In 2002 eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion. “Most of PayPal’s key employees left eBay, but they stayed in touch,” Fortune wrote in November 2007. For the magazine, a group of them posed at a San Francisco bar in gold chains and tracksuits. They even had a name for themselves: the PayPal mafia.
Former PayPal employees went on to found YouTube and LinkedIn, and to fund Yelp and other companies. “Today they call upon one another when they need money or advice,” Fortune wrote. Reid Hoffman, who started LinkedIn, told NPR in 2012: “When each of us started companies, we’d talk to each other.”