The Startup Mafia Playbook may extend to Climate-tech.
Exploring the Rise of Startup Tech Mafias and the Potential for a Climate-tech Mafia
Exploring the Rise of Startup Tech Mafias and the Potential for a Climate-tech Mafia
Frederick Terman, touted as the father of Silicon Valley, suggested Hewlett and Packard start their electronics company near Stanford Campus, which is the origin point of the Stanford Mafia.
Soon after, the Godfather of Tech Mafias, the PayPal Mafia, formed. It consisted of PayPal's former employees who had started up in Silicon Valley (alums of Stanford and University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign).
Silicon Valley went on to produce more bigwigs because of the Y Combinator technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm (YC), established in 2005.
You'd see founders & investors of YouTube, Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, Affirm, Yammer, Slide, Kiva, Reddit, Meta, Twitch, Stripe, AWS, Dropbox, Coinbase, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, OpenAI, Heroku, Air BnB, Doordash, Crew etc. on the YC'sYC's Hall of Fame interacting with each other with photos dated as early as 2005 and 2008.
Source: Fortune
The Rise of Cerebral Valley
A new place in San Francisco is seeing the rise of Cerebral Valley, ruled by tech oligarchs making giant strides in Artificial General Intelligence, Quantum Computing, Generative AI, Robotics, and more.
Here are a few examples:
The Google Mafia - Anthropic AI, Horizon Robotics, Nuro
The Apple Mafia - WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Salesforce
The Open AI Mafia - Anthropic, Perplexity AI
The eBay Mafia - YouTube, GrubMarket
The Microsoft Mafia - Airbnb, Glassdoor
The Amazon Mafia - InstaCart, Hulu, Flipkart
The Facebook Mafia - Open AI
Could a Climate-tech Mafia Rise?
Yes, I already see some patterns.
BlackRock Inc's CEO Larry Fink claimed in 2021 that the world's next 1000 unicorns will be involved in climate technology.
Climate-tech startups reach billion-dollar valuation status within just four years. About 45,000 early-stage climate-tech startups are rising globally, and as of 2023, 83 climate-tech unicorns rose.
I previously wrote about how the rise of AI will create an energy crisis and how tech giants are trying to combat that by heavily investing in nuclear and renewable energy technologies. This is causing geopolitical conflicts worldwide while mining for critical minerals and rare earth elements to power such alternative fuel sources.
On the nuclear energy front, Elon Musk is an investor in Sam Altman's Open AI. His Helion Inc. has Peter Theil as its investor (Don of PayPal Mafia).
Living Carbon sprouted from the OpenAI Mafia, while Swell Energy and Sila Nanotechnologies sprouted from the Tesla Mafia.
Carbon Removal tech company Climeworks has Elon Musk and Bill Gates as investors, among others.
Bill Gates and Wall Street Wolves, such as Vanguard Group, Capricorn Investment Group, and BlackRock Inc., invest in QuantumScape.
How is Climate-tech Mafia is interlinked to Silicon Valley? Is the concept of a mafia network good or bad? What's the secret sauce making Startup Mafias successful? Why does Y Combinator take only 10 minutes to select or reject a startup?
Read the full article on my blog ecoHQ to get a deep dive.