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PayPal Mafia
- GDC7 5y agoThe Paypal mafia run paypal into the ground. Peter Thiel was the only sane person on that boat, as soon as he was put at the helm he did the only sensible thing: Clear the deck and offload the ship to a bigger fool. Not exactly an heroic move. The whole genuflection towards the product of survivorship bias is very cringe. I still think that the SV intelligencia does this in order to cater to an audience who'd buy thier books and invite them on podcasts. Because otherwise....man it's really not that different from the gym goers who'd offer thier wives in tribute to Arnold if they could. At least those guys have some six pack that comes with their cult to show for.
- parhamn 5y agoI really hate the use of 'survivorship bias' these days. It makes it seem like everything is just happenstance and nothing is consequential. Ask someone who uses the term, "what would be the indicator, this wasn't just survivorship?" and they rarely do come up with something. You can blame any success on survivorship. It's silly to do so.
- runawaybottle 5y agoIt’s also worth noting that a whole lot of them survived and made decent products. In fact, I’d say way too many of them survived for it to be a coincidence. If you think about most of our lives, little to no one makes it out alive from a company. The bosses get the money and the workers mostly stay workers indefinitely at the same company or at another one. This group somehow made sure they would never be workers again.
- GDC7 5y ago> what would be the indicator, this wasn't just survivorship? "From now on can you please fail on purpose?" 6 months later: "Okay, back to pursuing success" 3 months later: "Please could you start failing on purpose again?" 5 months later: "Back to pursuing success, please." 10 months later: "Please fail until you are back being a nobody" X years later: "Okay let's get back to the top again"
- WanderPanda 5y agoInterestingly survivorship/success is an unbiased estimator of merit imo. The actual survivorship bias comes from the high variance and only looking at the surviving/successful stories.
- GDC7 5y ago> Interestingly survivorship/success is an unbiased estimator of merit imo If that is the case, can you fail on purpose?
- WanderPanda 5y agoYes you can produce noise, I guess
- pbreit 5y agoThis seems like a gross representation of pretty much everything. The concept of "PayPal Mafia" as what they did AFTER PayPal (YouTube, LinkedIn, Yammer, Palantir, Yelp, Affirm, OpenDoor, Tesla, Spacex). Ebay bought PayPal for $1.5b and spun it out for $40b. Not exactly foolish.
- mcrittenden 5y agoI just finished reading "Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley" which has a whole section on the PayPal Mafia. I never realized how influential that group was to startup culture.
- exogeny 5y agoI would strongly posit that influence was a bad thing, unless you think following the example of someone who told a gay professor to die of AIDS is a good thing.
- bserge 5y agoThe beauty of the Internet: you say one stupid thing (possibly under influence) to one person and you're literally Hitler forever.
- Sebguer 5y agoOne stupid thing? The person later reiterated their stance as: "I don’t necessarily hate homosexuals, but do believe in Jack Kemp’s suggestion that they may not be the best teachers of young children in public schools and recognize that the spread of AIDS has a direct causal link back to their activity."
- Ansil849 5y agoNotably, the man who said that is now married to a man himself.
- gremloni 5y agoOn a side note, that’s the worst name for a book I’ve heard in a while. The content is probably just modern feminist drivel.
- roenxi 5y agoThe most stunning moment in my life was when I realised that in a world of ~7 billion souls a group of about 30 people could have such an oversized impact. It is no joke to think how few people would need to be swapped around to reshape the face of the internet. Seeing things like this also makes me think that it is risky to attack successful people and companies.
- vmception 5y agoits more about what the attack's consequences are, which can be done more holistically. the consequences can be giving up board seats to outsiders or a union, and giving up a bunch of shares in every settlement. that will make the chairs and CEOs take society more seriously, or wind up with the people telling the company what to do
- WanderPanda 5y agoHow can people still believe that this would work (without a protectionism <-> productivity decline vicious cycle)?
- vmception 5y agoStill? I’ve never seen it proposed before so would love to see the existing conversations on the topic. Countries that already have something similar are productive, the differences are that quarterly profits arent obsessed over and valuations arent as stretched as a “consequence”. So who cares? Ooohh noo productivity declined because some ridiculous impossible quarterly goal wasnt met, not the strongest counterpoint
- parhamn 5y agoThere will always be just a few leaders. This feels similar to lauding 500 CEOs for the success of the US S&P -- it's missing a ton of the picture as the organizations they ran and the teams were massive. To be fair, most of this list is good investors which makes sense (they had a strong exit at a good time). Very cool seeing the makers/innovators like Elon go on to make cool things. For example, I'm convinced the space industry would've been totally different if not for him. I doubt the VC space would've changed too much without FoundersFund et al.
