我對矽谷的創業故事一直很有興趣，雖說我不是工程師，但可想見當時新創團隊胼手胝足的寫程式、架網站，拼命地推進新文明的那股熱情。現在閱讀歷史文獻，那份悸動應像是Steve Jobs看到Whole Earth Catalog，雷軍說他讀《矽谷之火》那般雀躍。所以兩年前我讀Youtube創辦人陳士駿自傳《Youtube你的熱情和直覺》，我就對他第二章談到PayPal的種種就特別有興趣，Peter Thiel跟Maz Levchin是何方神聖，PayPal故事為何，賣掉PayPal後怎麼銷聲匿跡(但也有可能是台灣媒體偏好問題)。 後得知Fortune雜誌在2007年訪問時，給他們打響了名號:the PayPal mafia! 本是私底下工程師對團體的暱稱，卻造就了十分響亮的雜誌title，搭上特意設計的賭場、雪茄、黑手黨造型，也許是喜歡《教父》的緣故，要我不留意也難。過去一直沒特別去找這篇讀，現在開網誌翻譯了，我想要慢慢翻，好好浸在這故事裡......
An inside look at the hyperintelligent, superconnected pack of serial entrepreneurs who left the payment service and are turning Silicon Valley upside down. Fortune's Jeffrey O'Brien reports.
一群極富智慧又生死與共的創業家，如何在離開PayPal後又把矽谷搞得翻天覆地。
By Jeffrey M. O'Brien, Fortune senior editor
(Fortune Magazine) -- A door opens, and a blond man appears in a white jacket with large buttons. "Good morning," he says. "Peter's in back. Make yourself comfortable in the dining room. I'll be serving breakfast shortly."
門打開了，一個身穿大排扣白夾克的金髮男人現身:「早安!」他說「Peter回來了，你在客廳裡隨便坐，我等會就拿早餐給你。」
Holy cannoli. Peter Thiel has a butler. The 40-year-old entrepreneur runs a $3 billion hedge fund. He's the founder of a new venture capital firm that's the talk of Silicon Valley. He's got an early $500,000 stake in Facebook that's now worth about $1 billion on paper. The man has bankrolled everything from restaurants to movies and is lauded by many as some kind of free-market genius. He drives a half-million-dollar McLaren supercar. And now a butler.
哇咧，Peter Thiel居然請個男管家，這位40歲的創業家擁有30億美元的避險基金，也是矽谷談論不休的新創投創辦人，早些日子給了Facebook 50萬元，現在大概值10億元左右。他從餐廳到戲院都有投資，算得上自由市場的天才，他開50萬的McLaren，然後...又配了位男管家。
Just back from a morning run, Thiel emerges into the dining room of his home in the shadow of San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts. Wearing a powder-blue T-shirt wet with sweat, he displays the relaxed self-confidence of Michael Corleone. Perhaps it comes with the butler. "I'm Peter," he says, extending his hand and smiling before thanking me for agreeing to such a late breakfast meeting. It's 7:30 A.M. "It was nice to sleep in."
剛晨跑回來，Thiel回到緊鄰舊金山美術館的家中客廳，汗水涔涔地身著粉藍色T-shirt。他展現出電影《教父》Michael Corleone般的自信，或許也跟管家在身旁有關吧。「我是Peter。」他說，攤手微笑謝謝我答應這麼晚的早餐約會。現在是早上7點30分，「這時候最好睡了。」
The doorbell rings, and in walks a scruffy, sleepy-eyed Max Levchin, 32, who has trekked over from his new $5 million-plus home a few blocks away in Pacific Heights. Every garment on Levchin's unwashed body is a freebie - University of Illinois zip jacket, mismatching shorts, bright orange T-shirt with some Hebrew lettering.
此時門鈴響了，走來一位邋遢又睡眼惺忪的Maz Levchin，32歲，方從幾個街區外的Pacific高地上500萬新家而來，Levchin身上所有的服裝活脫像是免費贈品組成-Illinois大學夾克，不合尺寸的短褲，以及亮橙色T-shirt搭襯希伯來文。
The high-stakes fight for your friends 冒險為朋友而戰
Levchin runs one of the hottest companies on the web, a photo-sharing site called Slide that draws 134 million users a month. Making neither eye contact nor conversation, he presses his lips together, nods to indicate that he is, as ever, ready for business, and sits.
Levchin 擁有一家火紅的照片分享的網路公司，叫做Slide，每月吸引1億3千4百萬人次造訪。我和他並沒有任何的眼神接觸或交談，他緊閉雙唇坐下來，點點頭表示他已經準備好了。
It's been nine years since Thiel and Levchin first dined together at Hobee's, near Stanford University. Levchin had an idea for a company, and Thiel wanted to invest. In short order Thiel joined as a co-founder, and together they set out to "create the new world currency."
距兩人第一次在Stanford大學附近 Hobee's用餐已經相隔九年了，Levchin說他有個idea，Thiel想要投資他，不久後Thiel又跳下去當共同創辦人，一起"創造新的世界貨幣"
Their brainchild would change the course of the Internet. They'd bring on several hundred employees to what would become PayPal. They'd sign up more than 20 million users and burn $180 million in funding before breaking even and selling out to eBay (Charts, Fortune 500) for $1.5 billion.
