The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

Description

“Deeply reported and bracingly written, this book is an indispensable guide to modern innovation and entrepreneurship.” —Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Code Breaker A definitive look at the origin of PayPal and its founding team—including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared. They have defined the modern world. This experience defined them. 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. 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. Title Page Dedication Epigraph Introduction Part 1: Sicilian Defense Chapter 1: Building Blocks Chapter 2: The Pitch Chapter 3: The Right Questions Chapter 4: “What Matters to Me Is Winning” Chapter 5: The Beamers Chapter 6: Hosed Chapter 7: Money Talks Part 2: Bad Bishop Chapter 8: If You Build It Chapter 9: The Widget Wars Chapter 10: Crash Chapter 11: The Nut House Coup Chapter 12: Buttoned-Up Chapter 13: The Sword Chapter 14: Ambition’s Debt Part 3: Doubled Rooks Chapter 15: Igor Chapter 16: Use the Force Chapter 17: Crime in Progress Chapter 18: Guerrillas Chapter 19: World Domination Chapter 20: Blindsided Chapter 21: Outlaws Chapter 22: And All I Got Was a T-shirt Conclusion: The Floor Epilogue Photographs Debts A Note on Sources and Methods About the Author Notes Copyright