Why The PayPal "Mafia" Was So Great: Yammer CEO David Sacks Explains. Yammer David Sacks is one of the earliest members of the so-called PayPal "mafia," a group of PayPal employees who went on to unusual positions of influence and power in Silicon Valley. But his first startup after leaving PayPal, a genealogical site called Geni, didn't exactly conquer the world. Then in late 2008, Sacks launched his second company, Yammer. The social networking service for businesses has since exploded, gaining more than 4 million users and 240 employees, and it's tripling in size every year.
It's also fended off a challenge from the much bigger and more powerful Salesforce.com, and now has its sights on the corporate intranet market dominated by Microsoft's SharePoint. We caught up with Sacks recently at Yammer's San Francisco offices. Why PayPal spawned so many success stories. Here's a full transcript, lightly edited for clarity. Business Insider: How did such a small and relatively young company like PayPal spawn so many people in positions of influence and power? BI: No. Don Kingsborough hired. The PayPal Mafia Puts $525K In CapLinked, A LinkedIn-Meets-Salesforce For Private Investing. There a few platforms that aim to connect investors and startups on the web, including AngelList, but for the most part investment transactions and venture funding is done face-to-face, many times with a hand shake involved.
A new startup, called CapLinked, is hoping to change this by offering a collaborative platform for entrepreneurs, private investors and advisors to find each other, build relationships, and transact business on the site. CapLinked, which was co-founded by PayPal marketing exec Eric Jackson, is announcing a $900,000 round of funding from group of former PayPal execs (a.k.a the PayPal Mafia), including Peter Thiel, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Joe Lonsdale (co-founder of Palantir Technologies); Aman Verjee (CFO of Sonos); and David Anderson.
In total, CapLinked has raised over $900,000 in angel funding. Using CapLinked is fairly simple for entrepreneurs. Users can create a pitch, and invite others via email to check out the idea on the site. The PayPal mafia - Nov. 14, 2007. (Fortune Magazine) -- A door opens, and a blond man appears in a white jacket with large buttons. "Good morning," he says. "Peter's in back. Make yourself comfortable in the dining room. I'll be serving breakfast shortly. " Holy cannoli. 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. 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.
Levchin runs one of the hottest companies on the web, a photo-sharing site called Slide that draws 134 million users a month. It's been nine years since Thiel and Levchin first dined together at Hobee's, near Stanford University. Their brainchild would change the course of the Internet. And then things got interesting. Besides Facebook and Slide, there's Yelp, Digg, and YouTube. Maybe it comes back to the early hires. WHERE ARE THEY NOW? The PayPal "Mafia" Is More Powerful Than Ever. Hoffman was on PayPal's founding board of directors and later took a role as executive vice president, where he handled most outward-facing duties. When PayPal sold, he turned around and founded LinkedIn. That company had a few years of struggles, but eventually benefited from the recent run-up in social media. It went public earlier this year, turning Hoffman into a billionaire, even though he's no longer its CEO -- he stepped down in 2007 to become its chairman.
He is also one of the most successful angel investors in the Valley, with stakes in Zynga, Last.fm, and social network Tagged, among many others. A New York Times profile last weekend called him the "king of connections. "