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Summary
Summary
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER
National Bestseller * New York Times Editors' Choice * Financial Times "Books to Read in 2022"
A SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS FINALIST
"A gripping account of PayPal's origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible" ( The Wall Street Journal )--including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared.
Today, PayPal's founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry's most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they're as controversial as they are admired.
Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media's rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world's foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. Their success was anything but certain.
In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley , award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal's turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today--fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer--were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal's success.
Described as "an intensely magnetic chronicle" ( The New York Times ) and "engrossing" ( Business Insider ), The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness--the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life. This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever.
Author Notes
Jimmy Soni is an award-winning author. His newest book, The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley , was a national bestseller and received critical acclaim from The New York Times , Wall Street Journal , New Yorker , The Economist , Financial Times , and more. His previous book, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age , won the 2017 Neumann Prize, awarded by the British Society for the History of Mathematics for the best book on the history of mathematics for a general audience, and the 2019 Middleton Prize by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his daughter, Venice.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"If you have used the internet at all in the last twenty years, you've touched a product, service, or website connected to the creators of PayPal," writes Soni (The Mind at Play), former managing editor at the Huffington Post, in this punchy origin story full of wheeling, dealing, and political machinations. Things began in 1999 with X.com, a company founded by Elon Musk that allowed people to email money back and forth. In 2000, X merged with Confinity, Peter Thiel's software company; rebranded as PayPal; and sold its employees on a grand vision: be part of something big and world-changing. Things were dicey in the early years, as the company's leaders feared a shutdown from eBay, and responded by sending a "scathing, eleven-page, single-spaced note to eBay headquarters" accusing the company of monopolistic control over online marketplaces. Soni tells the story with novelistic verve as he tracks Paypal's growing pains, including regulation challenges, dealing with hackers, and fears of user fraud, as well as the clash of cultures following eBay's 2002 acquisition (one colorful anecdote involves disgruntled employees publicly mutilating stuffed mongooses that were distributed by eBay leadership). Fans of Margaret O'Mara's The Code are in for a treat. Agent: Laura Yorke, Carol Mann Agency. (Feb.)
Kirkus Review
A modern technology success story about the Silicon Valley innovators who developed one of the world's largest payments companies. Combining historical detail with biographical perspective, Soni sifts through PayPal alumni to reveal the company's origins and the risks it took to surpass both its predecessors and contemporary competition. He seamlessly chronicles the early years of driven entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and Elon Musk, who began as a bank intern at 19. Soni writes extensively about PayPal's beginning as a digital payment platform borne from a hybridized set of companies founded by Thiel and Levchin, whose business plan was essentially to simplify the ability to transfer money. This conglomerate locked horns and vied with Musk's expanding X.com for eBay's attention. Eventually, they combined forces to create a resilient startup merger that survived the 2000 dot-com bust despite its fair share of executive turmoil, lawsuits, fierce competition, fraudster infiltration, and imitators. In 2002, investors were stunned when eBay purchased PayPal only months after PayPal went public. "Eventually," writes Soni, "eBay spun PayPal out on its own, and today it's worth roughly $330 billion." The author entertainingly elaborates on all the high drama, as interviews with former employees paint a vivid portrait of the early working environment at PayPal: cutthroat, chaotic, and mercilessly backbiting. Soni puts a positive, conclusive spin on the machinations of this select group of enterprising internet innovators (more contentiously known as the "PayPal mafia") by describing their funding and developing efforts as well as their mentorship programs for other startups seeking to achieve comparable success. Soni effectively captures both sides: "For its critics, the group represents everything wrong with big tech--putting historically unprecedented power into the hands of a small clutch of techno-utopian libertarians. Indeed, it is hard to find a lukewarm opinion about PayPal's founders--they are either heroes or heathens, depending on who offers the judgment." A captivating examination of a significant consortium of tech pioneers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
This deep dive into PayPal's history will intrigue readers from the beginning. Soni, an award-winning author, had unprecedented access to Elon Musk and internal PayPal documents. He shares how the change in electronic money transfer was spurred when Musk made his first big sale and got a check in the mail for $21 million and thought there had to be a better way. This idea eventually became PayPal. The book is presented in three sections, where Soni reveals the history of the entrepreneurs who made PayPal possible. He follows their education, work experiences, and thoughts behind disrupting the norm and using technology to drive innovation. Soni offers behind-the-scenes insights on the merger of PayPal and eBay, and how it almost became the ruination of PayPal. Readers will be surprised by how much personalities, company culture, and people shape revolutionary innovation. The book will appeal to all audiences, especially young adults and others who are sparked by technological advances. Those with entrepreneurial spirits will want to add this to their reading list.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. xi |
| Part 1 Sicilian Defense | p. 1 |
| 1 Building Blocks | p. 3 |
| 2 The Pitch | p. 20 |
| 3 The Right Questions | p. 34 |
| 4 "What Matters to Me Is Winning" | p. 48 |
| 5 The Beamers | p. 64 |
| 6 Hosed | p. 84 |
| 7 Money Talks | p. 104 |
| Part 2 Bad Bishop | p. 121 |
| 8 If You Build It | p. 123 |
| 9 The Widget Wars | p. 145 |
| 10 Crash | p. 158 |
| 11 The Nut House Coup | p. 172 |
| 12 Buttoned-Up | p. 193 |
| 13 The Sword | p. 216 |
| 14 Ambition's Debt | p. 234 |
| Part 3 Doubled Rooks | p. 249 |
| 15 Igor | p. 251 |
| 16 Use the Force | p. 270 |
| 17 Crime in Progress | p. 283 |
| 18 Guerrillas | p. 296 |
| 19 World Domination | p. 313 |
| 20 Blindsided | p. 328 |
| 21 Outlaws | p. 345 |
| 22 And All I Got Was a T-shirt | p. 363 |
| Conclusion: The Floor | p. 383 |
| Epilogue | p. 405 |
| Debts | p. 415 |
| A Note on Sources and Methods | p. 421 |
| Notes | p. 425 |