If you were to write a history of Silicon Valley, you could do it by looking at a series of major diaspora. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Oracle and PayPal attract top talent for years; when they reach maturity or a major liquidity event, their talent disperses and germinates into the next generation of companies.
The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, and the tendency of these companies to start up and grow nearby their progenitors has contributed to the virtuous cycle that maintains the Bay Area as the premier destination for entrepreneurship and technology today. Now that Snapchat(OK, parent company Snap) has announced an IPO that could value the company at $25 billion or more around March 2017, it’s quite possible that the ensuing “Snapchat Mafia” could do the same for L.A. into the 2020s. And while no one company can single-handedly reshape the SoCal versus NorCal divide, Snapchat’s forthcoming liquidity event is timed alongside other major trends that can position L.A. at the center of future areas of growth.
Will the Snapchat Mafia take after Facebook or PayPal?
Many peg the origins of Silicon Valley to the moment when the Traitorous Eight left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory for Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. Members of that group went on to found Intel, AMD and dozens of other companies.
The most well-known recent example is, of course, the PayPal Mafia, whose ranks included Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Jeremy Stoppelman, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Dave McClure and Chad Hurley, among others. The group is together responsible for Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, Yelp, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yammer, Clarium Capital, The Founders Fund, 500 Startups… the list goes on. The value created post-PayPal is so illustrious and far-reaching that it’s hard to imagine such a confluence of people like that again.
But there are other, perhaps lesser, examples: Facebook alumni brought us Path, Quora, Asana and a fair share of VC funds. Yahoo alumni created WhatsApp, Chegg, Slack, SurveyMonkey and Cloudera. The founders of Instagram, Foursquare, Pinterest and Twitter all passed through Google at one point or another.
Today, L.A. has one of these bona fide tech superstars in its midst — one with the power to draw this kind of top talent down I-5. With at least 150 million daily active users and its stratospheric valuation, Snapchat is that company (for perspective, it was a mere seven years ago that Facebook was worth $10 billion).
If you’re young and ambitious and loaded with talent, where would you go? Facebook, which has already gone through its hyper-growth and innovation stage, or Snapchat, where you can contribute to rapid growth and have your work make a bigger impact? A number of such individuals, like former Facebook product head Sriram Krishnan, have already made the jump. More will follow.
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