From the start, I wanted PayPal to be highly knit instead of transactional.

I thought stronger relationships would make us not just happier and better at work but also more successful in our careers even beyond PayPal.

So we set out to hire people who would actually enjoy working together. They had to be talented, but even more than that they had to be excited about working specifically with us.

That was the start of the PayPal Mafia.

Recruiting Conspirators

Recruiting is a core competency for any company.

It should never be outsourced. You need people who are not just skilled on paper but who will work together cohesively after they're hired.

The first four or five might be attracted by large equity stakes or high-profile responsibilities.

More important than those obvious offerings is your answer to this question:

Why should the 20th employee join your company?

Talented people don't need to work for you; they have plenty of options.

You should ask yourself a more pointed version of the question: Why would someone join your company as its 20th engineer when she could go work at Google for more money and more prestige?

Here are some bad answers: "Your stock options will be worth more here than elsewhere."

"You'll get to work with the smartest people in the world."

"You can help solve the world's most challenging problems."

What's wrong with valuable stock, smart people, or pressing problems?

Nothing-but every company makes these same claims, so they won't help you stand out.

General and undifferentiated pitches don't say anything about why a recruit should join your company instead of many others.

The only good answers are specific to your company, so you won't find them in this book.

But there are two general kinds of good answers: answer about your mission and answers about your team.

You'll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it's important in general, but why you're doing something important that no one else is going to get done.

That's the only thing that can make its importance unique.

At PayPal, if you were excited by the idea of creating a new digital currency to replace the U.S dollar, we wanted to talk to you; if not, you weren't the right fit.

However, even a great mission is not enough.

The kind of recruit who would be most engaged as an employee will also wonder: "Are these the kind of people I want to work with?"

You should be able to explain why your company is a unique match for him personally.

And if you can't do that, he's probably not the right match.

Above all, don't fight the perk war.

Anybody who would be more powerfully swayed by free laundry pickup or pet day care would be a bad addition to your team.

Just cover the basics like health insurance and then promise what no others can: the opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside great people.

You probably can't be Google of 2014 in terms of compensation and perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.

What's Under Silicon Valley's Hoodies

From the outside, everyone in your company should be different in the same way.

Unlike people on East Coast, who all wear the same skinny jeans or pinstripe suits depending on their industry, young people in Mountain View and Palo Alto go to work wearing T-shirts.

It's a cliché that tech workers don't care about what they wear, but if you look closely at those T-shirts, you'll see the logos of the wearers' companies-and tech workers care about those very much.

What make a startup employee instantly distinguishable to outsiders is the branded T-shirt or hoodie that makes him look the same as his co-workers.

The startup uniform encapsulates a simple but essential principle:

everyone at your company should be different in the same way - a tribe of-like-minded people fiercely devoted to the company's mission.

Max Levchin, my co-founder at PayPal, says that startups should make their early staff as personally similar as possible.

Startups have limited resources and small teams.

They must work quickly and efficiently in order to survive, and that's easier to do when everyone shares an understanding of the world.

The early PayPal team worked well together because we were all the same kind of nerd.

We all loved science fiction: Cryptonomicon was required reading, and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek.

Most important, we were all obsessed with creating a digital currency that would be controlled by individuals instead of governments.

For the company to work, it didn't matter what people looked like or which country they came from, but we needed every new hire to be equally obsessed.

Do One Thing

On the inside, every individual should be sharply distinguished by her work.

When assigning responsibilities to employees in a startup, you could start by treating it as a simple optimization problem to efficiently match talents with tasks.

But even if you could somehow get this perfectly right, and given solution would quickly break down.

Partly that's because startups have to move fast, so individual roles can't remain static for long.

But it's also because job assignments aren't just about the relationships between workers and task; they're also about relationships between employees.

The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing.

Every employee's one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing.

I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people.

But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict.

Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities.

Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages.

Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism.

More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all.

When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem.

But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable outside threats.

Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.