Banister co-founded an email service, IronPort, which he sold to Cisco Systems for $830 million. And indeed, the group has not only funded many of today’s successful technology companies but also has continued to create them.Īfter leaving PayPal, Mr.
Yammer was also founded by a former PayPal executive, David Sacks, PayPal’s former chief operating officer. Several PayPal alumni invested in Yammer, which was acquired by Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012. Thiel, who now runs venture and hedge funds, was one of the earliest investors in Facebook. For more than a decade, the PayPal group has been integral to the founding or financing of many of the best-known start-ups, making them even richer in the process. Or in this case, entrepreneurs want PayPal alumni to invest in their start-ups, because PayPal alumni have invested in previously successful entrepreneurs. Why do smart people go to Harvard? Because previous smart people went to Harvard.” “If you have a name that’s associated with success, people will seek you out. Stoppelman, who today is chief executive of Yelp, the user review site he co-founded. “There’s a network effect to these things,” said Mr. Jeremy Stoppelman, the former vice president for engineering at PayPal, has personally invested in the payments provider Square, Uber, Pinterest, Airbnb and Palantir.Īnd Keith Rabois, the former head of business development at PayPal who is now a partner at Khosla Ventures, holds shares in Airbnb, Stripe and Palantir, to name a few. Peter Thiel, a co-founder and former chief executive of PayPal, is an investor in companies including Airbnb, the big-data company Palantir, the spaceflight provider SpaceX and the payments company Stripe, four of the most valuable tech companies in Silicon Valley today. And now, the PayPal group’s close ties with the current crop of unicorns - a collection of some of the most valuable technology start-ups ever seen - suggest its influence is undiminished. Their enduring influence, more than a decade after they made their first fortunes, speaks to the tightknit social fabric of Silicon Valley’s technology industry, and to the trust new entrepreneurs place in those who have succeeded before them.
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