David Sacks: How did the "PayPal Mafia" come together? Exclusive content | Supermanagers Podcast

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TRANSCRIPT
David Sacks (Craft Ventures):
I do get asked it a lot. It's some variation of the question what was in the water at PayPal? Right. And I think there was three things really, it was the people, the timing of it, and then what they learnt. So the people, the important thing to understand about the early PayPal team is as great as they later proved themselves to be, nobody thought much of us at the time. And, and as, and no one really wanted to work at PayPal, this is back in 99 2000, during the.com crash, it was considered a very speculative thing. People were not quitting jobs at, you know, large companies or McKinsey and so forth, to go do startups back then it wasn't like it is now where everyone wants to be at a startup. And really the only people we can convince to join the company were our friends. And so Peter recruited his friends from Stanford, I was one of them. We'd gone to college together, Max Levchin, who's CTO, recruited his friends from U of I.
And so and then I recruited people I knew and so on down the line, as a result of that, because the team really wasn't hired by Headhunters, but really, through a friendship network, we were all sort of cut from the same cloth, and you had a much more entrepreneurial type of person, at the company. And that's why, you know, you had all these founder personalities, really from the get go, is they were all kind of, you know, we were these, you know, more contrarian type personalities. So that was sort of reason number one. And then what happened is that when eBay took over the, when eBay bought PayPal, they kind of didn't do anything to retain the team. It was, it was like a very corporatist culture and Pay Pal was sort of more like a cowboy, sort of really traditional startup culture, you know, very startup B. And they didn't really make any efforts at retaining the key people. And so you had all these people for Pay Pal go off, to create their own companies. And we had done well, but we hadn't done so well, that everyone wanted to retire, they all had ideas, they want to keep doing new things.
So you had this mass exodus of talent at this timing, and remember, this was in late 2000, to 2003. PayPal was one of the few successful outcomes to survive the.com crash. So you had all you don't know this, but like 20 years ago, the joke was that b2b meant back to banking. And b2c meant back consulting, everybody was leaving Silicon Valley, okay, back in the early 2000s, because of the.com crash. And so, by contrast, you had this group of people who didn't experience the crash that way where they failed, they actually succeeded, they saw that it could be done, and then went off to create their own new companies, they almost had the landscape to themselves, because everyone else had left and then. And then the final piece of it was the playbooks that we had successfully figured out like how you do this, like, how you do Product Management at a startup, like how you hack distribution, like how you go viral.
You know, there were all these like tips and tricks and techniques that we learned at PayPal that then got deployed at our new companies. And so you had at a time when everyone else was leaving Silicon Valley, this group of very entrepreneurial people coming off a success, and doing their own things with a series of playbooks that nobody else knew. Because by the way, blogging didn't even start, I think, until maybe 2005. You know, like, today, there's a wealth of resources where anybody can go online and learn how to do a startup, whether you've been through an experience, like Pay Pal or not, but back in the early 2000s, that just wasn't available. And so you almost had this group of people with a special knowledge. And you put all those ingredients together, and they just went off and created all these amazing companies. And so I think it was a function of the people themselves, the timing, and then the playbooks that we have learned at PayPal.

[@xletytejada]

currently listening to 'The Founders' && I ❤ me some Sacks

[@hassandiallo5326]

Your take on Hedera, HBAR, please.

[@AM-nx2vm]

Narcissist, greedy, power hungry.

[@itsmel869]

sociopaths

[@AM-nx2vm]

BIDEN, TAX THIS BILLIONAIRE MORE.