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The Founders: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and the Company that Made the Modern Internet
'A fascinating page-turner... An indispensable guide to modern innovation and entrepreneurship.'
Walter Isaacson, no. 1 bestselling author of Steve Jobs
Perfect for readers of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance and Zero to One by Peter Theil
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.
Walter Isaacson, no. 1 bestselling author of Steve Jobs
Perfect for readers of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance and Zero to One by Peter Theil
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.
377 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 1, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 267 reviews
May 25, 2022
A note of clarification to anyone considering this book: This is not a series of profiles on “The Founders” as the title might lead you to believe. It's the origin story of PayPal.
Yes, the business is of course the people who made it, and Levchin, Musk, and Thiel are the ones who feature most prominently in the story. Little is given to everyone else, and less still is said of anyone’s post-PayPal years. Given the portrait gallery on the book’s cover, I expected the personal stories to be in the foreground with PayPal simply being used as a plot device to stitch their biographies together. Instead it was the inverse. The book would have been more accurately titled PayPal: The Story of its Founding and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley.
In any case, it's good for what it is. The writing is central casting for this genre—linear storytelling that has its moments. It does fall a bit flat at times (ironic given that Musk and Thiel are two of the most dynamic and complex personalities on the planet) but in the end it achieves its purpose: chronicling the birth and rise of PayPal. If that's the story you’re interested in and style of book you like, then I suspect you'll find it quite enjoyable.
[P.S. I finished this book on 15 April 2022. Two days ago, Elon Musk made an offer to buy Twitter. A carnival of corporate finance chaos has ensued. Pretty fun time to have been reading this book!]
Yes, the business is of course the people who made it, and Levchin, Musk, and Thiel are the ones who feature most prominently in the story. Little is given to everyone else, and less still is said of anyone’s post-PayPal years. Given the portrait gallery on the book’s cover, I expected the personal stories to be in the foreground with PayPal simply being used as a plot device to stitch their biographies together. Instead it was the inverse. The book would have been more accurately titled PayPal: The Story of its Founding and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley.
In any case, it's good for what it is. The writing is central casting for this genre—linear storytelling that has its moments. It does fall a bit flat at times (ironic given that Musk and Thiel are two of the most dynamic and complex personalities on the planet) but in the end it achieves its purpose: chronicling the birth and rise of PayPal. If that's the story you’re interested in and style of book you like, then I suspect you'll find it quite enjoyable.
[P.S. I finished this book on 15 April 2022. Two days ago, Elon Musk made an offer to buy Twitter. A carnival of corporate finance chaos has ensued. Pretty fun time to have been reading this book!]
April 3, 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 some are mentioned more briefly (Hoffmann), but there's no single "primary character" here.
2. It was not all rosy and the book is quite fair in presenting that. Conflicts, excessive work, unexpected crises, backstabbing. It's all there and the author doesn't try to pretend otherwise - that's a big pro.
3. The book is about the early days only (1998-2001), the period until the IPO and acquisition by eBay. Well, if there's one single topic that keeps appearing across the whole book it's the hard relationship with eBay.
4. If you're interested in learning more about how the "founders" spread out to build more businesses - you won't find it here.
5. The book appears really accurate, but the story isn't that fascinating TBH. Some parts can be even called ... 'boring'.
In the end - good book on not-that-fascinating story (or maybe I've just heard/read about it from so many different sources).
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 some are mentioned more briefly (Hoffmann), but there's no single "primary character" here.
2. It was not all rosy and the book is quite fair in presenting that. Conflicts, excessive work, unexpected crises, backstabbing. It's all there and the author doesn't try to pretend otherwise - that's a big pro.
3. The book is about the early days only (1998-2001), the period until the IPO and acquisition by eBay. Well, if there's one single topic that keeps appearing across the whole book it's the hard relationship with eBay.
4. If you're interested in learning more about how the "founders" spread out to build more businesses - you won't find it here.
5. The book appears really accurate, but the story isn't that fascinating TBH. Some parts can be even called ... 'boring'.
In the end - good book on not-that-fascinating story (or maybe I've just heard/read about it from so many different sources).
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 turns. Soni's writing keeps you turning page after page, and his research into hordes of old emails and conversations adds tons of context to the story. Reading this you truly feel like a fly-on-the-wall for the big decisions and turns in the PayPal story.
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.
Soni's book will become a classic of business history - Internet business history to be specific.
October 29, 2022
Not a business person or a fan of billionaires but thought this book would be enlightening about them. Not enlightening.
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 through and run a trading book for a large bank covering the telecom and media sectors at the time, I remember this story, or parts of it, from the internet boom era and it was interesting to see the inside story. Now that Elon Musk is a household name, and Peter Thiel has an altogether different role to play in my life as backer of my political antagonists, the book is even more informative than I thought it would be. All in all a very solid book.
August 18, 2022
Rating- 3.5/5
Paypal - we all know about the famous financial technology company which specialises in online payment system internationally.
This book is all about the history of the multinational company ‘Paypal’. You’ll get to learn so much about the growth and experiences of the founders. The story focuses on the competition and conflicts the company had to face in it’s initial days.
