Most people are aware of the insane amount of money Google keeps earning, but the New York Times (h/t Online Media Daily) offers up an article about what the former employees are doing with it. They are starting their own venture capital firms.
What I didn’t know was that this path was blazed by the former PayPal employees a few years ago.
Mr. Sacca, 32, joins a growing number of Google millionaires hoping to parlay their newfound wealth into even greater riches by bankrolling technology start-ups. Three years after Google went public, a fast-growing network of company veterans is fanning out across Silicon Valley. Some are joining the venture capital firms that financed the technology boom of the 1990s. Others are raising investment funds or backing embryonic companies with their own money as so-called angel investors.
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It often pays to stick together in Silicon Valley. PayPal, the online payments system, spawned a bunch of serial entrepreneurs who went on to found and finance some of the hottest Web 2.0 companies, among them YouTube, LinkedIn and Slide. Many PayPal alums invest in one another’s companies. One co-founder, Peter Thiel, who now runs a $3 billion hedge fund and venture firm in San Francisco, is the godfather of what people jokingly call the PayPal Mafia.