Rebirth of the Internet Overlord

Abstract: Since Paypal was sold to eBay for US$1.5 billion in 2002, most of its important employees have left to start their own businesses. As a result, Paypal has become the company with the largest number of entrepreneurs in the history of Silicon Valley. These people are known as the Paypal gang. Let’s talk about it today.

We take a peek at the entrepreneurial stories of gangsters that amaze the world.

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Before talking about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, we have to say that Chinese entrepreneurs have undergone earth-shaking changes in the past two or three years. There are fewer and fewer grassroots entrepreneurs who have achieved remarkable achievements (it is difficult to have people like Jack Ma, Ma Huateng, Robin Li, Shi Yuzhu, etc.)

A group of older generation Internet grassroots entrepreneurs such as Zhou Hong and Ding Lei have emerged). The mainstream entrepreneurs are from first-line Internet companies, such as BAT, 360, Huawei, Sina, NetEase, Shanda, etc. The latter are in these large companies

After working for a certain period of time, they have gained product development, business models, user habits and needs, and financial freedom. Coupled with their circle and popularity, they have more advantages when starting a business, and their survival rate is also much higher. Among them are representative

There are many examples, such as Momo, Changba, yy, etc.

But far away in the United States, Silicon Valley has already experienced such mature changes. As early as 2002, people who left large companies began to embark on the road of entrepreneurship and achieved remarkable achievements in the near future. Among them, there is one thing that is most worthwhile.

What is thought-provoking is the circle, and it is used diligently by the PayPal gang. Therefore, PayPal has become the company with the largest number of entrepreneurs in the history of Silicon Valley, including the famous Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Chen Shijun, Reid Hoffman, Jeremy Stoppelman (Yelp CEO

) are among them. They are wild and uninhibited, dare to fight and fight hard, and they can be said to have turned Silicon Valley upside down. It can also be said with certainty that without them, Silicon Valley would be different. In the past ten years, they have created many

There are investment funds, Internet companies, new energy and electric vehicle companies, and some more imaginative things, such as a company developing Mars.

The alternative culture of paypal gangsters

If you don’t understand the origins and culture of the PayPal gang, then it will be difficult for you to understand their achievements. Some people would say that there are many important investors and founders from large companies such as Microsoft, Google and Oracle, but it can be said that

Alternative paypal is different:

When it submitted its prospectus for its initial public offering at the end of 2001, PayPal had only 600 employees. In its last quarterly financial report as a listed company, PayPal's revenue was only about $50 million.

Therefore, it is indeed surprising that the employees cultivated by Paypal can have the current strength. Although we are surprised, we are also looking for the subjective reasons. The summary is as follows:

The six founders of PayPal are all quite crazy. Four of them built bombs in high school. You should know that three of them are from communist countries: China, Ukraine, and Poland. This shows how unique this group of people is.

Founder Peter Thiel's leadership style is also unique. During his time at Paypal, he adopted a completely open approach, allowing all employees to see data on customer records, revenue streams, fraud losses, and capital expenditures.

Chief operating officer David Sacks established a "no unnecessary meetings" policy for Paypal. To put it simply, he became a "meeting policeman." Once an internal meeting is discovered within the company, Sacks will observe for three minutes. If he feels that there is no meeting,

value, he would immediately interrupt the meeting. Under the influence of this corporate culture, the number of Paypal managers has been greatly reduced.

Their employees will not be MBAs, counselors, fraternity members, or athletes because every basketball player the founders knew in college was an idiot. In other words, they are hiring people who are similar to themselves.

They have never hired professional recruitment or headhunting companies to recruit employees. Instead, they adopt a viral recruitment model and use employee networks to recruit. Therefore, the members they recruit have the same entrepreneurial passion and wisdom as the founders.

They never believe in any entrepreneurial taboos, but regard trial and error as a process of accumulating experience. The more mistakes they make, the closer they are to success.

Insist on retaining visionary founders rather than hiring "professional" managers and leveraging the platforms of large companies to market their products.