他們的發明改變了網路，創辦PayPal的過程雇用了幾百名員工，共2千萬名使用者，並在賣給eBay 15億之前燒掉了1.8億元。
And then things got interesting. The eBay deal, remarkable only because it happened in the bleakness of 2002, wasn't so much an exit as an explosion. Most of PayPal's key employees left eBay, but they stayed in touch. They even have a name for themselves: the PayPal mafia. And the mafiosi have been busy.
然後事情就更好玩了，這場交易發生在毫無生機的2002，因此PayPal的退場也不是那麼地震撼。多數Paypal的員工後來就離開了eBay，但彼此間仍保持聯絡，他們甚至給自己取了個名:the PayPal mafia(PayPal 黑手黨)，且多數黑手黨成員都活躍於線上。
During the past five years they've been furiously building things - investment firms, philanthropies, solar-power companies, an electric-car maker, a firm that aims to colonize Mars, and of course a slew of Internet companies. It's amazing how many hot web properties can trace their ancestries to PayPal.
過去五年他們大舉拓展疆土: 投資公司、慈善、太陽能公司、電動車製造，還有殖民火星的公司，還有一堆網路公司，這麼多熱門的公司可追溯至PayPal真是不可思議。
Besides Facebook and Slide, there's Yelp, Digg, and YouTube. Thiel and Levchin, the don and consigliere of the mafia, figure that all told, there are dozens of enterprises worth a total of roughly $30 billion - and that value is growing rapidly, as evidenced by Thiel's good fortune with Facebook.
除了 FB跟Slide外，還有Yelp, Digg, Youtube。Thiel 跟 Levchin，就像《教父》裡的Don Vito Corleone跟Tom Hagen，他們估計這些公司大概值300億，且價值還在高升中，從FB的投資就能看得出來。
This group of serial entrepreneurs and investors represents a new generation of wealth and power. In some ways they're classic characters of Silicon Valley, where success and easy access to capital breed ambition and further success. It's the reason people come to the area from all over the world. But even by that standard, PayPal was a petri dish for entrepreneurs. The obvious question is, Why?
這些連續創業家跟投資者代表新一世代的財富與權勢，某種程度來說，他們代表了矽谷，因資本密集而滋長野心進而走向成功，這也是為何矽谷海納百川之因，但即便如此，PayPal仍像是創業家的培養皿，問題是，Why?
Maybe it comes back to the early hires. After their first breakfast, Thiel and Levchin began recruiting everyone they knew at their alma maters. "It basically started by hiring all these people in concentric circles," Thiel remembers. "I hired friends from Stanford, and Max brought in people from the University of Illinois."
或許要追溯到早期的雇員，早餐後Thiel 跟 Levchin回憶，他們是從認識的校友中開始招兵買馬。「我從Stanford招募，Max自Illinois大學挖人。」
They were looking for a specific type of candidate. They wanted competitive, well-read, multilingual individuals who, above all else, had a proficiency in math. Levchin's original idea for PayPal was to beam money between PalmPilots, but Thiel has a way of seeing the bigger picture.
他們在找有某些特質的人，有競爭性、博學多聞、會多種語言，更重要的事精通數學，Levchin本想在PalmPilots電腦上貨幣流通就好，但Thiel有更大的夢想。
A staunch libertarian, Thiel figured a web-based currency would undermine government tax structures. Getting there, however, would mean taking on established industries - commercial banking, for instance - which would require financial acumen and engineering expertise.
這位堅定的自由主義者-Thiel認為網路貨幣會削弱政府稅收體系，然而這麼做也會挑戰既成體系，像是商業銀行，這也意味著他們需要敏銳的財務與工程技術人員。
Thiel and Levchin also wanted workaholics who were not MBAs, consultants, frat boys, or, God forbid, jocks. "This guy came in, and I asked what he liked to do for fun," Levchin recalls. "He said, 'I really enjoy playing hoops.' I said, 'We can't hire the guy. Everyone I knew in college who liked to play hoops was an idiot.'"
Thiel 跟 Levchin也希望這些新血並非MBA、顧問公司出身、飲酒作樂大學生、玩團人士或運動員。「這些人只要一進來，我就問他們平時做何休閒。」Levchin回憶。「某人回應:我很愛打籃球。我就說，我們不能雇用這種人，大家都知道愛打籃球的都怪怪的。」
In other words, they were looking for people like themselves. A bilingual immigrant from Kiev, Ukraine, Levchin is the hypercompetitive son of a playwright father and a physicist mother. He's numerate in the extreme and is an accomplished clarinetist whose athletic pursuits don't typically take him beyond table tennis. He lives to work.
換言之，他們想找跟他們一樣的人，像Levchin是有競爭力的烏克蘭基輔移民後裔，父親是劇作家，母親是物理學者，專精於數學並演奏單簧管，可體育才能只限於桌球，他活著就為工作。
Born in Germany, Thiel has a J.D. from Stanford and did some time as a corporate lawyer. But finance has always been more his thing - Institutional Investor named his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, "global macro fund of the year" in 2005. (He was once ranked among the top under-21 chess players in the country, but he gave up playing competitively.
