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Reid Hoffman explains Paypal Mafia’s unique hiring strategy

November 21, 2023

“The thing that was unique about the PayPal crew is typically when people start companies they’ll go: ‘I need to get people with a lot of experience at doing just this job’—you have a lot of experience coding, running a data center, marketing, selling, etc. But PayPal opted for very high-talent young people with the expectation that the high-talent young people would learn the jobs.”

He continues:

“So as opposed to hiring someone who has had a ton of experience doing an exact job, we said: we’re going to hire someone we think is a very fast learner, and we’re going to trust that they’re going to learn the job really fast… We’ll hire some experienced people too, but we had a huge predilection to [hiring high-talent young people].”