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.
To be continued...