23 Jul The Inspirational Story of the Paypal Mafia.

This Guy (Max Levchin from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

pitched an idea for a mobile device money transfer service to this guy (Peter Thiel).

Peter said cool, let’s do this. Then they buy X.com, which was founded by some dude named Elon Musk.

They decide to name the company:

The company goes public in 2002 and this company buys them:

Then this is where it get’s interesting. The Paypal employees hated the eBay corporate structure. Within 4 years, half of the first 200 employees quit.

This guy gets fired at Paypal:

Yes, Fired. He made a ton of money anyway and started 2 companies:

The first one is ya know, just some sort of car that only runs on electric.

Just whatever. Then he decides that he needs to do more. So he creates another company that makes spaceships:

Just spaceships, no big deal. NASA SHMASA. They also break some records about being the only company to return a spaceship from low earth orbit. Boring stuff, really. Then they attached the thing to the International Space Station. Nothing you can’t see on Youtube. Anyway, this guy

decides he ain’t done yet either. Invests an early $500,000 in this company:

for 10.2% of the company. He got ripped off if you ask me, but whatever. What’s a billion when you got millions?

These guys (2 Paypal engineers and designer):

said “we’re bored with our lives, let’s create something new.” They quit and create this company:

Which then gets bought out by this company:

Russel Simmons (left),

who was one of the first Paypal engineers has a conversation with a dinner that Max held.

What do they talk about? Out of all the things in the world to talk about, they talk about how hard it is to find a dentist. What else are they going to talk about? So Russell creates this company with another person with some funding from Max:

It’s just a site full of pissed off people ranting about food. The executive vice president of Paypal, Reid Hoffman:

says screw this, I’m going to do something new. Starts this company (thanks!):

The former, COO David O. Sacks decides to join in on the party. So he creates:

Yishan Wong, engineering manager at Paypal. He’s just another dude that can code. Nothing special.

He now becomes the CEO of a website that I’m totally not addicted to:

Product Manager Premal Shah becomes founding president of:

and finally Former Marketing Director Dave Mcclure:

starts:

If this doesn’t inspire you to get up and do something, I don’t know what will.

Main Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia. If you want the full list of key members of the Paypal mafia use the wikipedia link.

—

PS: Read the only resignation letter template you’ll ever need.