The former Paypal team is often called the “Paypal mafia” because of its size and its involvement in a tremendous number of new ventures.

Coming up next week February 2 at Inforum at Commonwealth Club
Max Levchin and Peter Thiel: Smart Venture Capital in 2011

Max Levchin, Founder, Slide; Co-founder, PayPalPeter Thiel, President, Clarium Capital; Co-founder, PayPal; Managing Partner, The Founders Fund

Brad Stone, Senior Writer, BusinessWeek – Moderator

Max Levchin has been critical of the angel investors, saying that they encourage startups to sell too early. It should be an interesting evening.

[Paypal’s Max Levchin: The Rise Of The Angels . . . And The Fall In Innovation – SVW]
Here is a partial list of the PayPal alumni and some of their achievements:

– Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and a very successful angel investor: Facebook, Ironport, Digg, Flickr, Ping.fm, Last.fm, Zynga.

– Peter Thiel and his hedge fund Clarium Capital. Not all of his bets have paid off but he is investing and funding some interesting organizations.

– Max Levchin – Slide, Yelp, Adroll.

– Elon Musk – Head rocket designer at SpaceX and CEO of Tesla.

– Steve Chen – Youtube co-founder.

– Chad Hurley – Youtube co-founder.

– Premal Shah – founding president of Kiva.org.

– Jeremy Stoppelman – co-founder and CEO of Yelp.

– And there are plenty more in this group: Dave McClure, Jared Kopf, Eric Jackson, Kieth Rabois, Ken Howery…

[Cross-posted at Silicon Valley Watcher]