Bad boss / Tough customer
Today: A new Flaming Hydra contributor! Dave Karpf, professor of political communication at George Washington University, writer of “The Future, Now and Then” newsletter, and author of the forthcoming book Vaporware, Inc: How Silicon Valley Sells the Illusion of Progress; and Trevor Alixopulos, who draws comics and illustrations and lives in sunny California.
Issue No. 531
A New Guy for Us All to Be Mad At
Dave Karpf
Main Antagonist Syndrome
Trevor Alixopulos
A New Guy for Us All to Be Mad at
by Dave Karpf
Here’s a new guy for us all to be mad at: Bill Harris. Goddammit, Bill, this whole sordid mess is a little bit your fault.
Before Elon became Technoking, before Peter Thiel became a self-declared expert on the Antichrist, before Reid Hoffman started preaching the gospel of “blitzscaling,” and before David Sacks was put in charge of all government tech policy, there was PayPal. The early years of PayPal are like a supervillain origin story for Silicon Valley’s biggest ghouls.
The myth of the “PayPal Mafia” has percolated through Silicon Valley for decades. It has acquired a certain Darwinian texture. It goes like this: PayPal was among the few startups to make it through the dot-com crash. Its founders persevered in the harshest of conditions. They were more visionary and disruptive than their competitors, we are often told. They had more hustle and willpower. They invented a new way of doing business, then enshrined their growth-hacking business philosophy as a template for the generation of techbros that followed. The fortunes and reputations they built from the sale of PayPal to eBay gave Elon carte blanche to invest in cars and rockets, and allowed Thiel to start Palantir (and to write the 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg an early check), and to let Hoffman start LinkedIn, and Sacks launch some dumb, unmemorable company and then host tech’s most annoying podcast. It also put Musk, Thiel, and Hoffman in extended social conversations with Jeffrey Epstein. But I digress.
The thing to understand about early PayPal is that it was an absolute clown car. These guys didn’t succeed against the odds thanks to their vision or wit or will. They succeeded in spite of themselves. They were literally handed a $100,000,000 check right when everyone else was running out of money, and they still nearly managed to piss it all away.
Keep us breathing fire!
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