The top 10 tech mafia groups in the world
You’ve probably heard of the legendary PayPal Mafia, a group of founders and early employees at PayPal who all went on to start some of the most prominent companies in Silicon Valley.
🔆 Where the term comes from:
Fortune coined the term ‘tech mafia’ in 2007 when they released a piece on the PayPal Mafia along with a photo of some of the members dressed in swanky, gangster-looking attire.
Tech mafia refers to groups of former employees at tech startups, that then went on to found their own successful companies.
I recently wrote a piece for GoingVC on the top 10 tech mafia groups, sourced from the PIN (Power in Numbers) team.
Who are the top 10 tech mafia groups?
Here’s a quick summary of the top 10 tech mafia groups and the most successful companies from each group:
1. The Google Mafia — raised $115 billion and started 2,408 companies so far
⚫ Anthropic AI
Co-founder: Dario Amodei
⚫ Horizon Robotics
Co-founder: Annie Feiwen Tao
⚫ Nuro
Co-founders: Dave Ferguson, Jiajun Zhu
2. The Apple Mafia — 1,011 companies founded & $27 billion raised so far
⚫ WhatsApp
Co-founder: Brian Acton
⚫ LinkedIn
Co-founder: Reid Hoffman
⚫ Salesforce
Co-founder: Marc Benioff
3. The OpenAI Mafia — 21 companies, mostly in the AI sector, and raised $44 billion from top investors
⚫ Anthropic AI
Co-founders: Sam McCandlish, Jack Clark, Tom Brown, Dario Amodei, Benjamin Mann, Daniela Amodei
⚫ Living Carbon
Co-founder: Maddie Hall
⚫ Perplexity AI
Co-founder: Aravind Srinivas
4. The eBay Mafia — 472 have been founded by eBay alumni, and $16.5 billion raised
⚫ YouTube
Co-founder: Steve Chen
⚫ ZipRecruiter
Co-founders: Will Redd, Ian Siegel, Ward Poulos
⚫ GrubMarket
Co-founder: Mike Xu
5. The Microsoft Mafia — 2,474 companies founded by former employees of Microsoft and $69 billion raised in funding
⚫ Airbnb
Co-founder: Nathan Blecharczyk
⚫ Zillow
Co-founder: Rich Barton, Lloyd Frink
⚫ Glassdoor
Co-founders: Rich Barton, Robert Hohman
6. The Twitter Mafia — 334 companies founded, and $55 billion raised
⚫ Compass
Co-founder: Ori Allon
⚫ Block, Inc
Co-founder: Jack Dorsey
⚫ Abnormal Security
Co-founders: Evan Reiser & Sanjay Jeyakumar
7. The Tesla Mafia — founded 140 companies and raised $48 billion
⚫ Substack
Co-founder: Hamish McKenzie
⚫ Sila Nanotechnologies
Co-founder: Gene Berdichevsky
⚫ Swell Energy
Co-founder: Suleman Khan
8. The Amazon Mafia — 774 companies founded and $34 billion raised
⚫ InstaCart
Co-founder: Apoorva Mehta
⚫ Hulu
Co-founder: Jason Kilar
⚫ Flipkart
Co-founder: Binny Bansal
9. The Facebook Mafia — 748 companies started and $18 billion raised
⚫ OpenAI
Co-founder: Wojciech Zaremba
⚫ Yugabyte
Co-founders: Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Karthik Ranganathan, Mikhail Bautin
⚫ Dada Group
Co-founder: Jun Yang
10. The McKinsey Mafia — raised $84 billion in funding so far, and started 1,392 companies
⚫ Aurora Innovation
Co-founder: Sterling Anderson
⚫ Faire
Co-founder: Jeffrey Kolovson
⚫ Glance
Co-founder: Naveen Tewari
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