前營運長David Sacks說:「注意細節才能做出好的決策。」現在他負責線上家譜網站Geni跟好萊塢製片公司Room 9 Entertainment，就是那間做"Thank You for Smoking"影片的公司。「我們不認同經理見解就比員工高。」他說。
Sacks himself almost didn't get hired by PayPal - perhaps because of a short stint at McKinsey. But Thiel recognized him as an important dissenting voice, someone who could sharpen the company's focus.
Sacks其實差點沒被PayPal雇用，或許跟他待過麥肯錫一段時間有關，但Thiel認為他是很重要的反對意見，能讓公司更專注於目標上。
Once he came on, McKinsey taint notwithstanding, Sacks further opened the culture by establishing a no-unnecessary-meetings policy. He became a meeting cop. Anytime he'd see a closed-door discussion happening, he'd sit in for three minutes. If he considered the meeting to be valueless, he'd call it adjourned.
當他上任後，麥肯錫的壞習慣啦，Sacks開始"不開沒意義會議"政策，像是會議警察般，只要見到有閉門會議產生，他就介入聽個三分鐘，一旦發現會議沒啥價值，他馬上下令取消。
Sacks, in his office on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, recalls how the lack of meetings helped create a culture of many workers and few managers. "You didn't measure where you were in the organization by how many people you're managing," he says. Prestige was measured "by how few people there were above you who could prevent you from doing what you wanted to do."
Sacks在他西好萊塢日落大道回憶，減少會議政策如何創造這個經理少、員工多的文化。「在PayPal不是依你管的人數來看你的地位。」他說，「是你上面有多少人會礙著你做你想做的專案，用這個決定你的地位。」
Back in Silicon Valley, Reid Hoffman, a former executive VP, sits in his own office at the social networking site he started, LinkedIn. Hoffman is one of the Valley's most prolific angel investors, with stakes in more than 60 startups, including Facebook and Digg.
回到矽谷，前執行副總Reid Hoffman現在坐在LinkedIn的辦公室裡，他也是矽谷內最多產的天使投資人，擁有FB跟Digg等超過60間新創公司股份。
Like Sacks, he loved PayPal's meritocracy. "The group was very analytical," says Hoffman. "It was all about, 'Here are my arguments; here's my perspective.' You could never say, 'In my experience,' because experience wasn't there as a variable."
跟Sacks一樣，他好愛PayPal的菁英文化。「這群人特愛分析，他們會說"這是我的觀點"，"那是我的看法"，但你絕對不能說"就我經驗來看"，因為經驗在我們這一行不可靠。」
Not everyone liked the PayPal vibe. Chief among the dissenters is Elon Musk.
但也不是每個人都認同這種文化，像Elon Musk就是。
It's free-lunch Friday at the space-exploration company SpaceX, down the road from Los Angeles International Airport. The massive fuselage of a rocket ship dominates the ground floor. In its shadow, dozens of employees sit cramped at a handful of foldout tables.
現在是SpaceX公司的周五免費午餐時段，LA國際機場直行就是公司地址，一個巨大的火箭盤據了一樓大廳，數十位員工與摺疊椅在它的影子底下。
There are no seats to be had, not even for the man who invested $100 million of his own money to start the company. So Musk and I retreat to his desk. I've just asked him what it was like to be the victim of a coup led by Sacks, Levchin, and Thiel. "It was like unicorns and rainbows, flower-filled meadows," he says with a smirk.
可這裡太過壅擠，連掏出一億元的老闆都沒地方坐，我們只好退回他的辦公桌，我問跟Sacks, Levchin, Thiel這夥人做事感覺怎樣，他輕蔑一笑:「unicorn and rainbow(獨角獸跟彩虹 喻:太天真浪漫) 似在花開遍野的草原。」
Musk came to PayPal not through Levchin/Thiel's regime but during the company's merger with his Internet bank, X.com. Born and raised in South Africa, Musk sold his first company, Zip2, to AltaVista at age 28 for more than $300 million. Now 36, he's running SpaceX, which plans to send people into space and eventually colonize Mars, and serves as chairman of Tesla Motors (electric cars) and Solar City (solar-panel installation).
