago
    Shortly after 2008 till around 2017 was when Silicon Valley, HN, and the start-up world in general surged heavily. Now I think most people agree it's behind it's ceiling point. (most != all) Of course before the first internet bubble also companies succeeded, but then when the bubble burst there was a dry phase.
lexs 8y ago
> Why are these men the gate keepers to success? The point of this article is how they invest their money not how they founded paypal
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  And my point is they founded companies without taking money from themselves. So anybody else should be able to do the same as they did. Further more, why is their money better for founding companies than somebody else's ? On top of that. What is the suggestion? Sorry Uber I have already invested in my quota of companies founded by men ? Even more being founders is not a job position nyou hire for. You have to have something to have a idea and plan. The assertion that they are telling women with amazing ideas that they won't invest them because they are woemen is silly. Not every idea is a good one. They fund founders who they think have good ideas. This whole article is silly and flame bait. I wish I had never replied.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Thiel got started with just a million dollars from his family. Surely anyone can do that, right? > The assertion that they are telling women with amazing ideas that they won't invest them because they are woemen is silly. The judgement of "amazing" is extremely subjective and vulnerable to unconscious bias on the part of those being pitched to.
    - mbrumlow 8y ago
      So you are telling me these were the only guys ever to have friends and family with that sort of cash to help out ? Many millions are lost every year by friends and families helping start companies that fail.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        > Many many many millions are lost every year by friends and families helping start companies that fail. As you've seen, there is a huge amount of luck involved as well.
pjc50 8y ago
Asserting that "anyone can do X" and then observing that very few people do X in reality: don't you think there's a contradiction here? Even if I just read bits of information from Thiel's bio on wikipedia, I see quite a few "not everyone" moments: " With financial support from friends and family, he was able to raise $1 million toward the establishment of Thiel Capital Management and embark on his venture capital career." "his luck changed when Max Levchin, a friend of Nosek's, introduced him to his cryptography-related company idea, which later became their first venture called Confinity in 1998"
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  None of those seem to have anything to do with gender... Many people have access to a million dollars, not many seem to have good ideas.

rjzzleep 8y ago

Maybe I live in a bubble, but IMHO investment statistics shouldn't be divided in only male and female. I'd also be interested in: - country of origin (e.g. immigrants, I'd imagine a lot of them to be Indian or first or second generation immigrants of some sort) - Domain/Field - Applications/vs. accepted investments. I think the ratio might be a lot more important than the actual number of investments. Tracking half that information is probably illegal in the US. Another thing that rubs me the wrong way is the use of the word Mafia. I think clique is the right word. Sure, I would like to be a part of that club as well and yeah I'm jealous as well, but calling people that profited from a tech boom they actively participated in a criminal organization is a bit of a stretch. - a hierarchically structured secret organization allegedly engaged in smuggling, racketeering, trafficking in narcotics, and other criminal activities in the U.S., Italy, and elsewhere. (in Sicily) - ( lowercase )a popular spirit of hostility to legal restraint and to the law, often manifesting itself in criminal acts. - a 19th-century secret society, similar to the Camorra in Naples, that acted in this spirit. - ( often lowercase ) any small powerful or influential group in an organization or field; clique.

pluma 8y ago
The article indicates that this is what the group is already known as, it didn't come up with the term. That said, "a popular spirit of hostility to legal restraint and to the law" sounds indistinguishable from how AirBnB, Uber & co operate.
- rjzzleep 8y ago
  I don't disagree and to be honest Uber did actually operate like a Mafia. Although I don't know if that's still the case. Rarely do we read it being labeled that way however. And while the group is called PayPal Mafia, the article specifically keeps using that term over and over. Besides the 5 times PayPal Mafia has been used in the article in compound there is a total 24 times the Mafia word has been used alone. That's a very clear framing of the article and most paragraphs contain it at least once.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago

bunkydoo 8y ago

They arent a 'mafia' if they have 0 whacks under their belt

discopicante 8y ago

The story would be more (or less) compelling if a comparison was made to a wider group of VCs and/or an index of VCs who are credited for investing in female founders.

lucozade 8y ago
The article does mention a Crunchbase study that found that startups in general have roughly the same proportion of female founded startups as Paypal alumni funded, female founded, startups. It's slightly odd that the article, which clearly intends to be pejorative, is focused on female founders when the data doesn't say anything interesting about female founders. You've have thought with such a small dataset, they could have found something that appeared more damning.
- dwighttk 8y ago
  As a group they invest in women slightly less often, though not extraordinarily less. The guy who was an outlier, supporting women founders twice as often as everyone else, was also forced to quit a position because of sexual harassment.

soft_dev_person 8y ago

So 13 percent of their investment targets had at least one female founder which corresponds with the industry as a whole quite closely (15.5 percent). They don't seem to be contributing either way, just following the status quo. Primary reasons may just as well lie elsewhere. Are less females trying to raise capital? Or are they raising capital differently that may cause this effect (different industries/motivations/methods)?