The Founders: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and the Company that Made the Modern Internet

Description

Out of Paypal's ranks have come three billionaires and dozens of multi-millionaires, including household names like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman. Paypal's alumni have built, funded and advised almost all of the billion-dollar-plus companies to emerge from Silicon Valley in the past two decades. Today, every online video you watch and every internet purchase you make bears PayPal's fingerprints - its inventions made the modern internet possible and are embedded in our social networks, our banks and our intelligence agencies. This book tells the gripping story of how a scrappy start-up became one of the most successful businesses of all time, worth over $70 billion today. Full of fascinating characters and anecdotes about Silicon Valley's biggest titans, The Founders also shows how the so-called PayPal Mafia continue to shape our future today.

Jimmy Soni is an author and editor who has worked for the New York Observer, the Washington Examiner and HuffPost, among others. With Rob Goodman he is the author of Rome's Last Citizen and A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, which was nominated for a National Book Award. He lives in New York.

"A fascinating page-turner about the brilliant and competitive innovators who created PayPal and went on to shape our digital world. Deeply reported and bracingly written, this book is an indispensable guide to modern innovation and entrepreneurship." - Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs "The real secrets of Silicon Valley are the tight networks of friendship and business that propel new ideas, companies, and personalities into the world. The most consequential of these networks in recent decades is the one that began at PayPal. Here Jimmy Soni delivers a startup-hustle story for the ages, revealing why their wild entrepreneurial ride did so much to build Silicon Valley's supersized present." - Margaret O'Mara, author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America "This book is stunning in its depth and clarity, especially given the complexity of its subject matter: the intertwined early lives of some of the greatest innovators of the twenty-first century. I thought I knew most of the characters-particularly given how much they are covered in the news-but I was wrong. Jimmy Soni's immense effort, which involved combing through 150,000 pages of emails and hundreds of interviews, unearthed not only new facts but also new layers of humanity that lie at the heart of the story. This is the rare book that combines deep research, powerful storytelling, and wit. Anyone who wants to understand how great things get built will benefit from reading it-and so will anyone who wants an inside look at brilliance." - Luke Burgis, author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life "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 "Short of getting into a time machine, it's hard to imagine how you'd get closer to capturing PayPal's rise-and understanding the lives of its creators. A brilliant book chock full of wisdom and lessons for business and life." - Nir Eyal, Bestselling author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products