• There's a new, Trump-aligned private club in DC, where membership can reach half-a-million dollars.
• David Sacks said the club will replace older establishments and attract a new type of Republican.
• Private clubs are popping up across the US, including in the nation's capitol.

There's a new private club in DC for the "younger, hipper, Trump-aligned Republican."

That's how David Sacks, President Donald Trump's crypto and AI czar, described Executive Branch on the latest episode of the All-In podcast. The most exclusive membership costs a small fortune, and Trump's orbit is full of people who can pay the price.

Interest in private clubs is soaring across the country, including in DC. Ned's Club, a separate members-only space, opened just steps from the White House earlier this year.

Here are five key details about Executive Branch, which is billing itself as MAGA's hottest new hangout.

Membership can cost half a million dollars

Founding members have to shell out $500,000 to join the invite-only club. Sacks said on All-In that there are around 10 founding members, including himself and billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya. They have "additional benefits," Sacks said, though he didn't specify what their special perks include.

According to the club's website, the waiting list for new members is closed.

Owners include the sons of Trump World

Sacks said on the podcast that his government work means he can't be an owner, but Politico reported that Donald Trump Jr., megadonor Omeed Malik, investor Chris Buskirk, and Zach and Alex Witkoff are the owners. Sacks congratulated the owners in a post on X, which each of them, except Trump Jr., reposted.

Malik and Buskirk cofounded 1789 Capital, an anti-ESG VC firm that has invested in Tucker Carlson's new conservative media project. Trump Jr. is a partner at the firm.

The Witkoff brothers are the sons of Steve Witkoff, Trump's Middle East envoy and a real-estate developer. The elder Witkoff has known the president for decades.

Palihapitiya responded to a request for comment from Business Insider with a poop emoji.

The other reported cofounders and owners didn't respond at all.

An alternative to the 'old and stuffy' DC

Executive Branch promises to remake the DC social scene in Trump's image, Sacks said.

"The clubs that exist in Washington today have been around for decades. They're kind of old and stuffy," he said on All-In. "To the extent that there are Republican clubs, they tend to be more Bush-era Republicans as opposed to Trump-era Republicans. We wanted to create something new, hipper, and Trump-aligned."

He said the founders wanted to create a place where people could hang out without fear of bumping into lobbyists or "a fake news reporter."

The club will reportedly be in Georgetown

The club will be based in the upscale neighborhood of Georgetown, Politico and other news outlets reported. Sacks didn't share any location details on All-In.

Lower-cost options are available

While founding members pay a staggering half-a-million dollars to join Executive Branch, other invitees can dole out a smaller sum, Sacks said on All-In.

"I think people are getting a little bit carried away with that number," he said of the $500,000 price tag. Sacks didn't specify how much lower-tier membership costs.

Regular membership at Ned's Club costs $5,000 a year, on top of a $5,000 joining fee, BI reported in April. The Founders' membership there comes in at $25,000 a year, with a $125,000 initial fee.

• David Sacks said on the All-In podcast that US-made chips should have strong export controls.
• He said some Western tech companies turn a blind eye to existing rules.
• Sacks said the Bureau of Industry and Security could use more resources to enforce export controls.

David Sacks, the White House's AI and crypto czar, is a strong proponent of DOGE's work to slash the size of the US government.

But one area he said could use more resources is at a little-mentioned federal agency, the Bureau of Industry and Security, which enforces export controls on US-made chips.

During Friday's episode of the All-In podcast, Sacks said China continues to get its hands on regulated chips from the US despite export controls.

"I think clearly the shell companies, the front companies, are set up by either the Chinese government or entities in China to evade the export controls because ultimately they want the chips," Sacks said.

The US government has implemented restrictions and rules around China's ability to get US semiconductors, including those from Nvidia. On Wednesday, Nvidia said it expects a multibillion-dollar charge due to a licensing requirement to send H20 chips to China.

