The Founders by Jimmy Soni
Synopsis
Out of PayPal's ranks have come household names like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Reid Hoffman. 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.
Yet for all their influence, the incredible story of where they started has gone largely untold. In The Founders, award-winning author Jimmy Soni narrates how a once-in-a-generation collaboration turned a scrappy start-up into one of the most successful businesses of all time. Facing 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. But they would go on to change our world forever.
Informed by hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, The Founders explores how the seeds of so much of what drives the internet today were planted two decades ago.
Reviews
'A fascinating page-turner... An indispensable guide to modern innovation and entrepreneurship.' Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
'A dramatic business story about the payment’s company rise… also a human tale about Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin before they went on to greater fame and fortune.' Reuters
'Gripping... an engrossing glimpse of the PayPal mafia’s riotous early days.' The Economist
'A masterpiece of reporting and storytelling by a deeply intuitive writer who gained access to the most important—and elusive—minds of our generation.' Robert Kurson, author of Shadow Divers and Rocket Men
'Anyone who has used the internet in the last decade will find The Founders a revealing and sometimes shocking look inside today’s tech revolution and the very human wizards who have transformed our lives—for good and ill.' Kati Marton, author of The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel
About the Author
Jimmy Soni is an award-winning author. His last 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 Middleton Prize by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). His most recent work, Jane’s Carousel, completed with the late Jane Walentas, captured one woman’s remarkable twenty-five-year journey to restore a beloved carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his daughter, Venice.