Musk到PayPal時並不是 Levchin跟Thiel掌權期間，而是因PayPal與他的網路銀行公司 X.com合併後才加入的。Musk成長於南非，28歲那年把他第一間公司 Zip2 以超過3億元的價格賣給了AltaVista，今年他36歲，現在擁有SpaceX, Tesla Motors, Solar City，分別專注於火星殖民、電動車與太陽能安裝上。
Despite having perhaps the greatest entrepreneurial streak of all the PayPal mafia, Musk was purged from PayPal like some kind of toxin. Soon after the merger, Thiel resigned.
盡管Musk擁有PayPal mafia中最強的創業家特質，還是被視為某種毒素被PayPal掃地出門。且合併後不久，Thiel就請辭了。
Musk became CEO of the combined company and decided it was time for a technological overhaul. Specifically, he wanted to toss out Unix and put everything on a Microsoft platform.
當Musk成為合併後的CEO後決定來場技術大變革，決定將Unix作業系統換成微軟作業系統。
That may sound innocent enough to laypeople but not to Unix zealots like Levchin and his team. A holy war ensued. Musk lost. The board fired him and brought back Thiel while Musk was on a flight to Australia for his first vacation in years. "That's the problem with vacations," Musk deadpans.
這對外行人沒什麼，但對Levchin跟他的團隊這類Unix狂熱者就不行，就此一場聖戰開始，Musk輸了，董事會趁他去澳洲度假時迎回Thiel，「這就是休假的壞處。」Musk面無表情的說。
Musk still contends he didn't deserve his fate, that his biggest flaw was being cut from different cloth. "Peter, Max, and I are not directly aligned philosophically," he says. "Peter's philosophy is pretty odd. It's not normal. He's a contrarian from an investing standpoint and thinks a lot about the singularity. I'm much less excited about that. I'm pro-human."
Musk直到今天都覺得自己不該遭受如此待遇，他最大弱點就是曲高和寡。「Peter, Max跟我思維上並不一致。」他說。「Peter的觀點很奇怪，不大正常，從投資觀點上來看常常唱反調。我也不是很喜歡那樣，我是個正常人。」
It wasn't just Musk; anyone who didn't mesh with the Levchin/Thiel culture ran into trouble. X.com had a number of people from the banking industry who didn't last long. "We had been rivals, so it was awkward," remembers Jeremy Stoppelman, who was an engineer at X.com, stuck it out after the merger, and is now the CEO of Yelp, a fast-growing restaurant- and bar-review site.
不只有Musk，也有其他人跟Levchin/Thiel文化合不來，X.com中很多從銀行業出身的就水土不服。前X.com工程師，現Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman回憶:「我們曾是競爭對手，所以湊在一起很詭異。」
"And that awkwardness turned into total dysfunction and warfare. Most X employees ended up leaving or getting fired. The culture was really an intellectual pissing contest, and some people didn't like that."
「最後這種格格不入讓公司無法運行，進而轉為對抗。很多X.com的人不是自己離開就是被解雇，那兒的文化就像智力大挑戰，有些人不喜歡這樣。」
The infighting eventually stopped. It had to, because there were too many other enemies to deal with - eBay, for example. Before buying PayPal, the auction giant tried in various ways to kill it - by purchasing a competing service, for example.
內鬨最後停止了，也必需要停止，因為外面有太多敵人在虎視眈眈，像是eBay這併購巨人，買下PayPal前提供了像是競爭性服務，意圖幹掉PayPal。
Meanwhile, PayPal losses were multiplying. It battled Russian fraudsters who were filching millions by cribbing credit card numbers. Customer-service complaints flooded the phone lines and in-boxes and were often dealt with by simply not answering the phone or doing a mass deletion. Louisiana temporarily banned PayPal from doing business in the state; MasterCard (Charts) threatened to pull the plug because of the high number of chargebacks.
同時間，PayPal也蒙受俄國詐騙集團的巨額損失，他們盜取信用卡號，客訴讓電話跟信箱都爆滿，Louisiana州暫時禁止使用PayPal，MasterCard也因為大量退款揚言終止合作業務。
"Peter Thiel didn't know what a chargeback was," says Jawed Karim, an early engineer who went on to found YouTube with fellow alumni Chad Hurley and Steve Chen - and then sell it to Google for $1.65 billion. "That's one of the fundamental things of any credit card payment system. Chargebacks almost killed the company."
