It's the reason people come to the area from all over the world. In some ways they're classic characters of Silicon Valley, where success and easy access to capital breed ambition and further success. This group of serial entrepreneurs and investors represents a new generation of wealth and power. Thiel and Levchin, the don and consigliere of the mafia, figure that all told, there are dozens of enterprises worth a total of roughly $30 billion - and that value is growing rapidly, as evidenced by Thiel's good fortune with Facebook. It's amazing how many hot web properties can trace their ancestries to PayPal.īesides Facebook and Slide, there's Yelp, Digg, and YouTube. And the mafiosi have been busy.ĭuring the past five years they've been furiously building things - investment firms, philanthropies, solar-power companies, an electric-car maker, a firm that aims to colonize Mars, and of course a slew of Internet companies. They even have a name for themselves: the PayPal mafia. Most of PayPal's key employees left eBay, but they stayed in touch. The eBay deal, remarkable only because it happened in the bleakness of 2002, wasn't so much an exit as an explosion. They'd sign up more than 20 million users and burn $180 million in funding before breaking even and selling out to eBay ( Charts, Fortune 500) for $1.5 billion.Īnd then things got interesting. They'd bring on several hundred employees to what would become PayPal. Their brainchild would change the course of the Internet. In short order Thiel joined as a co-founder, and together they set out to "create the new world currency." Levchin had an idea for a company, and Thiel wanted to invest. It's been nine years since Thiel and Levchin first dined together at Hobee's, near Stanford University. Making neither eye contact nor conversation, he presses his lips together, nods to indicate that he is, as ever, ready for business, and sits. Levchin runs one of the hottest companies on the web, a photo-sharing site called Slide that draws 134 million users a month. Every garment on Levchin's unwashed body is a freebie - University of Illinois zip jacket, mismatching shorts, bright orange T-shirt with some Hebrew lettering. The doorbell rings, and in walks a scruffy, sleepy-eyed Max Levchin, 32, who has trekked over from his new $5 million-plus home a few blocks away in Pacific Heights. "I'm Peter," he says, extending his hand and smiling before thanking me for agreeing to such a late breakfast meeting. Wearing a powder-blue T-shirt wet with sweat, he displays the relaxed self-confidence of Michael Corleone. Just back from a morning run, Thiel emerges into the dining room of his home in the shadow of San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts. ![]() He drives a half-million-dollar McLaren supercar. ![]() The man has bankrolled everything from restaurants to movies and is lauded by many as some kind of free-market genius. He's got an early $500,000 stake in Facebook that's now worth about $1 billion on paper. He's the founder of a new venture capital firm that's the talk of Silicon Valley. The 40-year-old entrepreneur runs a $3 billion hedge fund. Make yourself comfortable in the dining room. (Fortune Magazine) - A door opens, and a blond man appears in a white jacket with large buttons.
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