- Atlas667 5y agoAll you gotta do is be a sellout to three letter agencies.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoIs the world they have created better? Is this a photo of robber barons or liberators? > By the late 19th century, the term was typically applied to businessmen who used exploitative practices to amass their wealth.[2] These practices included exerting control over natural resources, influencing high levels of government, paying subsistence wages, squashing competition by acquiring their competitors to create monopolies and raise prices, and schemes to sell stock at inflated prices to unsuspecting investors. Wow this sounds so familiar.
- 127 5y agoI'm a little confused on what you're proposing of them robbing?
- travisjungroth 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
- 88840-8855 5y agoI'm a regular consumer from Germany. PayPal is the best payment tool here. it's free of charge (for me), ist instant, ist available pretty everywhere. And the protection is just superb. PayPal has handled fraudulent cases or just very bad shopping experience very well. The added value to me over bitcoin, direct transfer, credit cards, etc is so significant that i always love to use it. hence, PayPal has contributed to a better life, at least to my digital life.
- paulpauper 5y agoYeah now how about from merchant,s perspective
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoI receive almost all of my income via PayPal, and have done so for more than a decade. I could complain about the APIs, the clunky website and the very occasional odd behavior, but in the broad picture, PayPal offers me wider global coverage than any other payment processor, and a micropayment fee schedule that makes it viable to get paid mostly in amounts of US$1 to US$10. It could be done better, but PayPal does it well enough.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- numair 5y agoAll of the conspiracy theories and hero-worshipping etc ignore the basic, boring reality of how these concentrations of power emerge: half the work is showing up. There was a time that you had to beg and plead with people to take websites and the Internet seriously. Nobody wanted to show up. These guys showed up. The rest is history.
- paulpauper 5y agoThe internet was a tiny niche...for a year or two. By 1998 it blew up. It,s not like there was not intense competion 24 years ago.plenty of ppl showed up but few made a lot of money
- dragonwriter 5y ago> The internet was a tiny niche...for a year or two. By 1998 it blew up. That's more than a year or two into the internet (and even the Web.)
- johannes1234321 5y ago> That's more than a year or two into the internet (and even the Web.) Around 1998 was the time when Microsoft started pushing it out of the geek space into mainstream, but AOL and CompuServe were still around. This was when Microsoft pushed the "Active desktop" and other things. However the Internet still was of united use for most people. eBay was founded only in 1995, Amazon in 1994. And global expansion took time. People still used 28.8 Baud or 56k Modems. ADSL wasn't broadly available, yet. Sure, some companies started using it as a communication network between offices, universities and geeks used it. But all in a relatively small niche.
- xyzzyz 5y agoYes, and after 2000 it was again a niche for a while (though not quite so tiny). The collapse of dot com bubble also resulted in lack of faith in internet based businesses in general, lack of investment and difficult market conditions. The landscape of 2003 was much different than that of 2013, when internet startups again were fully en vogue.
- 11thEarlOfMar 5y agoHow much of their many successes is due to abilities versus timing? The period they invested their initial PayPal fortunes in was in the nasccent Web 2.0 era. They had the benefit of capital from the PayPal exit, plus an up to date understanding of modern web capabilities, plus the initial open source platforms and leverage, plus a great deal of learning about what didn't work in the .COM 1.0 bubble. Plus intelligence, inventiveness and drive.
- lisper 5y agoSuccess is always a result of a confluence of abilities and circumstances. There has to be a good impedance match between what you can do and the state of the world so that what you do is exactly what the world needs at that point in time. Too early or too late and you fail.
- xyzzyz 5y agoThere were thousands of others who also started companies at the time, and yet have not enjoyed success, seeing their companies go into bankruptcy in the nascent 2.0 era.
- toomanybeersies 5y agoAfter PayPal, most of these blokes would've had a good amount of personal capital to use in future ventures. Much easier to make a million bucks when you have a million bucks.
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- toomanybeersies 5y ago> Musk later became a co-founder of Tesla Inc Are series A financiers now considered co-founders?
- Ekaros 5y agoIf they pay for that fact long after company has been founded... What is more capitalistic than buying the history after all...