The White House advisor added that another issue is that Western companies will ignore where their chips end up.

"I do think there are a lot of Western companies that will look the other way or turn a blind eye and just haven't been enforcing the rules as religiously as they should because it's profitable not to," he said. "This is where I do think that the US government has to be pretty tough."

Sacks said there needs to be a crackdown on loopholes companies may use to send their chips overseas, and more monitoring and inspection.

According to Sacks, doing so would require more resources for the Bureau of Industry and Security, which is under the Department of Commerce's purview.

Sacks said he felt the agency was "understaffed relative to the importance" of enforcing export controls.

"This is one of the few areas of the government that I actually think needs more resources," Sacks said.

A BIS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Donald Trump has picked the world's richest men to join his staff. We discuss how that could shape America's future in defense, health, and AI in a collaboration between reporters from Business Insider and Politico.

• President Donald Trump signed an executive order on AI development on Thursday.
• Trump's AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, said the US wants to become the world's AI capital.
• Earlier this week, Trump announced Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment project.

President Donald Trump wants his administration to have an action plan for artificial intelligence ready within 180 days.

On Thursday, the president signed an executive order calling for the US "to sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance." Since returning to the White House on Monday, Trump has signed multiple executive orders on areas including energy, trade, and immigration.

"We're basically announcing the administration's policy to make America the world capital in artificial intelligence and to dominate and to lead the world in AI," Trump's AI and cryptocurrency czar, David Sacks, told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday.

Trump appointed Sacks, a venture capitalist and former PayPal COO, to the newly created position last month. When announcing his appointment, Trump said Sacks would also lead the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology.

Sacks is a member of a group known as the "PayPal Mafia" — a group of PayPal employees who went on to become big names in the world of tech and venture capital. Besides Sacks, the group counts Tesla CEO Elon Musk and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

"David is one of the greatest in the world at AI, most respected probably there is," Trump told reporters on Thursday while signing the order.

Trump has ordered that "certain existing AI policies and directives that act as barriers to American AI innovation" be revoked — though the document did not specify which policies would be rolled back.

Trump's order also requests that existing regulations on AI be reviewed. Policies inconsistent with Trump's latest directive will be suspended or revised per the order.

In October 2023, then-President Joe Biden signed an expansive executive order on AI. The order, which Trump revoked on Monday, demanded greater transparency from companies developing AI tools.

Representatives for Trump did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

AI has figured prominently in Trump's first week in office.

On Tuesday, Trump announced Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment project. The new company is a joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank.

The president said that Stargate would create "over 100,000 American jobs almost immediately."

"What we want to do is we want to keep it in this country. China is a competitor, others are competitors. We want it to be in this country, and we are making it available," Trump said while announcing Stargate on Tuesday.

"I am gonna help a lot through emergency declarations, because we have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built," he added.

• Donald Trump recently appointed Sriram Krishnan to an AI advisory role.
• Krishnan came to the US from India in 2007 and became a US citizen in 2016.
• Indian tech workers initially praised his appointment, but have grown concerned by MAGA criticism.

Anuj Christian's green card was approved in 2019, a decade after he first came to the US as a graduate student from India. Since then, he's been waiting to receive it, one of thousands trapped in a lengthy backlog created by America's byzantine immigration system.

Earlier this month, Christian was hopeful for the first time in years. Just before Christmas, Donald Trump announced that Sriram Krishnan, a first-generation Indian American, would serve as a senior White House policy advisor for AI. Krishnan is set to work closely with Trump's new "crypto czar" David Sacks, an early investor in Facebook, SpaceX, Uber, and Palantir.

For Christian, Krishnan's appointment felt personal. "Sriram has personally been through the immigration system," said Christian, who runs an immigration reform group called FAIR. "Someone who has personally been through this issue is close to the president now. That has never happened before."

From Chennai to Silicon Valley

Krishnan arrived in the US in 2007 from Chennai, India, to begin a six-year stint at Microsoft. From there, he climbed the ranks of Silicon Valley, holding senior roles at Yahoo, Snap, Facebook, and Twitter. In 2020, he moved to venture capital, becoming a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Along the way, Krishnan became a US citizen in 2016, a milestone that eludes many legal immigrants from India. The green card backlog, a byproduct of per-country caps on employment-based permanent US residency, has left thousands of skilled workers from India in limbo. Wait times can now exceed beyond a lifetime.

Krishnan's appointment comes with a unique resonance for those impacted by this system. He has spoken openly about the challenges of navigating US immigration and has advocated for raising the country-based green card caps. These calls for reform have been a recurring theme of The Aarthi and Sriram Show, a podcast he hosts with his tech entrepreneur wife Aarthi Ramamurthy.

MAGA backlash

Krishnan's visibility and advocacy have turned him into a lightning rod for MAGA followers, though. In the days since Trump's announcement, the technologist has faced hate speech and racism directed not just at him but also at Indians and legal immigration in general. Krishnan declined to comment.

The backlash began with a tweet from far-right activist Laura Loomer, who criticized his appointment as "deeply disturbing" and said it conflicted with Trump's "America First" agenda.

Loomer accused Krishnan of advocating to "remove all restrictions on green card caps" and enabling foreign workers to take jobs from American STEM graduates, citing Silicon Valley's reliance on international talent as a threat to domestic innovation. Former Congressman Matt Gaetz, who was Trump's initial pick for attorney general, accused "tech bros" of engineering "an immigration policy."

H-1B visa debate

Rahul Menon, an Indian-born engineer from Rhode Island and host of Area51, a podcast about immigration, believes hate speech directed at Krishnan reflects broader misconceptions about skilled immigrants in the US.

"They just assume we are here to steal everyone's jobs," Menon told Business Insider. "If people understood the process of getting through an H-1B and the number of hoops you need to jump through, it's insane. The hate that Sriram is getting is just the beginning. You just need a thick skin to do the job."

Some of the scorn has been directed at H-1Bs, a common visa type that Silicon Valley companies and tech outsourcing firms use to hire foreign workers in the US. This particular system is also overwhelmed by huge volumes of applications for a limited number of slots each year. Bloomberg News uncovered a scheme earlier this year, known as "multiple registration," that manipulates the H-1B program and prevents what it described as legitimate talent from accessing these skilled-worker visa-based opportunities.

Recent optimism

Menon noted that optimism around addressing the green card backlog has been steadily growing, fueled by statements from high-profile figures. During a June appearance on the All-In Podcast hosted by VCs including Sacks, Trump expressed support for granting green cards to all US college graduates. Trump also recently voiced support for H-1B visas.

Menon sees Krishnan's appointment as the latest in a series of developments boosting morale among advocates for US immigration reform.

"It started with Trump saying that, then with Vivek, and now with Sriram — it's the cherry on top," Menon said, referring to Vivek Ramaswamy, another Trump advisor whose parents immigrated from Kerala, India. Ramaswamy has repeatedly called for the H-1B lottery system to be replaced with a selection process based on merit.

"AI stands for artificial intelligence, not American Indian"

Others remain skeptical about Krishnan's ability to influence immigration policy in his new role.

Sacks addressed the speculation directly in a tweet: "Sriram has been a US citizen for a decade. He's not 'running America.' He's advising on AI policy. He will have no influence over US immigration policy." The post appeared aimed at calming criticism from MAGA loyalists and quelling hope among some Indian immigrants that Krishnan's appointment would lead to immediate changes.

Ash Arora, a partner at VC firm LocalGlobe, and a friend of Krishnan and his wife, Ramamurthy, cautioned against reading too much into Krishnan's role when it comes to immigration reform.

"Sriram has been hired for AI — and AI stands for artificial intelligence, not American Indian," she told Business Insider. "I'm not sure whether Sriram will have a say in immigration matters, but the optimism about legal immigration being fixed, in my opinion, is misguided."

Ultimately, Krishnan is an AI policy advisor, Area51's Menon said. "I'd like to hope things will change. But let's not count our chickens before they've hatched."

• OpenAI's CFO trusts Elon Musk to prioritize the national interest despite owning a rival company.
• Musk, a Trump advisor with ties to AI czar David Sacks, has a feud with OpenAI's Sam Altman.
• Altman said last week he does not think Musk will use his political power to hurt competitors.

OpenAI trusts Elon Musk to act in good faith as the owner of a rival AI company with the ear of President-elect Donald Trump, its CFO said.

"We trust him...as a competitor, [Musk] will put first the national interest and compete appropriately," Sarah Friar, the CFO of OpenAI, said at the Reuters NEXT conference on Tuesday.

Musk is a close Trump advisor and is co-leading the advisory body DOGE alongside Vivek Ramaswamy. Musk's ally and fellow PayPal Mafia member David Sacks was recently appointed as Trump's AI and crypto czar.

After Sacks was tapped for the position, OpenAI chief Sam Altman — with whom Musk has a long-running feud — took to X to congratulate him on the role. Musk responded with a laughing emoji.

Friar's comments follow Altman's remarks at The New York Times' DealBook summit last week, in which he said he didn't think Musk would use his political power to his advantage and boost his own AI startup, xAI.

He said, "I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that Elon would hurt competitors and advantage his own businesses."

Musk has been embroiled in a legal battle with OpenAI since March after twice suing the company behind ChatGPT. He accused the company and some of its cofounders of violating its founding charter with its plans to change its corporate structure to become a for-profit business, and of putting commercial interests ahead of its original mission to benefit humanity.

Altman also addressed the feud between him and Musk at the DealBook conference, calling it "tremendously sad" and said he grew up looking to Musk as a "mega hero."

xAI was launched just 16 months ago, but it has quickly scaled up to be considered a competitor of OpenAI. In record time, the $50 billion startup built a supercomputer in Memphis that has 100,00 GPUs and is aiming to increase that to at least one million.

OpenAI and Elon Musk didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

• A group of early 2000s PayPal employees and founders came to be known as the "PayPal Mafia."
• The members have all gone on to impact Silicon Valley by founding and developing major companies.
• The group includes Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and the founders of both YouTube and Yelp.

What do the founders of YouTube, Yelp, Tesla, and LinkedIn have in common?

Apart from creating some of the biggest companies in tech, they all share a common résumé line item: they've all worked at PayPal.

Many of PayPal's early employees went on to become major names in tech and the venture capital world, founding, funding, and otherwise developing successful companies. This elite group came to be known as the "PayPal Mafia," a nickname that gained popularity after Fortune used the term in a 2007 piece alongside a photo of some of the members dressed in gangster attire.

Members of the group include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and over a dozen others. Here's a rundown of the most prominent members of this exclusive group and what they're up to over two decades later.

Peter Thiel: PayPal's founder and the so-called "don" of the PayPal Mafia

Peter Thiel cofounded the company that would become Paypal — called Confinity — in 1999 alongside Max Levchin and Luke Nosek. Confinity was launched as a developer of security software for hand-held devices like the PalmPilot, but it later pivoted toward digital money transfers. 

Thiel served as CEO of PayPal until October 2002, when eBay acquired the company for $1.5 billion. Thiel's 3.7% stake was worth a $55 million, according to SEC filings.

Thiel went on to cofound Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has helped launch companies like SpaceX and Airbnb.

Thiel, now a billionaire with a net worth of $15.9 billion, according to Bloomberg, cofounded the big data analysis firm Palantir in 2003. He was the first major outside investor in Facebook and contributed early funding to Yelp and LinkedIn, along with a number of other ventures launched by his PayPal peers. Thiel's also a partner of Founders Fund, a venture capital fund based in San Francisco.

Thiel has also drawn criticism in recent years for his support of President Donald Trump and for secretly funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker Media, which resulted in the company shutting down Gawker and selling the company's assets.

After facilitating talks between Trump and now Sen. JD Vance, Thiel gave a record-breaking $15 million to Vance's campaign, the largest donation ever given to a single senate candidate. 

Thiel later told The Atlantic he was taking a break from politics. Business Insider later reported that he served as an FBI informant.

While his and Trump's relationship has reportedly soured, Trump's recent announcement of Vance as his vice president pick has put Thiel back to playing kingmaker.

Max Levchin: PayPal cofounder and Chief Technology Officer.

Max Levchin is sometimes called the "consigliere" of the PayPal Mafia — in "The Godfather," a consigliere is an advisor to the boss.

Levchin made significant contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts. Together with PayPal technical architect David Gausebeck, he helped create the Gausebeck-Levchin test, an early version of a CAPTCHA for commercial applications.

Levchin now serves as the CEO of Affirm.

After PayPal was bought by eBay, Levchin founded a media-sharing service called Slide that was later bought by Google. He was also an early investor in Yelp — at one point he was the company's largest shareholder — and he served as chairman of Yelp from its founding in 2004 until July 2015.

He founded fintech company Affirm, which allows consumers to finance online purchases at the point of sale and pay for them over time. Affirm went public in 2021, raising $1.2 billion in its IPO. Levchin is also the chairman of Glow, a fertility-tracking app that helps users improve their odds of conceiving.

Ken Howery: PayPal cofounder and CFO from 1998 to 2002.

After eBay bought PayPal, Howery stayed on as eBay's director of corporate development until 2003. After PayPal's acquisition, he served as cofounder and partner of Founders Fund alongside Peter Thiel.

Howery recently served as US ambassador to Sweden.

He was appointed by former President Trump in January 2019 and confirmed in September of that year. He also donated $1 million earlier this year to America PAC, a pro-Trump super PAC created by fellow PayPal mafia member Elon Musk.

Howery is active in several nonprofits and serves as a founding advisor to Kiva, an organization that facilitates loans to low-income entrepreneurs. Kiva was founded in part by Premal Shah, PayPal's former product manager.

Howery is reportedly still good friends with Elon Musk. 

Elon Musk: founder of (the other) X.com, which merged with Thiel's Confinity to become PayPal

In 1999, Elon Musk founded a payments company called X.com, which merged with Thiel's Confinity in 2000. He briefly served as CEO of PayPal before he was ousted by the board in September 2000 and replaced with Thiel. But as the company's largest shareholder, he still walked away from the PayPal sale to eBay with a cool $165 million.

Musk is currently the world's richest person.

Perhaps the best-known of all the members of the PayPal mafia now, Musk's estimated net worth is $362 billion.

Since his PayPal days, Musk has moved on to oversee companies like Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Company, and Neuralink. He also bought Twitter and renamed it X, after buying back the X.com domain name from PayPal. 

Musk, who has been a vocal supporter of Trump's 2024 presidential campaign and donated more than $200 million to Republican election efforts, will also co-lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency alongside former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump announced after winning the election.

Luke Nosek: PayPal cofounder and vice president of marketing and strategy.

Nosek was also reportedly the person who clued in Peter Thiel to cryogenic preservation, which Thiel has since invested in heavily.

Nosek explored angel investing.

In 2005, Nosek joined Thiel and Howery as a partner at Founders Fund. In 2017, Nosek left Founders Fund to launch investment firm Gigafund, which helped raise money for SpaceX.

Nosek was also the first institutional investor in SpaceX and is a board member. He also joined the board of ResearchGate, a platform where scientists and researchers can ask questions, follow topics, and review one another's papers.

Roelof Botha: PayPal's director of corporate development, vice-president of finance, CFO

Botha went to school to be an actuary. He said he never planned to get into tech, but when he saw the opportunity in Silicon Valley, his intuition told him it was where he needed to be.

He started as PayPal's director of corporate development, went on to become vice-president of finance, and later served as CFO.

Botha is now a partner at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital

Botha is now considered one of the top tech investors in the world.

Sequoia Capital has funded tech giants like Apple, Google, YouTube, and Instagram. 

Botha as served on the board at more than a dozen companies, including Square, EventBrite, Weebly, Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube, as well as 23andMe, which he resigned alongside the rest of the board in September over CEO Anne Wojcicki's proposal to take the company private.

Reid Hoffman: board of directors at PayPal, COO

LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman served on the board of directors when PayPal was founded.

He eventually joined the company full-time as PayPal's COO. In a New York Times interview, Peter Thiel referred to Hoffman as PayPal's "firefighter in chief," noting that there were many fires that needed putting out in the company's early days.

When PayPal was acquired by eBay, Hoffman was the company's executive vice president.

Hoffman cofounded LinkedIn and is one of Silicon Valley's most prolific angel investors.

Hoffman was an early investor in Facebook, Flickr, Care.com, and many more. In 2017 he joined the board of Microsoft.

Hoffman has coauthored several books on startups and professional development. He hosts the "Masters of Scale" podcast, on which he interviews founders about how they launched and scaled their companies, and is a partner at VC firm Greylock Partners. He was an early investor in OpenAI and used to serve on its board, and cofounded Inflection AI.

Hoffman has also recently criticized business leaders, including his fellow PayPal mafia members, for supporting Trump.

 

David Sacks: PayPal COO

Like Hoffman, Sacks also served as COO at PayPal. Previously a management consultant for McKinsey & Company, David Sacks joined PayPal in 1999.

After PayPal was bought by eBay, Sacks produced and financed the box office hit "Thank You For Smoking," which would go on to be nominated for two Golden Globes. In 2006 he founded Geni.com, an online tool for building family trees.

 

Sacks founded several companies, became an angel investor, and was named Trump's AI and crypto 'czar'

In 2016, Sacks was briefly interim CEO at Zenefits, an HR software firm that was plagued by scandal, including allowing unlicensed brokers to sell insurance to its customers. In 2017, Sacks cofounded the early-stage investment firm Craft Ventures. 

Sacks is a serial entrepreneur and investor, with angel investments in Airbnb, Postmates, Slack, and many more. 

He's also a member of Elon Musk's inner circle and, like the Tesla CEO, is an avid Trump supporter, hosting a fundraiser for the president-elect at his home. Sacks reportedly urged Trump personally to choose Vance as his running mate, whom he was introduced to by fellow Paypal mafia member Thiel.

Trump said in December that he is appointing Sacks as his White House AI and crypto czar.

 

 

 

Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen met at PayPal during its early days.

Karim and Chen were engineers, while Hurley was a web designer.

In 2005, the trio launched the video-sharing platform YouTube. Karim uploaded the platform's very first video, "Me at the zoo," an 18-second clip of Karim in front of the San Diego Zoo's elephant exhibit. It's been viewed over 292 million times.

Today, Karim, Hurley, and Chen remain active entrepreneurs and investors with a hand in projects from finance to music.

Karim launched venture fund YVentures in 2008, through which he invested in Palantir, Reddit, Eventbrite, and Airbnb.

Hurley stepped down as CEO of YouTube in 2010. Since then, he's backed education startup Uptime and invested in several sports teams.

Chen invested in actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt's musical collaboration platform HitRecord, which in February secured $6.4 million in Series A funding.

Andrew McCormack: assistant to Peter Thiel at PayPal

McCormack joined PayPal in 2001, working as an assistant to Peter Thiel as the company prepared for its IPO.

In 2003, McCormack started a restaurant group in San Francisco. In 2008, he joined Thiel Capital and worked there for 5 years.

McCormack went on to launch VC firm Valar Ventures

McCormack partnered up with Thiel again in 2010 to found Valar Ventures, a venture capital fund.

