National Bestseller * New York Times Editors Choice * Financial Times Books to Read in 2022
A gripping account of PayPals 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, PayPals founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industrys 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; theyre 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 medias rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the worlds 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 PayPals 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 todayfast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transferwere 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 PayPals success.
Described as an intensely magnetic chronicle (The New York Times) and engrossing (Business Insider), The Founders is a story of iteration and inventivenessthe 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.