If you don’t want the company to fall into chaos, don’t hire people who quit big companies. Because they usually like to do things according to the established patterns they have developed, and they are also used to making excuses about trying new things that prevent them from working properly. They run around.

It's probably just to gain benefits and positions, and you're not sure how much he can learn.

If your team is doing enough work behind the scenes, you don't need to worry about things like "What should I do if Microsoft also enters this field?", or "What should I do if Tencent enters this field?"

Such a problem. Large companies with sufficient funds will find it very difficult to copy your products, because the work to be done in a field is far more complicated than it seems on the surface.

The biggest difference between Paypal and Google is that Google hopes to recruit PhDs, while Paypal hopes to recruit people who have given up their PhDs. These are two completely different temperaments.

In general, Paypal's corporate culture is not anti-government, but anti-mainstream thinking.

The entrepreneurial legend of PayPal gang members

1.Leader Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel co-founded Paypal (previously known as "Confinity") with his partners in 1998. As CEO, he witnessed the company's initial public offering in 2002. A few months later, Paypal was sold for $1.5 billion.

Gave it to eBay. In 2004, he invested in Facebook and in the same year founded ntir, a company that provides data analysis in the national security and financial fields. He is also an investor in hundreds of companies such as yelp, linkedin, spacex, airbnb, etc. He once studied at Stanford

Law School, and also founded the Thiel Foundation, which is dedicated to technological progress and long-term thinking about the future. He is definitely the most creative thinker in the investment field.

Peter Thiel recently became popular for teaching "Startup" at Stanford. He believes that a start-up is composed of the largest group of people who are persuaded by a plan to change the world. The biggest advantage of a new company is that it is new.

Thinking. To start a company, you must think about these seven questions:

1. Engineering question: Do you have a technological breakthrough or a micro-innovative improvement?

2. Timing issue: Is the time right for the business you want to do?

3. Monopoly issue: Do you want to start with a large share of a small market?

4. Human factors: Do you have the right team?

5. Channel factors: In addition to creating products, do you have ways to distribute and promote your products?

6. Durability: Can you defend your market position in the next 10-20 years?

7. Confidential Core: Have you found a unique opportunity that no one else has?

If the answers to the seven questions are all positive, you are bound to achieve success. Even if there are only five or six positive answers, the career achievements will be considerable.

At the same time, he believes that innovative monopolies should have the following characteristics: 1. Proprietary technology; 2. Network effects; 3. Economies of scale; 4. Brand advantage.

2. Reid Hoffman, the “King of Networking” in Silicon Valley

He was the founding core member of Paypal. He served as a director from the early days of its establishment, and then jumped in to join the business. Along the way, he helped Paypal negotiate important partners such as visa, mastercard, eBay, etc., and finally went public and was bought by eBay. Only then did Hoffman succeed.

Retreat.

However, entrepreneurship is addictive, so of course a real entrepreneur will not stop there. In 2003, shortly after leaving eBay, Hoffman founded the now super successful business social networking website LinkedIn, and then accompanied LinkedIn all the way through it until 2009.

After dominating the business and social vertical, he retired as chairman and joined Greylock, a long-established venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, as a partner. As a result, he served as a director of important Internet companies such as Zynga, Sixapart, etc. In addition to venture capital, Hoffman is also famous for his love of helping start-ups.

The latecomers are also very active angels and have invested in 80 Internet companies, including famous new companies such as Facebook, Digg, and Aviary.

The New York Times pointed out that Hoffman is a very important figure for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and called him the "King of Silicon Valley Networks."

He later summarized the 10 laws of creating great companies:

Find that disruptive change

Think big

need many partners

Plan a and plan b cannot be locked in a fight

Be flexible, but persistent

It has to be embarrassing for you to rush out the first version of your product

Confident, but not arrogant

First-class products are important, but first-class channels are even more important

Be very careful about company culture, especially early employees

All entrepreneurial laws are just principles, not rules

3. "The next Steve Jobs" Elon Musk

In 1999, Musk co-founded X, an online entry and email payment service company. A year later, X and Confinity merged, and the company was renamed Paypal in 2001. In 2002, eBay acquired Paypal for $1.5 billion. Before the acquisition,

Musk is the largest shareholder of PayPal, owning 11.7% of the shares.

