Observations on Business Mafias
Good business mafias form when there’s a group of people who all have to quit their job for reasons that are exogenous to their performance. If you want your organization to produce a really effective alumni network, you absolutely need to shut it down at the wrong time.
The ingredients to a business mafia seem to be these:
Elitist recruiting with an unusual skew
Relatively low headcount and long working hours
An organizational unwind that leaves most employees with enough money to start a company but not enough to retire
An engineered soft landing from the founder
Hint: maybeeee there's a "business mafia" in the Indian generic pharmaceutical industry.