all founded by members of the paypal mafia. what was special about all of you? at did you have in common? >> paypal selected a lot of people who were young, and intense, and were entrepreneurial themselves. then they were bought by ebay. so all of these folks were like, what do i do next? some of them go to youtube, some go to spacex, some of them do yelp, i do linkedin. and yet, because we had this intense experience together, we all still have really tight networks. we are calling each other going, i'm thinking about doing this, what do you think? >> who do you call for what? >> macroeconomic bold models, i will call peter. the intersection of interesting business models or business technology, i call max. for a willingness to just think super big, with risk as not a variable, elon. >> what do they call you for? >> laughs. [laughter] >> i have heard you are funny. >> occasionally. i don't know. other people are funnier. a view of the valley. i'm thinking about x, who were the right people to talk to about x? >> you were instrumental in the sale of ebay. looking

emily: you went on to the paypal mafia. who called who? how did that happen? : i called peter, and he said, we are going to sell paypal. we don't have a business model. at the time. but it would be really useful for us, because you know all of this stuff, could you come help us organize the company and sell it? if i could be helpful, i would be happy to step in and do that. we did not sell it, we took it public and sold it after we took it public. what was supposed to be a six-month tour of duty turned into a three-year tour of duty. the paypal story is long. and fun. emily: and legend. when did it start being called the mafia? reid: i don't really know. it might have been with the fortune article. i am always hesitant about the term. the mafia implies dark rooms, extortionate practices -- these kinds of things. it's clever, gets repeated. it implies a dense network. you know where people are tight with each other. it's much less evocative. the paypal network is what i would call it. it probably started six to 12 months after the ebay acquisition. emily: linked

where you met the paypal mafia. peter: you can never run these experiments twice.aving met a lot people there was invaluable. had i gone to any other university, that may have discouraged me from going into tech. emily: what else would you may want to do? >> be a teacher. i am not against learning, i am against education. >> of the six people who built paypal, four of them build bombs in high school. >> i was not one of them. [laughter] ♪ ♪ emily: something that you talk about is the danger of founders becoming captive to their own myth. what is the myth of peter thiel and what is the reality? >> the myth of all these founders is that they are somehow singular and that they are somehow divine, omnipotent beings. these things that i am doing are not solo efforts. i have friends that i talked to a lot and people i talk to closely. emily: i am curious about your background, and what should you along the way. i know that you were born in germany and moved around a lot, you went to south africa and namibia. peter: i went to seven different elementary schools as a kid, a

emily: what determined how everyone in the paypal mafia ended up going their separate ways and how didou and steve end up together? chad: after i left paypal, i would meet up with steve and a few other engineers. we would meet for coffee on university avenue. and everyone had at that time a digital camera that had a video mode. this was right before cameras took off in cell phones. people had video files on their desktop that they could not share, including ourselves. how could we make it as easy as sending an e-mail? that was really what inspired us. emily: this is 2005, before smartphones, really, before high-speed internet was the norm. how difficult was it to get this off the ground? chad: i think because we knew nothing about video, we were not scared about getting into it. i think the same thing with paypal and payments. i think if we realized how much fraud and how many other hoops we would have to jump through in the finance industry, we probably would never have started the project. same with video, dealing with bandwidth and hosting and streaming issues. so because of that, w

emily: what determined how everyone in the paypal mafia ended up going their separate ways and how did you and steve end up together? chad: after i left paypal, i would meet up with steve and a few other engineers. we would meet for coffee on university avenue. and everyone had at that time a digital camera that had a video mode. this was right before cameras took off in cell phones. people had video files on their desktop that they could not share, including ourselves. how could we make it as easy as sending an e-mail? that was really what inspired us. emily: this is 2005, before smartphones, really, before high-speed internet was the norm. how difficult was it to get this off the ground? chad: i think because we knew nothing about video, we were not scared about getting into it. i think the same thing with paypal and payments. i think if we realized how much fraud and how many other hoops we would have to jump through in the finance industry, we probably would never have started the project. same with video, dealing with bandwidth and hosting and streaming issues. so because of that,