The Economist February 19th 2022 Culture 77ThestoryofPayPalMaking the mafia
I
t ishardlya techgiant.PayPal,a digital
payments firm, has a market capitalisa
tion of $135bn, compared with Amazon’s
$1.6trn and Apple’s $2.8trn. Yet it holds a
unique position in Silicon Valley mytholo
gy. A startling number of PayPal’s cofoun
ders and honchos have gone on to
corporate greatness, earning themselves
the nickname the “PayPal mafia”.
The top job at the firm was held by both
Elon Musk, boss of Tesla and one of the
world’s richest men, and Peter Thiel, a vet
eran venture capitalist and cofounder of
Palantir Technologies, a dataanalytics
firm. Reid Hoffman, cofounder of Linked
In, held various senior roles. Three PayPal
alumni later created YouTube; others co
founded Yelp, a popular review website,
and Yammer, a social network. Former em
ployees landed senior jobs at Google, Apple
and Facebook, as well as at some of the val
ley’s biggest venturecapital firms. Togeth
er they form “one of the most powerful and
successful networks ever created”, argues
Jimmy Soni in “The Founders”.
His wellresearched book chronicles
PayPal’s birth and transformation from a
scrappy startup to a profitable business
which, in 2002, was bought by eBay for
$1.5bn. The origin story starts with two
other companies: Confinity, cofounded
by Mr Thiel, which planned to build soft
ware to beam money between PalmPilots,
then musthave devices for businessfolk;
and X.com, cofounded by Mr Musk, which
was meant, as he put it, to be “the Amazon
of financial services”, offering internet us
ers everything from mortgages to credit
cards to insurance. Both found success
with features that let customers transfer
money using email. Initially rivals, the
firms merged. PayPal was the result.
The story of its rise is gripping. PayPal
was born during the internet boom of the
late 1990s, when money poured into Sili
con Valley. The fierce competition foment
ed by the investment in turn generated
intense pressure; allnighters were com
mon. PayPal burned through dangerous
amounts of cash to attract new customers.
It was sued repeatedly and subject to fraud.
Splits among the top brass caused commo
tions: two chief executives were ousted in
coups in a sixmonth spell. Mr Soni’s text is
peppered with colourful quotations fromMr Thiel (“I need people here I can scream
at”) and Mr Musk (“This is like gambling
one hundred million smackeroos”).
All this gives a taste of the chaos of
startup life. Business models were impro
vised on the fly. Shortly before Confinity’s
launch, Mr Thiel told journalists that his
new product would be free. That was news
to his engineers, who quickly removed fees
from the website. Experimentation led to
grave mistakes. For almost a month a loop
hole in X.com’s security allowed villains to
steal from banks using only account and
routing numbers, both of which were
printed on cheques.
What the book lacks is a clinching an
swer as to why the PayPal gang have been
so successful. Lots of theories are offered,
including the wildness of the PayPal roller
coasterandtheoutsiderstatusofmanyof
thoseinvolved(nineofthetenfoundersof
thetwooriginalfirmswereforeignborn).
Noneoftheseexplanationsisconvincing;
mostapplytoothertechstartups.
Evenso,thisisanengrossingglimpse
ofthePayPal mafia’sriotousearly days.
Many former employees object to that
nicknamenow,onthegroundsthatitin
sinuates something sinister. A quip by
JohnMalloy,a formerboardmember,bet
tercapturesthebook’stone:“Callingusa
mafiaistoinsultmafias.A mafiaisfarbet
terorganisedthanwewere.”nThe Founders.By Jimmy Soni.
Simon & Schuster; 496 pages; $30.
Atlantic Books; £18.99DebutfictionLove and other
demons
T
his luminousstory is poweredand
steered by two characters from differ
ent walks of life who have different
attitudes to death. Set in fictitious locales
of Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s native Trinidad,
her debut novel tells of the separate strug
gles and twinned destinies of Emmanuel
Darwin and Yejide St Bernard. What looks
set to be a simple tale of boy meets girl
soon develops into a thoroughly original
and emotionally rich examination of love,
grief and inheritance.
Darwin (as the character prefers to be
called) leaves his home in the country and
hitches a ride to Port Angeles to start work
as a gravedigger at the Fidelis Cemetery.
His mother, a devout Rastafarian who has
taught him to keep a distance from death,
is appalled at his choice of job: “Not in no
dead yard and not in that dead city.” But intheabsenceofotheropportunities, Darwin
is forced to turn his back on her and take
his chances in a place that can reputedly
“swallow a man whole”.
Meanwhile, on her family’s estate in
Morne Marie, Yejide waits for Petronella,
her ailing mother, to gasp her last breath.
When she dies, Yejide inherits a mysteri
ous legacy that has been passed down
through generations of St Bernard wom
en—the ability to anticipate death and
commune with spirits. “I feel the dead call
ing,” she later says, “and I see death coming
before it reach.”
Darwin meets Yejide when she turns up
at Fidelis to make burial arrangements for
her mother. They sense a special connec
tion and an intimate relationship blos
soms. But privately each is plagued by a
pressing individual concern. Darwin dis
covers that his colleagues at the cemetery
are embroiled in shady business and that
his life is in danger. Yejide is visited by Pet
ronella’s restless ghost, which urges her to
escape her fate and make her own life:
“Take your man, take yourself and run.”
But can the pair run far enough?
Several recent novels have included
memorable scenes in graveyards, among
them “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”
by Arundhati Roy and George Saunders’s
sublime, Bookerprizewinning “Lincoln in
the Bardo”. As in those books, the “dead
yard” in “When We Were Birds” is full of
life. Ms Lloyd Banwo ensures that the
scenes it hosts are packed with drama, col
our and tension, particularly in her
gripping finale.
In other hands, the flights of fancy in
Yejide’s story might have clashed with the
grounded realism of Darwin’s. Here they
blend into a heady mix. The rhythms of Ms
Lloyd Banwo’s narrative voice help keep
the reader rapt. Like the corbeaux—vul
tures which, in the author’s invented my
thology, escort dead souls to theafterlife—
her novel takes flight and soars.nWhen We Were Birds. By Ayanna Lloyd
Banwo. Doubleday; 304 pages; $27.00.
Hamish Hamilton; £14.99The graveyard shift