| Senior writer Jessica Mathews here, filling in for Alyson.
Sixteen years ago, Fortune immortalized the descriptor “PayPal Mafia” in a story detailing how so many tech luminaries like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Reid Hoffman got their start at the payments company. But many of PayPal’s other earliest employees likely wouldn’t have arrived at the company in the first place had they not already gotten to know one another writing for a student newspaper: The Stanford Review.
Stanford University’s conservative student newspaper, cofounded by Thiel in 1987, has made a reputation for itself for riling up the left-leaning Stanford community for more than three decades. But it’s also quietly become one of the surest paths to an enviable job in Silicon Valley, as I reported earlier this week.
Several of PayPal’s cofounders or early executives—Thiel, Craft Ventures’ David Sacks, and former U.S. Ambassador to Sweden Ken Howery—wrote for the paper, as did three founders of Palantir, a defense technology company with a market capitalization of nearly $33 billion as of mid-August. You can add Founders Fund investor Keith Rabois, who had stints at LinkedIn and Square, and Founders Fund principal John Luttig to the mix as well. Joe Lonsdale, who worked for Thiel after serving as editor-in-chief of the Review and now runs venture capital firm 8VC, has hired a number of the conservative paper’s staffers, including Alex Moore, one of Lonsdale’s longest-running investing partners, and, just last year, recent Stanford alum Maxwell Meyer.
I spoke with 10 current or former Review editors and staffers, including Thiel, and reviewed hundreds of pages of nonprofit filings as well as an extensive network of company websites, LinkedIn pages, and archived newspaper articles to document and understand how the student newspaper became such a prominent, yet controversial, launchpad into the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem—and to piece together the common thread that bound them.
“We obviously didn’t envision it becoming this incredible tech Silicon Valley network decades later when we started back in 1987,” says Thiel, who agreed to sit down for an interview to discuss the paper.
You can read my full story below. |
academiccompositionab
Empowerment Equalizer
SSaragian
Antony Sammeroff
Ann Sterzinger
Rodney
RJ
busterjames
cainusmaxus
Craig FitzGerald
David Heleniak
Caity & Dan Greene
keirmartland
Keith Preston
Bill the Butcher
ljp711
MRDA
Jack Donovan
Rachel Haywire
comrade hermit
Michael
Vince
Regan
robertstark2014
Noonan
S E Pearson
Rachel Haywire
Nexus X Humectress
