Alumni of PayPal · San Jose

PayPal Mafia

The original startup mafia. Early PayPal staff went on to found or fund LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Tesla, SpaceX and Palantir.

8alumni startups
8named on Labspie
10founders
TeslaElon MuskSpaceXElon MuskLinkedInReid HoffmanYouTubeChad Hurley, Steve Chen +1YelpJeremy Stoppelman, Russel SimmonsPalantirPeter ThielYammerDavid SacksAffirmMax LevchinPayPal

The companies

CompanyFounded by (PayPal alumni)FieldBased inValuation
Tesla
Electric vehicles, batteries and solar.
Elon MuskClimateAustin, United States–
SpaceX
Reusable rockets and the Starlink satellite network.
Elon MuskHardwareHawthorne, United States–
LinkedIn
Professional network, now part of Microsoft.
Reid HoffmanConsumerSunnyvale, United States–
YouTube
Video platform, acquired by Google in 2006.
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Jawed KarimConsumerSan Bruno, United States–
Yelp
Local business reviews.
Jeremy Stoppelman, Russel SimmonsConsumerSan Francisco, United States–
Palantir
Data integration and AI platforms for government and industry.
Peter ThielAIDenver, United States–
Yammer
Enterprise social network, acquired by Microsoft.
David SacksB2BSan Francisco, United States–
Affirm
Buy now, pay later lending at checkout.
Max LevchinFintechSan Francisco, United States–

Sources

More mafias

Alumni of OpenAI$1.03tn in unicorns

OpenAI Mafia

Researchers and leaders who left OpenAI have started several of the most valuable AI labs of the decade.

AnthropicSafe SuperintelligenceThinking Machines LabPerplexityAdeptCovariant+2
19 founders named8 startups
Alumni of Google DeepMind$19.1bn in unicorns

DeepMind Mafia

London's deepest bench of AI talent. DeepMind alumni now run labs in London, Paris, New York and the Bay Area.

Inflection AIMistral AIIsomorphic LabsLatent LabsIneffable IntelligenceH Company+2
11 founders named8 startups
Alumni of Google Brain$7.8bn in unicorns

The Transformer Eight

Six of the eight Google authors of "Attention Is All You Need" (2017), the paper behind today's language models, went on to found companies.

Character.AICohereSakana AIEssential AIInceptiveNEAR Protocol
7 founders named6 startups