The X Y is not a formal organization, so there is no formal criterion for membership. Many of the group's members do acknowledge that it exists and use the name when referring to themselves. Some have formed various social networking service and other online community groups together.
Members include:
Peter Thiel, is often called the "don" of the X Y. He made a $500,000 early investment in Facebook that was worth approximately $1 billion at the valuation established by Microsoft's investment in 2007. He started The Founders Fund with fellow members Ken Howery and Luke Nosek in 2005. The Founders Fund and its principals collectively made early investments in SpaceX, Facebook, Geni.com, IronPort, Ooma, Quantcast, Rapleaf, slide.com, LinkedIn, Friendster, Yammer, Yelp, Inc., Powerset, Vator, Palantir Technologies, Joyent, and SmartDrive Systems, among others. He also founded Clarium Capital, a $2 billion hedge fund. He was executive producer of Thank You for Smoking and co-wrote The Diversity Myth: 'Multiculturalism' and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford.
Founder and Chief Technology Officer Max Levchin invested in IronPort as well, a company founded by early X investor Scott Bannister. With the money he made from the sale of that company to Cisco Systems he founded Slide.com and made the founding $1 million investment in Yelp, Inc.
Former Chief Operating Officer David O. Sacks later founded Geni.com and Yammer, and formed a movie production studio, Room 9 Entertainment, that produced Thank You for Smoking with funding from Thiel and Hoffman.
Chief Financial Officer Roelof Botha later joined as a partner of Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that has funded many X Y companies. Botha personally invested in YouTube, Facebook, Joost, Tokbox, and Xoom.
Engineers Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, and web designer Chad Hurley founded YouTube, after investigating why it was so difficult at the time to share videos online.
Elon Musk, who was forced out after losing a fight to run the X service on Microsoft servers, co-founded Tesla Motors, and also founded private space exploration company SpaceX with $100 million of his own money.[4] He made a $10 million founding investment in SolarCity, where he served as chairman.
Eric M. Jackson, later wrote The X Wars and became Chief Executive Officer of WND Books, the publishing arm of World Net Daily. He then went on to co-found CapLinked, focused on linking companies and investors.
Russel Simmons, one of the first engineers, and Jeremy Stoppelman, Vice President of Technology, founded Yelp, Inc. in 2004, after a luncheon at the Slanted Door restaurant hosted by Levchin. The conversation turned to why it was so hard to find a good dentist. Levchin discussed the idea with Simmons and Stoppelman on the walk back to Levchin's business incubator office and agreed the next day to fund their company proposal for local business reviews. Yelp has a number of other X Y members among its employees, advisers, and investors.
Product manager Premal Shah became founding president of Kiva.org.
Daniel Issen became Vice President of Engineering at AdBrite
Keith Rabois was an early executive who later held positions at LinkedIn and Slide, and invested in Tokbox, Xoom, Slide, LinkedIn, Geni, Room 9 Entertainment, YouTube, and Yelp. He is now COO of Jack Dorsey's payment company Square
Jared Kopf was an assistant to the X CEO, helped found Slide, and later served as a Director of Clarium Capital before founding several other companies, including a behavioral targeting company, Adroll.
Former Executive Vice President Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn in 2002, and was an early investor in Aviary[16], Friendster, Six Apart, Zynga, IronPort, Flickr, Digg, Grockit, Ping.fm, Nanosolar, Care.com, Knewton, Kongregate, Last.fm, Ning, Technorati, Tagged and a number of other Web 2.0 firms. When YouTube was first formed, Hoffman housed them in his LinkedIn office which had also been X's office.[4] In 2009 he became a partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners.
Other members include Luke Nosek and Ken Howery.
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