「Peter Thiel不瞭解退款的衝擊有多大。」Jawed Karim說，這位跟Chad Hurley還有陳士駿創立Youtube的第三位創辦人(最後Youtube以16.5億美元賣給Google) 「那是信用卡付款系統的基礎，退款幾乎毀了公司。」
But the executive team made up for nonmastery of details with unwavering vision, which inspired the troops. At his San Bruno, Calif., office, YouTube CEO Hurley remembers his PayPal days as an education in business. When he arrived in California with a degree in art from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, building a successful company seemed like something other people did.
然而高層以堅定的願景克服了這些不甚了解的細節，且這件事也激勵了其他員工，在加州San Bruno辦公室裡，YouTube的 Hurley回憶PayPal的日子等於給他上了商業課程，他到加州前在賓州Indiana大學拿到藝術學位，現在也創立了跟其他人一樣棒的企業。
"You never think it could happen to you," says Hurley. "But seeing Peter and Max and the guys come up with ideas and seeing how to make things work gave me a lot of insight. You may not have a business degree, but you see how to put the process into effect. The experience helped me realize the payoff of being involved in a startup."
「你未曾想過會有這種事降臨。」Hurley說。「但看到Peter跟Max想辦法，如何去解決問題給了我很多啟發，或許我沒有商科的文憑，但見到整個運作的過程，這經驗讓我知道在新創公司的一切都是值得的。」
After 11 revisions to the prospectus, PayPal pulled off its IPO on Feb. 15, 2002. The stock closed that day at $20 a share and rose for the next nine months, even as Nasdaq cratered, until the sale to eBay. Thiel walked away on the day of the acquisition; Levchin and Sacks followed. Botha considered sticking around - "Meg Whitman made me a terrific offer," he says - but left for Sequoia to stay in the startup game.
修改11次招股說明書後，PayPal在2002年2月15日正式公開上市，當天收盤20元，但之後九個月都呈現上漲趨勢，即便後來那斯達克震盪也是一樣，直到賣給eBay才停止。Thiel在併購當天就離開，Levchin 與 Sacks隨後跟進，Botha游移不定，「Meg Whitman給我非常優渥的合約。」但最後來是去紅杉資本了。
For those who remained in the name of a paycheck, the culture shock was profound. Premal Shah, a former product manager at PayPal and now president of Kiva.org, was put in charge of eBay's developing-world strategy. He went to India for three months - a dream assignment. But when he got back, it seemed that every day meant another PowerPoint presentation for yet another layer of management. "I quit after a year," he says.
對於那些同意留任的人，文化衝擊不可謂不大。前產品經理Premal Shah，現在是Kiva.org總裁，就負責eBay開發中國家策略。他後來負責一個夢想中的任務-去印度三個月。但當他回來後，每天就像是做PPT給其他管理階層看。「一年後我就離開了。」他說。
By then, the PayPal mafia was well established. Today they call upon one another when they need money or advice - and when they need both, they go to Thiel, who seems to be at the center of it all. Among his many investments, Thiel has money in Slide, Yelp, and LinkedIn.
之後，PayPal mafia已然成形，需要建議或投資就互相連絡，或是兩者都要便去找Thiel，他就像他們的中樞，Thiel就投資了Slide, Yelp, LinkedIn.
He helped his former assistant start Laiola, one of San Francisco's hottest new restaurants. His venture capital startup, the Founders Fund, invested the first $1.5 million in Sacks' Geni.com, where five of the 29 employees are from PayPal.
他也協助前任助理開了舊金山最近很熱門Laiola餐廳，他的創投資金Founders Fund也投資150萬在Sack等五位前PayPal員工的 Geni.com。
Levchin invested in IronPort systems, which was founded by early PayPal investor Scott Bannister and acquired by Cisco (Charts, Fortune 500) for $830 million. He put the first $1 million into Yelp and serves as its chairman.
Levchin投資早期PayPal金主Scott Bannister成立的IronPort systems，後被思科8.3億收購。他還注資Yelp100萬並擔任董事。
He's also got money with Botha at Sequoia (even while Sequoia has a stake in Slide's rival, RockYou) and was an executive producer of Thank You for Smoking, along with Sacks, Thiel, and Musk. That last name may come as a surprise, but Musk has made peace with his mutineers.
