Inside the DNA of the Facebook Mafia
A lot of things about Facebook have been impressive, even by the Silicon Valley standards. Almost no other Valley company has reached so many people around the world so quickly. Few Valley companies have been considered important forces in causes …
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs back to 2007, when coverage framed Facebook less as a product than as a force that had 'thrown the entire startup world for a loop' (hypebusting its effect on founders), and when the New York Times described venture money going into Facebook as a bet on a theory rather than proven economics. Four years on, TechCrunch's argument is that the company's most durable export is not traffic but people: former employees — the so-called Facebook Mafia — are now significant forces in Silicon Valley companies and causes.
First-order effects
- Ex-Facebook employees are deploying their equity, reputations, and networks into new ventures and causes across the Valley, making them sought-after founders, hires, and angels in their own right.
- Facebook itself enters February 2011 at peak gravity: a rumored (unconfirmed) 600-million-user milestone, a new Menlo Park headquarters announced via the Feb. 8 press conference, and fresh developer-data controversies over address and phone-number access.
Second-order effects
- Investors who once bought 'a theory' about the platform now compete for deals stamped with Facebook pedigree, pushing valuations for Mafia-founded startups up and forcing non-alumni founders to recruit against the network's pull.
- Rival large platforms face the same diaspora dynamic — every hypergrowth company becomes a training ground whose alumni fund and staff competitors, raising the cost of retaining senior talent.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Valley's institutional structure shifts further from companies toward alumni networks: each breakout firm seeds the next cohort of founders, concentrating capital and deal flow around a small set of corporate genealogies.
- Regulators and policymakers increasingly confront these alumni-built firms collectively, since a single company's growth decisions ripple through dozens of successor startups rather than staying contained.
The trend: Hypergrowth platform companies are maturing into talent engines whose alumni — not the parent firms — become the primary vectors for the next wave of Silicon Valley company formation.