The Paris PayPal Mafia
November 23, 2013
IT professionals in Silicon Valley can trace their jobs or some connection back to PayPal. When PayPal was acquired by eBay in a $1.5 billion acquisition, its founders Max Levchin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and their surrounding network has since been referred to as the PayPal Mafia. Why? The PayPal Mafia has reinvested that money into VC Funds, startups, and more in Silicon Valley. Rude Baguette explains how Paris is getting its mafia in the form of Exalead: “Paris Has Its Own PayPal Mafia: How Exalead Spawned Dozens Of Startups.”
The French equivalent of the PayPal buyout was when Dassault Systèmes purchased Exalead, a semantic search startup, for $162 million. The former Exalead team has then put their money into more companies: Dataiku, Stupeflix, Leetchi, Nitroram, Aloglia, Jellynote, Veezio, OpenDataSoft, MyJobCompany, Bookset, RunOrg, Archivezen, Altirnao, Gumbaya, Nexkap, cogniteev, and Spycommerce. If those companies are not enough, Exalead bred a leading workforce that has found new homes in high-profile companies.
Why do Exalead and its people have all this success? The article explain:
“…What’s interesting is the culture of entrepreneurship that the company bred, as well as the badge of respect that having worked there gets entrepreneurs & engineers today. A Facebook executive recently spoke of one of the above mentioned startups saying, “even if they don’t succeed, we’ll likely hire them just to have their talent working with us on our Graph Search.”
It is as simple as hiring the best of the best and fostering a “we will be the best” attitude. When Dassault acquired Exaead, this mentality was most likely lost in the corporate machine and its former employees left to innovate on their own.
Whitney Grace, November 23, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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