STRENGTH IN
NUMBERS
FOCUS
How women working in Silicon Valley are
taking a page out of the “PayPal mafia”
playbook. By Emma Hinchliffe
45
FORTUNE.COM // NOVEMBER 2019
VENTURE
IN THE FIVE YEARS since five Twitter
alumnae and one current executive
banded together to invest in startups as
#Angels, they’ve often heard one comparison:
the “PayPal mafia.” A moniker popularized by
Fortune in 2007, the nickname refers to the
group of Silicon Valley bigwigs—Peter Thiel,
Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, et al.—who came
out of the payments platform and used their
payouts from its acquisition by eBay to shape
the next generation of Silicon Valley startups.
The #Angels laugh at the comparison, but they
don’t entirely disagree. “We’re the new Twitter
mafia,” says #Angels cofounder Jana Messer-
schmidt, a Lightspeed partner and former vice
president of global business development and
partnerships at Twitter.
Today the analogy is more apt than ever—to
a growing number of groups. As the companies
that the PayPal mafia helped build, including
Facebook and Lyft, transition into their post-
IPO eras, more Silicon Valley women are
coming into investor-level money. And many
are taking a cue from #Angels’ strategy: Pooled
together, their capital is more powerful than
one woman’s alone.
Late last year, the #Angels were joined
by F7—a group of seven former and current
Facebookers—and by a still nascent group of
10 women who worked at Uber and have since
gone into venture at separate firms, sharing
Members of
F7, from left:
Kirthiga Reddy,
Sarah Smith,
Joanna Lee
Shevelenko,
Robyn Reiss,
Kelly Graziadei,
and Yvette Lui.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK
