This either means Pay Pal is a launching pad, or that Ebay is not a great place for innovators.
... after online auction giant eBay bought the startup for $1.5 billion in 2002, the tight-knit group dispersed. Many have gone on to found some of Silicon Valley's most talked-about companies:
It might be too soon to tell, but this could also mean that former Pay Pal employees feel that everyone can take a start-up, make it wildly successful, and wait for the corporate giants to come-a-calling with cash in hand.
Apparently success is quite a "fountain of youth".
"I really haven't seen so many entrepreneurs spin out of a single company before," says Jeremy Stoppleman, former vice president of technology at PayPal, and the current chief executive of local-reviews site Yelp.com.
But there's always another side to things.
But years later, PayPal is still losing some of its top staff. Last year, Chief Technical Officer Chuck Geiger left the company. And last week, eBay said PayPal president Jeff Jordan will leave the company after a two-year stint at the top, a move viewed negatively by some analysts.
And another.
Former PayPal employees estimate that half of the 200 or so employees who worked at the company's headquarters before the 2002 acquisition have left; of the company's original 50 employees, they estimate, fewer than a dozen remain.
How about one more.
"There's brain drain at PayPal, and it reflects how things are going over there," says Eric Jackson, a former interim vice president of marketing at PayPal who left the company in 2003.
While PayPal's original vision may remain, the startup's culture is long gone, Jackson says.
Welcome to the real world. And this probably has more than just a ring of truth to it.
But PayPal vets say their former company had a particular spirit that would have been hard to sustain, no matter who bought the company.
So, good luck to you all. And good luck to PayPal. There going to need it now that "Google Checkout" is up and running.
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