Zero to One_ Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future ( PDFDrive )

BEYOND PROFESSIONALISM
The first team that I built has become known in Silicon Valley as the “PayPal
Mafia” because so many of my former colleagues have gone on to help each
other start and invest in successful tech companies. We sold PayPal to eBay for
$1.5 billion in 2002. Since then, Elon Musk has founded SpaceX and co-founded
Tesla Motors; Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn; Steve Chen, Chad Hurley,
and Jawed Karim together founded YouTube; Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel
Simmons founded Yelp; David Sacks co-founded Yammer; and I co-founded
Palantir. Today all seven of those companies are worth more than $1 billion
each. PayPal’s office amenities never got much press, but the team has done
extraordinarily well, both together and individually: the culture was strong
enough to transcend the original company.
We didn’t assemble a mafia by sorting through résumés and simply hiring the
most talented people. I had seen the mixed results of that approach firsthand
when I worked at a New York law firm. The lawyers I worked with ran a
valuable business, and they were impressive individuals one by one. But the
relationships between them were oddly thin. They spent all day together, but few
of them seemed to have much to say to each other outside the office. Why work
with a group of people who don’t even like each other? Many seem to think it’s a
sacrifice necessary for making money. But taking a merely professional view of
the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is
worse than cold: it’s not even rational. Since time is your most valuable asset,
it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future
together. If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at
work, you haven’t invested your time well—even in purely financial terms.
From the start, I wanted PayPal to be tightly knit instead of transactional. I
thought stronger relationships would make us not just happier and better at work
but also more successful in our careers even beyond PayPal. So we set out to
hire people who would actually enjoy working together. They had to be talented,
but even more than that they had to be excited about working specifically with
us. That was the start of the PayPal Mafia.