Valar Ventures has invested in technology startups well beyond Silicon Valley, including some in Europe and Canada. In August, Crunchbase reported the firm had closed on a $150 million funding round for a new venture capital fund, Valar Fund V.

McCormack continues to serve as a managing partner of the firm.

 

Keith Rabois: PayPal's executive vice president

Entrepreneur Keith Rabois served as PayPal's executive vice president from 2000 to 2002.

He would go on to join his PayPal colleague Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn as its vice president for business and corporate development from 2005 to 2007. He was an early investor in startups like Square, where he spent two-and-a-half years as COO. 

Rabois joined Thiel, Howery, and Nosek as a partner at Founders Fund.

Rabois is the CEO of OpenStore and has served on the board of directors for Yelp, Xoom, and Reddit.

He was a general partner at Founder's Fund, where he cofounded OpenStore, before returning to Khosla Ventures in early 2024.

Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman: worked on technology at PayPal.

Simmons was an engineer and Stoppelman was the vice president of technology after joining PayPal from X.com.

In 2004, the pair came up with the idea for a platform where users could leave recommendations about businesses in their area. They pitched the idea to Levchin, who provided an early investment of $1 million, and Yelp was born.

Simmons left his official role at Yelp in 2010, while Stoppelman continues to serve as Yelp's CEO.

Simmons served as CTO at Yelp from 2004 until he left the role in 2010. Stoppelman is still CEO of Yelp, and has publicly spoken out in support of political issues like women's reproductive rights.

Jack Selby: PayPal's vice president of corporate and international development.

After leaving PayPal, Selby partnered with Thiel to start Clarium Capital Management.

In 2017, Selby was revealed to be the generous tipper behind "Tips for Jesus."

Selby later helped manage Thiel Capital, the Thiel's family office, and started his own venture capital fund, AZ-VC, where he serves as managing partner. He still serves as managing director at Thiel Capital.

Starting in 2013, Selby began anonymously leaving tips for unsuspecting waitstaff, ranging into the thousands, and signing them "Tips for Jesus." His identity was confirmed by a New York City bartender who served him prior to receiving a $5,000 tip.

Dave McClure: PayPal's director of marketing

McClure served PayPal's director of marketing as for four years beginning in 2001.

According to McClure's LinkedIn, he began a program called the PayPal Developer Network, which consisted of about 300,000 developers that were using PayPal. 

McClure left PayPal in 2004.

He had a brief stint at Founders Fund before launching 500 Startups, an early stage venture fund. McClure stayed at 500 Startups until June 2017, when he was accused of "inappropriate behavior with women" in a New York Times report and stepped down from his role at the firm, writing an apology post titled "I'm a creep. I'm sorry."

He's since become an investor and owner in a professional sports league for ultimate frisbee and cofounded Practical Venture Capital, according to his LinkedIn.

 

Several more former PayPal employees went on to have careers both in and out of tech.

• Yishan Wong was an engineering manager who later served as CEO of Reddit from 2011 to 2014. He then founded the reforestation company Terraformation in 2020, where he now serves as CEO.
• Jason Portnoy worked in finance at PayPal, and went on to work at Clarium Capital and Palantir. He's now a partner at VC firm Oakhouse Partners. 
• Premal Shah was a product manager at PayPal beginning in 2000, then went on to work at technology nonprofit Kiva. He's now president at financial-services startup Branch. 
• David Gausebeck was a technical architect at PayPal. Now, he serves as chief scientist at 3D modeling company Matterport. He cofounded 3D modeling company Matterport, where he now serves as chief scientist.
• Joe Lonsdale started his career as a finance intern at PayPal before moving into venture capital — he's worked at VC firms Clarium Capital, Formation 8, and 8VC. Lonsdale also cofounded Palantir, and has reportedly contributed to a Trump PAC.
• Eric Jackson was director of marketing at PayPal and went on to write a book about the company called "The PayPal Wars." He's currently the CEO of CapLinked.