他也跟Botha投資紅杉(雖然Slide的敵手RockYou紅杉也有股份)，也跟Sacks, Thiel, Musk當影片Thank You for Smoking執行製片，Musk這名字你聽到可能大吃一驚，但Musk最後還是跟大家和好了。
He has invested in Room 9, Geni, Botha's Sequoia fund, and Clarium Capital. (But he won't let Thiel reciprocate. "We don't need the money," says Musk with a wry smile.)
Musk也投資 Room 9, Geni 還有Botha的紅杉資本。(但他不讓Thiel回報，「我們又不需要錢。」他諷刺地笑了一下。)
As for the impact of PayPal's culture, that varies. At some places, like Slide, Levchin's work ethic lives on- though his hiring practices seem to have softened. His head of engineering, for example, was on the Stanford water polo team. "He probably likes to play hoops," Levchin jokes.
PayPal文化也在某些地方開花結果，像是Slide，Levchin的方式也延續下來，雖說他招募不再那麼苛刻了，例如總工程師是Stanford大學的水球隊隊員，「或許他也愛打籃球。」他開玩笑道。
At other places there's nary an intellectual pissing match in sight. YouTube's quiet San Bruno office might be taken for a division of a large corporation (which it is).
其他地方也看不到智力競賽的影子了，YouTube在San Bruno的辦公室就安安靜靜的像個大公司的分部一樣(其實就是啦)
At Yelp, Stoppelman has become a regular on the San Francisco party circuit, and these days spends little time sleeping under his desk. But both YouTube and Yelp learned a valuable lesson from PayPal: The first idea isn't always the best. Yelp was a convoluted e-mail referral service before becoming a top review site. YouTube started as a video dating play. Now it's at the center of the zeitgeist.
在Yelp， Stoppelman變成舊金山的Party動物，也讓他睡在桌子下的時間少了些。但YouTube 跟 Yelp都在PayPal學到寶貴的一課:第一個idea都不是最好的idea，Yelp本想做email轉交服務但現在變成網站評分網站，Youtube從約會影像網站變成時代精神的中心。
The mafia doesn't often convene in a physical place- they don't have a Bada Bing, where Tony Soprano and his crew would hang out. But they do have a sense of humor, and so at FORTUNE's request, the capos are gathered in Tosca, the legendary San Francisco watering hole, for a group photo.
現在PayPal mafia不常碰頭了，他們沒有《黑道家族》Tony Soprano老大跟小混混們待的Bada Bing酒吧，但他們有配合的幽默感，受FORTUNE要求到Tosca，舊金山知名的「水坑」拍團體照。
Frank Sinatra is here, crooning from the Wurlitzer. So are Thiel, Levchin, Sacks, Botha, and many others. Musk wanted to come, but he's in Chicago to receive an "innovator of the year" award. Hurley and Chen bowed out after their Google handler objected to the gangster motif.
Frank Sinatra到了，跟著Wurlitzer唱機哼歌，Thiel, Levchin, Sacks, Botha還有其他人也是，Musk也想來，但他去芝加哥拿「年度創新家」獎。Hurley 跟 陳士駿也因為比較喜歡PayPal mafia的作風離開Google。
The group is decked out in gold chains and tracksuits, smoking cigars, drinking Maker's Mark. It's a happy moment, even if the lack of Wi-Fi makes Levchin antsy. Looking at the group laughing and joking, you'd never guess they're all supercompetitive hyperintellectuals- or that some don't like each other very much. But when you get to know them a bit, it's not all that surprising. As Stoppelman puts it, "We're all a little weird."
這幫人戴著金項鍊、穿幫派運動服、抽雪茄、喝Maker's Mark威士忌，真是歡樂時光，雖然沒有Wi-Fi讓Levchin坐立難安，看著他們互相揶揄開著玩笑，你絕對想不到他們是絕富競爭性的知識份子，且他們也不是那麼喜歡彼此，但只要你再稍微了解他們一下，你就不會訝異了，像Stoppelman說的:「我們就是有點怪怪的。」