He then invested the money he earned from the acquisitions into the two companies he ran, two companies that are changing the world: the electric car manufacturer and the private space company SpaceX. Not long ago, SpaceX launched the private spacecraft Dragon

After successfully docking with the International Space Station, it successfully returned to Earth. Telsa is also a listed company with a market capitalization of US$3.21 billion. The company's latest high-performance electric vehicle Model S has attracted much attention from the outside world. In addition, he is also the chairman of rcity, a home solar panel company.

.There is also the recent hyperloop project, both of which are groundbreaking innovations.

Why is he a contemporary legend? You can take a look at the summary of his journey by businessinsider, a well-known American technology blog. Bi also excerpted 12 famous quotes he once said from past reports and speeches, which will make us impressed again.

Elon Musk’s wisdom and difference:

Failure here is an option. If everything goes smoothly and successfully, it probably indicates a lack of innovation.

If we think seriously about the future, there is going to be a major difference between humanity and space-faring civilizations, exploring the stars, or other planets, versus being permanently confined to Earth until that absolutely happens.

Compared to extinction, I think that's really exciting.

Basically, we have not applied for any patents for SpaceX. Our main and long-term competitor is in China. It would be ridiculous if we applied for a patent, because it would just be convenient for the Chinese to directly copy it.

(Physics) is a great thinking framework... In short, think about the most fundamental truths and argue from them, rather than using analogies.

(Probably the biggest mistake I've ever made is) only focusing on someone's talent and talent without considering personality traits at all. I think it's important to have a kind heart.

If there is no doubt about the importance of something, even if the whole world is not on your side, you still have to persevere.

The first step is to establish the possibility of something, so that it has a chance to happen.

In order to better understand which questions are worthy of inquiry, we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness. The search for greater collective enlightenment is, in fact, the only thing worth pursuing.

There are so many things that can explode, but I’m really lucky that all ten of my fingers are still alive.

For what you want to do most, you must have the most severe attitude, find all the mistakes and fix them, and seek negative opinions, especially from friends.

After leaving Paypal, what I thought about was not how to make big money, but "What other problems will have a major impact on mankind?"

In the past 20 years, he has unprecedentedly changed the world in the three fields of Internet, new energy and commercial aerospace. Not only that, he has also described a staggering future for mankind. He is undoubtedly the most incredible entrepreneurial star today. He is vigorous and high-profile.

He is humorous and has a distinctive personal style. He is also known as the "next Steve Jobs".

4. Silicon Valley entrepreneurial wizard Max Levchin

Max Levchin co-founded PayPal with his friends when he was 23 years old. Later, Slide was acquired by Google for US$200 million in 2010, and he subsequently became a member of Google. In addition to Slide, he also co-founded LinkedIn and YouTube.

, yelp, yammer, spacex, etc. In 2011, the slide service was shut down by Google, and Levchin also resigned from Google and became an angel investor.

In Silicon Valley, there may be no one who is more popular than Max Levchin. From Paypal to Slide, he has created entrepreneurial miracles. Unlike many entrepreneurs, he prefers to constantly build a company and then sell it. This kind of person is very popular in Silicon Valley.

Known as entrepreneurial players, they are more like innocent and naughty children who keep making the toys they like according to their own wishes. When the novelty loses, they find a place to sell them and then go back to making new toys.

Chen Weiguang, a partner at blue run venture, said of him: "He is the boss of Silicon Valley. Venture capital investors often come to Max Levchin and ask, what are you working on recently? Do you need funds?"

max levchin himself also answered questions about entrepreneurship on quora. I will extract a few points for readers:

It's better to start a business with a partner than to start it alone, but you can't hire a co-founder, you can only impress him.

