Why did so many successful startups come out of PayPal? Answered by Insiders

A lot of early PayPal founders probably cashed out to the tune of a million or two bucks.<p>That's not enough money to retire, but it is enough money to take a risk on your own startup.

The Magic of Believing<p>&#62; But the executive team made up for nonmastery of details with unwavering vision, which inspired the troops. At his San Bruno, Calif., office, YouTube CEO Hurley remembers his PayPal days as an education in business. When he arrived in California with a degree in art from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, building a successful company seemed like something other people did.<p>"You never think it could happen to you," says Hurley. "But seeing Peter and Max and the guys come up with ideas and seeing how to make things work gave me a lot of insight. You may not have a business degree, but you see how to put the process into effect. The experience helped me realize the payoff of being involved in a startup."<p><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/13/magazines/fortune/paypal_mafia.fortune/index3.htm" rel="nofollow">http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/13/magazines/fortune/paypal_maf...</a>

I find it more impressive they were able to manage a culture full of alpha dogs and make a productive business out of it. I wouldn't consider this type of culture as one to implement in my own company.

"Go to work each day willing to be fired" was a great line. I've noticed that many really successful engineers seem to have that attitude where putting out a quality product is their primary focus, where others may tend to be more worried about consensus and goodwill.

The success of PayPal itself is pretty phenomenal when you consider what they were going up against in the traditional credit card industry.

For those curious souls looking for a deeper dive on the early days of Paypal, check out the fantastic Robert Cringely interview with Max Levchin on NerdTV (See episode #2 near the bottom) <a href="http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/</a>

Interestingly the second quora link he quotes is explicitly marked "Not for reproduction": <a href="http://www.quora.com/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-for-entrepreneurialism-did-Peter-Max-David-have-at-PayPal/answer/Keith-Rabois" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/What-strong-beliefs-on-culture-for-entr...</a><p>That being said, building a culture like that requires quite a lot of insight and Paypal must've been an exciting place to be back then...

I love this part the most -- "you’d do your homework first and then come to the table with - 35% of our [insert some key metric here] are caused by the lack of X functionality…"<p>Meetings would be so much more productive if everyone operated like this.

Sounds like a fascinating way of working, if not high-stress. It doesn't say how many hours/week their staff were working.<p>"but either individual heroes or small, high-trust teams more often than not found ways to deliver projects on-time."<p>I'm not sure to read that as if they are finding ways "out of hours" and on their own time.

I think the crucial reason is only that most people in paypal made tons of cash and they generally hired smart people.<p>Everything else this post mentions is probably reading too much between the lines and is more similar to the over-romanticising commonly associated with fluff journalism pieces.

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -- Carl Sagan<p>Imagine John DeLorean meeting with PayPal instead of the FBI.

So many? isn't youtube the only one with a successful exit? I know linked in probably will, but the rest are unproven.

I think this is the best content on Quora to date.

Some interesting ideas here but wouldn't want to post it up on the wall as the road map to success.