When Ebay bought PayPal In 2002 for 1.5 billion dollars, there was an internal earthquake. In the four years following the acquisition, only 12 of the company’s original employees were left. Paypal was a boiling talent, Entrepreneurship And brilliant people, and who “Ebay escaped” They ended up redefining the technological world. Now we are attending a similar phenomenon, but with another company: OpenAi.
PayPal Mafia. This was baptized by the group of bright ex -employed PayPal who left the company to found your own startups. These projects ended up becoming true business and technological successes, and showed that in PayPal there was a lot of talent waiting for their own opportunity to undertake. The most outstanding examples of that mafia Paypal already make clear the dimension of that phenomenon:
- Elon Musk: The clearest example of how far the members of the PayPal Mafia arrived. He founded or co -founded SpacexOpenAi, Neuralinkand The Boring Company, in addition to buying a majority participation in Tesla and Acquire Twitter (Now x).
- Peterthiel: is the president of Palantirhe created the Founders Fund Investment Fund – which would later attract former partners like Ken Howery or Luke Nosek – and was the first Facebook external investor.
- Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim: these three former PayPal employees YouTube co -founded
- Reid Hoffman: He founded LinkedIn
- Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman: Yelp co -founded
- Yishan Wong: He worked on Facebook and became CEO of Reddit for a season
- David O. Sacks: Founded Geni.com and Yammer
They redefined the Internet. These engineers and entrepreneurs were a fundamental part of the transition to an internet focused on consumers, something surprising especially after the bubble of the Puntocom in 2001. Rarely in history there has been a phenomenon in former employees of the same company end up creating one or several companies even more successful than the one they left, but there is a previously relevant previous example.
The eight traitors. In 1957 eight engineers, fed up with his boss in Seticonductor Laboratory Shockley, decided to lite the blanket and create their own semiconductor company. They called her Fairchild Semiconductor Corp, and those employees They went down in history like the eight traitors. Fairchild had a huge success, but ten years later his engineers also looked for new roads. Three of them –Gordon MooreRobert Noyce and Andy Grove – ended up joining in 1968 to create a legendary company: Intel.
The other Paypal Mafia is the OpenAi mafia. Those phenomena seem to be now having a new iteration, but this time the company of which all this new movement is starting is OpenAi. This company has become absolute reference in the field of AI, but on the way to achieve this there has been a true internal war and many conflicts between several of the engineers and their CEO, Sam Altman. Those internal tensions were the ones caused the dismissal and later return to the company of Altman In November 2023, but the company was not the same since then.
OPENAI MAFIA members. Actually the divisions that occurred in Openai began very soon, almost shortly after the startup were formed. In fact, the first member of that “Openai Mafia” was also from the Paypal Mafia: It is none other than Elon Musk. It is a clear example, but not the only one, and the members of that OpenAi mafia are the following:
- Elon Musk: OpenAi co -founder that ended declaring war on the company and Sam Altman. Co -founded XAI
- Dario and Daniela Amodei: these brothers co -founded Anthropicthe company that develops the family of Ia Claude models.
- John Schulman: After being one of Openai’s main researchers, he left the company to join Anthropic. Others former investigators and engineers Openai like Tom Brown, Jared Kaplan, or Sam McCandlish also joined the company later.
- Jan Leike: This researcher who worked in Deepmind and OpenAi He left this company and joined Anthropic in May 2024. His work focuses on the development of a “safe” (“super -align”) and scalable.
- Ilya Sutskever: Openai co -founded and it was her Chief Scientist, but in 2024 left the company To create your own startup, Safe Superintelligence.
- Look Murati: Openai’s exco also decided leave the company something after Sutskever, and just Create Thinking Machinesanother startup of AI. Bob McGrew, who also left Openai recently, have joined that project.
- Josh Tobin and Vicki Cheung: These engineers also came out of Openai to found Gantry, another startup of ia.
- David Luan: After being one of the top engineering responsible for OpenAi, he ended up co -founding Adept AI Labs.
- Andrej Karpahty: After working on Tesla’s autonomous driving systems and then in OpenAi, this expert and disseminator ended up founding Eureka Labs.
Many promises, few realities. The fundamental difference between these two “mafias” is that while in the PayPal Mafia those companies that founded its creators were absolute balls, the situation of those startups that Openai exingenier have created is an absolute unknown. Safe Superintelligence Ya raised 1,000 million dollars in 2024 and it is rumored that Thinking Machines soon It will lift 2 billion of dollars. None of them have launched any product for the moment, and in these new companies there is a lot of expectation – and, talent is supposed – but little else. The future will say whether the impact of these former OpenAi employees is comparable to that of PayPal’s ex -employees.
Image | OpenAI
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