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Showing posts from April, 2015

Galaxy-Scope: Finding your virtual tribe (for example near the PayPal Mafia)

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Whether it’s sitting in the same restaurant as George Clooney, or being on a picture with Warren Buffet, we are defined by whom we know and derive great satisfaction by being close to celebrities. Thanks to the Web and social media the six degrees of separation that separate any two people are shrinking rapidly. In addition, we can use the same insights to define who we are by looking at whom we are close to. The following example illustrates how this idea can be applied to measure how close any aspiring Internet entrepreneur is to the “PayPal Mafia”.  In an article on April 1, 2015, the NYT describes the far reaching influence of PayPal alums in Silicon Valley. I was curious to measure the influence of the names listed in the article:  Chad Hurley  David Sacks  Elon Musk  Jawed Karim  Jeremy Stoppelman  Keith Rabois  Max Levchin  Peter Thiel  Reid Hoffman  Roelof Botha  Russel Simmons  Scott Banister  Steve Chen  I plugged them into our network data coll