PayPal, the online payments company that eBay bought in 2002, is legendary in Silicon Valley for spawning an incredibly talented group of founders, investors, and executives at startups that read like a Who's Who of Web success stories. The so-called PayPal Mafia includes Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, LinkedIn cofounder, angel investor and Greylock VC partner Reid Hoffman, hedge fund and early-stage investor Peter Thiel, Yelp cofounder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, and many more.
Now, it looks like a new corporate organization is moving in: the Google Mafia. With the surprise appointment today of longtime Google executive Marissa Mayer as CEO of Yahoo, it now appears that the Google Mafia could prove almost as powerful, though in a different way: It's more of an executive mafia than a startup mafia. But these former Googlers are now in high-profile positions around the Valley and the larger tech industry, in very influential companies:
* Sheryl Sandberg, another sales exec at Google, has been chief operating officer at Facebook during its hypergrowth period of the past few years. Not to mention, former Googler Bret Taylor was chief technology officer at Facebook (which bought his post-Google company FriendFeed) until June, when he departed to do a startup, and onetime Google sales exec David Fischer is now the same at Facebook too.
* Dick Costolo, whose company Feedburner was bought by Google and then languished, is CEO of Twitter.
* Foursquare cofounder and CEO Dennis Crowley left Google after his startup, Dodgeball, also was ignored inside Google. (Hmm, a pattern developing? Well, most people leave any company for a reason, and it's not always simply "other opportunities." Silicon Valley was founded by unhappy employees, and wouldn't exist without them.)
* Former Google sales chief Tim Armstrong, appointed CEO of AOL several years ago.
* A bunch of startup CEOs hailed from Google as well, including Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, who sold his company to Facebook for $1 billion in April--though not all are that successful by any means. (Remember Cuil? Yeah, that's what I thought.)
Now, whether these folks ultimately will become as successful as their PayPal brethren remains to be seen. No one knows how well Mayer will do at Yahoo, but if it's no better than Armstrong's so-far-unspectacular reign at AOL, the Google Mafia won't look so fearsome.
And these were and are very different companies and very different groups of people--so they're very different mafias. PayPal was a scrappy upstart that probably sold out too soon, leaving many people there hungry to show they weren't just lucky.
Google has been a Web giant for years now, and its former executives are, well, executives more than founders. It remains to be seen if its departees have the fire in the belly to match the success of the PayPal gang. We'll find out soon enough.
