Inside the DNA of the Facebook Mafia
14th February 2011
Sarah Lacy is one of the better tech journalists around. This is somewhat long but condenses a lot of interesting information about what’s going on in tech in recent times.
But before we get to the specifics of the Facebook mafia, it bears noting that not all companies produce bona fide mafias. It’s more than just alums doing well. A true “mafia” is a collection of co-founders, early hires and top engineers who’ve been battle-tested together with an enthusiasm and financial resources to start many different ventures immediately. There’s also a communal sense of co-investing in and supporting one another, hence the idea of keeping it “in the family.” While plenty of smart entrepreneurs and angel investors came from or filtered through Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon and Microsoft, those gargantuan successes didn’t really create a mafia that catalyzed at a certain moment of time, resulting in an cluster of cool new stuff.
In fact, few big successful, lasting companies spin out mafias, because those companies grow to such a large size that the unique DNA of the culture gets watered down. And for financial reasons, insiders used to be tethered to the company until after its IPO. By then, they’d missed being in the middle of the next big startup wave. Instead mafias tend to fall out of companies that didn’t go as far as they could have. It creates a frustrated sense of still having something to accomplish, or as Peter Thiel said about the PayPal mafia, “You had a lot of smart, competitive people who all needed something to do.”