San Francisco Globe and Mail (July 22) -- When it came time to start hiring employees for their nascent startup in 1998, PayPal co-founders Max Levchin and Peter Thiel recruited heavily from their alumni networks. Mr. Levchin favoured engineering friends from his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mr. Thiel looked chiefly to his network of college friends, hiring several of those who had written for The Stanford Review, including his Diversity Myth co-author.