It is much better to find a team that is generally similar (background, education, values, other qualities, etc.) and you can save a lot of time in arguments.

Don't let bad blood arise between senior management groups. Once this happens, you need to mediate or arbitrate immediately.

If you are not sure about the candidates for the first 5-6 positions when you start a business, then there is no doubt that you are not ready to start a business yet.

Leading by example is the most effective way. If you want your team to work around the clock, it's best if you do the same, even if you're not actually involved in the team's tasks. It's a bit ridiculous, but it's true.

Raise funds through good stories or good results. Raise funds before launching the project or just after it is launched. Don't plan to raise funds long after the project is launched.

But what is levchin doing now? According to the American technology website gigaom, levchin has now opened a half-laboratory and half-incubator called hvf (hard, valuable, fun.). Currently, the company has hatched two

Projects, the first of which is the mobile payment company Affirm, and the second project is glow (which successfully raised US$6 million in June 2013).

Through glow, couples can record and track various important physical signals related to pregnancy, including menstrual cycle, morning temperature, time of last sexual intercourse, weight, psychological stress, and of course, the most important cervical mucus consistency. After entering the data,

Glow's built-in algorithm can calculate the best time for conception.

It is also worth mentioning that glow has a glow first community fund. Couples who have difficulty conceiving can continuously save money into this fund every month while preparing for pregnancy, with a monthly deposit of US$50 for 10 months. If after 10 months, glow

If it has not helped you successfully conceive, this fund will fund your follow-up examinations and treatments. However, Levchin is determined to position Glow's future as a health insurance company.

In addition, levchin is using glow to enter the domestic market. The company's core R&D team is set up in Shanghai and is currently recruiting founding team members. The positions include android development engineers, ios development engineers, product managers, product design, backend development engineers and QA, etc.

They all report directly to the Product VP or Technology VP. If you are interested, you can click here to submit your resume or send your resume directly to may.pan# (replace # with).

5. roelof botha

When PayPal went public and was acquired by eBay, Roelof Botha served as the former's chief financial officer. Later, Botha quickly joined Sequoia Capital, the top venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, as a partner of the company. Although Botha has always been out of the spotlight,

Indeed, there are board directors of many technology companies, including jawbone, eventbrite, evernote, mahalo, natera, square, tokbox, tumblr, weebly, unity, whisper and xoom, etc. Before Google's acquisition, he served as a director of youtube and meebo.

The author of "The Choice of Venture Capital: Who is the Next Billion-Dollar Company" interviewed 16 investment pioneers in the American venture capital community, telling their experiences in investing in the market and startups, as well as the legendary stories of the growth of startups. Among them

In the first chapter, the interview was with Roelof Botha. This interview can be summarized in one sentence: "For a startup to succeed, the key is to have pure motives and aim to solve a problem of interest."

6. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, the largest review website in the United States

Stoppelman previously worked at Iron Man Elon Musk's online bank

When Stoppelman and Simmons told Levchin about their entrepreneurial idea, Levchin did not hesitate to become their seed investor, investing US$1 million at the time. This entrepreneurial idea of ​​Stoppelman and Simmons gave birth to Yelp, the largest review website in the United States.

Yelp once received an acquisition invitation from Google, and Apple's Qiao helped Stoppelman give up the acquisition invitation from Google, which led to Yelp's successful IPO in March 2012. Stoppelman has personally invested in many projects, including eventbrite, ntir technologies, pinterest, airbnb, and uber.

Among them, the valuations of Uber, the originator of taxi-hailing, and Airbnb, the short-term travel rental company, are still very high.

Stoppelman once accepted an interview question at an event: "What is your most important management secret, and who or where did you learn it from?" He replied, "I learned this from Paypal. I strongly support everyone.

Weekly 1-on-1 presentations. Sometimes, I feel like I’m the psychiatrist in the company, but I love listening, listening to their problems, both professionally and privately, and removing old ones and replacing them with new ones to keep our organization alive.”

7. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen (Chen Shijun), founders of YouTube, the world’s largest video website

c. In PayPal, Steve Chen met Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. In 2005, the three of them co-founded the famous video website YouTube, which was sold to Google for US$1.65 billion only one year later.

After the acquisition, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen continued to focus on video social networking and started Mixbit, while Jawed Karim began to develop into an investor role and established Youniversity Fund. As you can tell from the name, it is a fund to support college students' entrepreneurship. In mid-2011, Chad Hurley and

Steve Chen acquired the social bookmarking website Delicious from Yahoo, aiming to continue to provide users with their favorite content through Delicious, making it more convenient and interesting for the website to save, share and explore the "most interesting" content on the Internet.

To sum up the YouTube entrepreneurial journey of these two people, it can be described in three words: the power of technology, the culture of engineers, and the belief in the Internet.

8.Keith Rabois, one of the “most important people behind the scenes” in Silicon Valley

Keith Rabois has worked in many companies founded by his former colleagues at Paypal, including linkedin, slide, square, ventures, and has personally invested in many good projects including tokbox, xoom, slide, linkedin, geni, room 9 entertainment, youtube, linkedin and slide

.

Last year, Labouise joined the mobile payment company Square and served as chief operating officer. Today, Square is valued at more than $1 billion, and Labouise himself is sometimes called one of the "most important people behind the scenes" in Silicon Valley.

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Keith Rabois has a great workplace motto: "Choose your boss, not your job."

9. david sacks, founder of corporate internal social network yammer

In 1999, David Sacks joined Paypal from consulting giant McKinsey. When it was acquired by eBay, Sacks served as Paypal COO. After leaving Paypal, Sacks pursued his movie dream and participated in the preparation of the Golden Globe Award-winning film "Thank You" as an independent producer.

"Smoking". In 2006, he founded an online genealogy service, which was acquired by MyHeritage in 2012. In 2008, Sacks founded the enterprise social network service tool Yammer. In 2012, Microsoft acquired Yammer for US$1.2 billion in 2012. In addition, it is worth mentioning

By the way, Sacks is also an angel investor in Uber.

When talking about the direction of entrepreneurship in an interview, Sacks believed that traditional technology is too mature and it is a bit unrealistic to break the monopoly of giant companies. Rather than looking for a place for oneself in a dense forest, it is better to go

To open up a territory outside the forest. I would rather choose to become an Uber than squeeze my head to become the next Facebook.

10. super angel dave mcclure

Before PayPal's IPO, dave mcclure joined the company as marketing director. In 2004, mcclure founded simplyhired.

McClure quickly became famous for providing advice directly to innovative companies and entrepreneurs in his blog. In 2010, he founded 500 startups, a business incubation and investment company in Silicon Valley. Its incubation and investment projects include twilio, wildfire, makerbot, sendgrid, credit

Karma, etc. Among them, the social media marketing company Wildfire Interactive has been acquired by Google for US$350 million, the 3D printing company Makerbot has been acquired by Stratasys, a giant in the same field, for US$400 million, and the cloud communication service company Twilio has been valued at US$500 million after the fourth round of financing.

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He also believes that consumer and small business Internet opportunities are far from over, and the argument that "it is difficult to obtain a large number of users" is even more wrong. Almost all Internet distribution channels now have more users than in the past, whether it is search

, social networks, mobile terminals, videos, localization, SMS, email, instant messaging, etc. In Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, etc., there are rapidly developing Internet and mobile Internet markets.

Paypal has become the company that has created the largest number of entrepreneurs in the history of Silicon Valley. Whether they are entrepreneurs or investors, they have jointly written an Internet legend. Although they no longer work together, the connection between the members of the "Paypal Gang" has never been interrupted.

.If someone needs money or advice, he will call other members. If someone needs both, he will call Peter Thiel, who is the core of the "Paypal Mafia" and indeed has a gangster style.