Five Myths About Building Billion-Dollar Startups

Paypal doesn't even appear on the list of employers with more than 5 unicorns from ex employees I can name more off the top of my head: Tesla, Spacex, Palantir, Youtube, Linkedin, Yelp, Yammer, Affirm

The reason ex-googlers could create the most startups are:

1) There's a lot of google employees, so a large population of former employees

2) They're paid some of the highest salaries in the world, so can afford the runway to start their own company (this is hugely important.) Although the occasional MVP is written in a weekend, more likely it takes about 90 days, and without a salary most people can't afford to do that. The life cycle of most startups is about 7 years, so a long-term commitment.

Back in the day, business owners used to say, "I pay my staff well, but not enough to leave me." That's why.

3) Their pedigree makes it easier to get VC funding. VCs actually think, "Since the founders are ex-google, this must be a good opportunity." in the sense of social proof.

(VCs hate when they hear a pitch like, "after we get funding, these other people will join" since the other people don't sound committed, and may actually decline to join after getting funding anyway, and most people including VCs are naysayers and nitpickers.)

4) Google is a Bay Area company, so no non-competes, like Boston has. Parallel to that is the SV startup culture, where startup risk is normalized - good luck trying that in Europe or Japan.

However, note that a lot of ex-googlers admit to struggling when founding startups because the infrastructure (and monopoly sales) they're used to doesn't exist outside google (borg, bigtable, pregel, etc.) It's much easier for somebody who used AWS or ran a lemonade stand before to build their first business than "institutionalized" ex-googlers.

What's interesting is the contrast between software and hardware startups. Since hardware is so expensive, Cisco funded several "spin-outs" to create new product lines. Ironically, Zoom is their biggest and unintentional "spin-out", but it was software and the value was captured by an ex-manager, not Cisco itself. (Zoom was formed from 40 ex-Cisco Webex staff.) :)

Venture investing 101:

Raise money from pension funds, invest it in founders who have had good exits before. Rinse, repeat.

VC in 2021 is a media and promotion play to get in front of the right founders, and then claim you have a good hiring pipeline or intros to customers. (They mostly don't. 645 especially doesn't.)

Founder also doesn't have a universal definition and by your own link the courts decided that he could be called a co-founder, along with the 4 others.