The Founders, Jimmy Soni
The Founders, Jimmy Soni
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The Founders
The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

Author: Jimmy Soni

Narrator: Jonathan Todd Ross

Unabridged: 18 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/22/2022


Synopsis

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 “deeply reported…bracingly written” (Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Code Breaker) and “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 21st-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.

About Jimmy Soni

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

Goodreads review by Sebastian on April 03, 2022

Probably the best book on the origin of the so-called PayPal mafia. But it doesn't mean the book is perfect. What should you know about it before reading? 1. This is NOT a book about Musk or Thiel - it's a book about all of them collectively. Some of them are covered more (Musk, Thiel, Levchin), and......more

Goodreads review by Jacob on February 22, 2022

This is the book on Musk, Levchin, and Thiel we've been waiting for. The combination of their minds, the push and pull on the direction of X/PayPal, and how these brilliant figures came together to build something that ended up being successful, even though it seemed like it might not at various tur......more

Goodreads review by Scott on February 25, 2022

Superb book by a great writer diving into the early days of Confinity/X.com -> PayPal. So many great insights from all of the folks who shared their memories of those events so many years ago. Soni's book will become a classic of business history - Internet business history to be specific.......more

Goodreads review by Lynn on October 29, 2022

Not a business person or a fan of billionaires but thought this book would be enlightening about them. Not enlightening.......more

Goodreads review by Kenneth on March 12, 2022

This was a great read, a coherent narrative of the twists and turns of the two companies that formed PayPal. It also serves as a partial biography of "the paypal mafia" and the struggles they went through with the technology, their competitors and each other when building the firm. Having lived thro......more