Redefinition of Silicon Valley
Time revolves around 1998 when Max Levchin proposed an idea coupled to cryptocurrency to Peter Theil. Confinity was founded by Max Levchin, Peter Theil, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howrey in the same year. They had their competition with the firm X.com lead by Elon Musk. In the next subsequent year, they decided to merge and named the company “PayPal”. The core team of 50 members toil up for around two years in PayPal before it was sold to eBay in 2002. The original PayPal employees had difficulty adjusting to eBay’s more traditional corporate culture and within four years all but 12 of the first 50 employees left the firm. Some of them worked together to form new companies.
Let’s talk about the dropouts of PayPal which became successful in managing their new firm.
Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen
They started with the idea of online dating but failed terribly but had an exceptional video and uploading platform. This failure gave them the design of YouTube. The proposal of the new company was for non-computer experts to be able and use a simple interface that allowed the user to publish, upload, and view streaming videos through standard web browsers and modern internet speeds. Ultimately, creating an easy to use video streaming platform that wouldn’t stress out the new internet users of the early 2000s.
Reid Hoffman
LinkedIn started out in the living room of co-founder Reid Hoffman and the site officially launched on May 5, 2003. Reid has previously been on the board of Google, eBay, and PayPal, so he had a proven track record before taking the first round of funding and eventually floating on the New York stock exchange. This also goes some way to explaining the great integration between Google and LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of the oldest mainstream social platforms, older than YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. The mission statement was keyed to connecting the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.
Elon Musk
Following the PayPal sale, Musk made around $180 million. Musk founded space-exploration company SpaceX. SpaceX was made with an ambition of “to enable humans to become a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species by building a self-sustaining city on Mars”. While SpaceX shoots for stars, Musk is well known for a company that is at least a little more down to earth the Tesla Motors. Elon Musk is also the key contributor or founder of Solar City, Starlink, The Boring Company, Hyperloop, OpenAI, and NeuraLink.
Palantir, Kiva.org, Genni.com, Yammer, Matterport.Inc, CapLinked, Slide, HomeRun, NextRoll, Addepar, OpenGov, 500Startups, Valar Ventures, Founders Fund, Tokbox, Xoom, Yelp, Room 9 Entertainment and many more corporation were created by fellow mate once working together.
What we should learn from them?
- Excluding the hitch ups which they faced when their firm engaged with eBay, none of them call for the day. They all came with double enthusiasm, double hard-work, double determination. They took this setback as a challenge. Elon Musk once said that,
“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing you are not innovating.”
- The other thing to pick up from them is one should have the courage to think differently or something new from others.
Till Next Time….
