Fortune magazine recently profiles the CS and PayPal alumni now known as the PayPal Mafia. The article profiles the success that the alumni of PayPal - many of them also alumni of Computer Science - have had since launching PayPal.

From the issue:

"It's amazing how many hot web properties can trace their ancestries to PayPal.

Besides Facebook and Slide [CS alumnus Max Levchin], there's Yelp [CS alumnus Russel Simmons, ECE alumnus Jeremy Stoppleman], Digg, and YouTube [CS alumni Jawed Karim and Steve Chen]. Thiel and Levchin, the don and consigliere of the mafia, figure that all told, there are dozens of enterprises worth a total of roughly $30 billion - and that value is growing rapidly...

This group of serial entrepreneurs and investors represents a new generation of wealth and power. In some ways they're classic characters of Silicon Valley, where success and easy access to capital breed ambition and further success. It's the reason people come to the area from all over the world. But even by that standard, PayPal was a petri dish for entrepreneurs. The obvious question is, Why?

Maybe it comes back to the early hires. After their first breakfast, Thiel and Levchin began recruiting everyone they knew at their alma maters. "It basically started by hiring all these people in concentric circles," Thiel remembers. "I hired friends from Stanford, and Max brought in people from the University of Illinois."

They were looking for a specific type of candidate. They wanted competitive, well-read, multilingual individuals who, above all else, had a proficiency in math. "

To read more about how CS alumni are impacting Silicon Valley, read the complete article.