出身於德國的Thiel有Stanford的法學博士學位並曾在某企業執業，不過財務才是他的愛好，《機構投資人》曾經把他的避險基金Clarium Capital列為2005年度"global macro fund of the year" (他也曾是西洋棋(21歲以下)名列前茅的選手，但後來就放棄不下了。)
"Taken too far, chess can become an alternate reality in which one loses sight of the real world," he says. "My chess ability was roughly at the limit. Had I become any stronger, there would have been some massive tradeoffs with success in other domains in life.")
「西洋棋世界跟真實世界有些失真。而我的棋藝也有限，但如果我棋藝超群，我在其他領域也不會那麼成功了。」
"All of this is about self-selecting for people just like you," says Levchin. "He thinks like me, he's just as geeky, and he doesn't get laid very often. Great hire! We'll get along perfectly."
Levchin說:「這其實是個人選擇問題。他思想邏輯跟我很像，又是科技怪咖，平常也不愛泡妞，我們會很麻吉的。」
Recruiting underclassmen from the middle of the country assured Levchin that his charges would have few preconceived notions and fewer social distractions. "Most of them were very introverted anyway," Levchin recalls. "They'd come in, eat crappy food all day, and sleep under their desks."
從中部找些還沒畢業的人，因Levchin確定他要找些沒有先入為主跟沒有社交紛擾的人。Levchin說:「有些人像個自閉兒，進來後吃些垃圾食物，累了就睡在桌子底下。」
Early on, disagreements sometimes broke out into wrestling matches, and on at least one occasion Levchin worried that he had a serious fight on his hands. As with the real Mob, PayPal wasn't exactly welcoming toward women.
早些日子，彼此間還會有些紛擾甚至拳腳相向，有一度Levchin還真怕自己也捲入進去。也因為跟這一群黑幫在一起，PayPal不歡迎女性加入。
When it came time to hire a high-ranking female engineer, she turned out to be bad at Ping-Pong. Levchin took that as a lack of competitive fire but grudgingly hired her anyway. She quit within six months. "Peter never fails to rub that in," he grumbles.
有一次他們雇了位女工程師，但他們發現他連乒乓都打不好，Levchin也覺得她欠缺競爭精神，六個月後，那位女性就辭職了。Levchin抱怨:「Peter總是喜歡對此嘮嘮叨叨。」
Of course Google (Charts, Fortune 500) is also famous for a relentless pursuit of brainiacs. But PayPal was no Google. "The difference between Google and PayPal was that Google wanted to hire Ph.D.s, and PayPal wanted to hire the people who got into Ph.D. programs and dropped out," says Roelof Botha, PayPal's onetime CFO who went on to become a general partner at one of the nation's most powerful VC firms, Sequoia Capital, and put the first venture money into YouTube. "It's a different temperament."
當然Google在雇用人上也是出了名的嚴格，但PayPal與Google比完全不同，「兩者差距在於Google喜歡用博士，而PayPal喜歡從博士班輟學的人。」曾是PayPal財務長後又變成第一隻投資Youtube的Sequoia Capital(紅杉資本)創投合夥人Roelof Botha說。「性情不同嘛。」
The PayPal-ers who didn't possess Thiel's anti-establishment streak as new hires had it by the time they left. The PayPal culture wasn't just antigovernment. It was anti--mainstream thought.
PayPal的員工在離開前都還沒有Thiel的反骨思想，而PayPal不只反政府，也反主流思想。
Thiel, ever the freethinker, has donated $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation, a life-extension-research organization run by the controversial academic Aubrey de Grey, who believes humans will one day live to 1,000.
像Thiel這種自由思想家，就捐了350萬給Methuselah基金會，一個延長人類生命的機構，相信有一天人可以活到1000歲。
Thiel sits on the board of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which concerns itself with the coming merger of man and machine. In the early days at PayPal, he even discussed establishing cryogenic storage as an employee benefit.
他也是人工智慧學院董事，專注於人與未來機器混合體，早期PayPal時代，他還想到個極低溫儲藏系統當員工福利。
Thiel's leadership style is as unconventional as his worldview. His hallmark management MO at PayPal (at least, pre-IPO) was the all-hands open-book session. Customer logs, revenue flow, fraud losses, burn rate: He'd display it all for every employee to see. This access to information, coupled with the lack of offices, created a flat structure where any idea could win the day.
Thiel的領導方式跟他的世界觀一樣獨特，他的特色就是在PayPal移動辦公的全體員工大會(至少在IPO前)，客戶日誌、營收、耗損與支出，他讓每個人都知道現況，這種資訊開放風格，加上辦公空間不大，創造了一個扁平的組織讓所有idea都能有所貢獻。
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翻到一半發現大陸人已有一些翻譯，但不管他，參照之餘還是會完成他。
http://archive.fortune.com/2007/11/13/magazines/fortune/paypal_mafia.fortune/index.htm
圖片來源:hsakawa
