We Dont Like Stripe Paypal Mafia

Stripe and the PayPal Mafia

Stripe is an American financial-technology company founded in 2010 by Irish brothers Patrick Collison and John Collison. The company developed software infrastructure for accepting payments over the internet and became one of the major payment-technology companies of the 2010s and 2020s. (Wikipedia)

Relationship with the PayPal Mafia

Stripe is sometimes discussed in connection with the PayPal Mafia, a term used to describe a network of former PayPal employees and executives who subsequently founded, financed, or led technology companies. The original group included figures such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Keith Rabois and others. (Wikipedia)

The Collison brothers were not PayPal employees and are therefore not members of the original PayPal Mafia in the conventional sense. Stripe instead developed an important relationship with members of the network through its investors.

In 2011, shortly after Stripe's founding, the company raised approximately $2 million in early financing. The round included investments from Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, both of whom had been central figures in PayPal's early history, as well as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel. (TechCrunch)

This relationship was particularly notable because Stripe was developing a product in the same broad market that PayPal had pioneered: internet payments. Contemporary reporting described Stripe as a PayPal competitor, while the Collison brothers described their ambition in terms of expanding internet commerce and addressing limitations they perceived in existing online-payment infrastructure. (Fast Company)

Investment connections

The connection continued after Stripe's initial financing. In 2014, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund led a major Stripe financing round, with Keith Rabois, another former PayPal executive, participating through Khosla Ventures. Sequoia also participated. The round valued Stripe at approximately $1.75 billion. (TechCrunch)

Thus, the relationship can be described as a combination of:

Distinction from the original PayPal Mafia

Stripe was independently founded by the Collisons in 2010. Its connection to the PayPal Mafia primarily came through investment, venture-capital relationships and overlapping technological ambitions, rather than through common employment at PayPal. (TechCrunch)

Consequently, Stripe is better characterized as part of the broader post-PayPal technology and investment network than as a member of the original PayPal Mafia itself.

Significance

The Stripe–PayPal relationship is notable because it represents one of the clearest examples of capital and networks from the original PayPal generation flowing into a subsequent generation of internet companies.

PayPal alumni such as Thiel and Musk did not create Stripe, but they were among the company's earliest prominent financial backers. Later, Thiel's Founders Fund and other investors connected to the PayPal network continued to participate in Stripe's financing. (Forbes)

In this sense, Stripe can be viewed as a second-generation company within the broader PayPal ecosystem: independently founded, but significantly connected to the people and investment networks that emerged from PayPal.