Don’t get confused by the mention of the names of Elon Musk and Peter Theil because all they have is a short part in the book.
This book was a great learning experience for me though it was too much information at some point of time. The narration was smooth but It felt boring after a while.
Recommended to those who would love to read about the experiences of Paypal.
Paypal - we all know about the famous financial technology company which specialises in online payment system internationally.
This book is all about the history of the multinational company ‘Paypal’. You’ll get to learn so much about the growth and experiences of the founders. The story focuses on the competition and conflicts the company had to face in it’s initial days.
Don’t get confused by the mention of the names of Elon Musk and Peter Theil because all they have is a short part in the book.
This book was a great learning experience for me though it was too much information at some point of time. The narration was smooth but It felt boring after a while.
Recommended to those who would love to read about the experiences of Paypal.
December 24, 2022
This was a fun book. A very detailed discussion of the process by which PayPal was created, as an amalgamation of two companies, into a global payments company. It also chronicled the battles between PayPal and eBay in those early years. The founders: Elon Musk, Peter Theil, David Sacks, etc… all went on to create other companies with huge success on the business world. It must been pretty amazing to have all of these talented people under one roof.
April 22, 2022
“If you have used the internet at all in the last twenty years, you've touched a product, service, or website connected to the creators of PayPal“
Imagine a bunch of youth in their 20s - the majority of them immigrants having no background in finance - who end up building a fintech unicorn in 4 years amidst the dot-com bubble. Sounds right out of a fiction novel, right?
The Paypal story is an incredible, against all odds story whose success emboldened the soul of Silicon Valley and what it stands for. Started by a bunch of misfits, Paypal came into existence with the merger of the two companies, Confinity and http://X.com that were building competing financial products. The company faced numerous uphill challenges related to consumer adoption, fraud, regulatory laws, resentment from Visa/Mastercard, and competition from eBay "You could almost say that we saw every major problem that a startup would encounter, so people got experience dealing with all the types of you would run into. They weren't easy to solve, but we figured out ways to solve them."
The author, Jimmy Soni, is a former managing editor of The Huffington Post who is best known for 'A Mind at Play', his biography of Claude Shannon - the father of information theory. The Founders is in fact the biography of Paypal and is the closest to what you can get to a time machine visit of the exciting dot com times in the late 90s and early 2000s.
More than the product itself, Paypal's gift to the world is the legacy of its founders who collectively constitute the "Paypal Mafia" - the group behind Tesla, LinkedIn, SpaceX, Yammer, Inc., Yelp, YouTube, and many more. Paypal's story at its heart is about 'Scenius' - the collective intelligence of a group of highly driven people as opposed to a single hero narrative.
Read this if you are looking to understand how the seamless payment systems of today that power the creator economy were envisioned and pioneered by a bunch of young people who hustled their way through the established banking, legal, and compliance constructs.
Imagine a bunch of youth in their 20s - the majority of them immigrants having no background in finance - who end up building a fintech unicorn in 4 years amidst the dot-com bubble. Sounds right out of a fiction novel, right?
The Paypal story is an incredible, against all odds story whose success emboldened the soul of Silicon Valley and what it stands for. Started by a bunch of misfits, Paypal came into existence with the merger of the two companies, Confinity and http://X.com that were building competing financial products. The company faced numerous uphill challenges related to consumer adoption, fraud, regulatory laws, resentment from Visa/Mastercard, and competition from eBay "You could almost say that we saw every major problem that a startup would encounter, so people got experience dealing with all the types of you would run into. They weren't easy to solve, but we figured out ways to solve them."
The author, Jimmy Soni, is a former managing editor of The Huffington Post who is best known for 'A Mind at Play', his biography of Claude Shannon - the father of information theory. The Founders is in fact the biography of Paypal and is the closest to what you can get to a time machine visit of the exciting dot com times in the late 90s and early 2000s.
More than the product itself, Paypal's gift to the world is the legacy of its founders who collectively constitute the "Paypal Mafia" - the group behind Tesla, LinkedIn, SpaceX, Yammer, Inc., Yelp, YouTube, and many more. Paypal's story at its heart is about 'Scenius' - the collective intelligence of a group of highly driven people as opposed to a single hero narrative.
Read this if you are looking to understand how the seamless payment systems of today that power the creator economy were envisioned and pioneered by a bunch of young people who hustled their way through the established banking, legal, and compliance constructs.
March 12, 2022
Very well written and with quite some detail. It's hard to know how well researched a book like this one is, but it comes across quite credible and with strong consistency.
The book gives interesting perspectives in the people involved (Thiel, Musk, Levchin, Nosek, Hoffman, etc.) and insight into the ride of highly successful startup. I like that the book seeks to give a realistic picture of startup life as opposed to that shown in many mainstream media.
The book gives interesting perspectives in the people involved (Thiel, Musk, Levchin, Nosek, Hoffman, etc.) and insight into the ride of highly successful startup. I like that the book seeks to give a realistic picture of startup life as opposed to that shown in many mainstream media.
May 13, 2022
Well researched, meticulous but dry book on PayPal’s founders, and the birthing of the company. I wouldn’t want to take away from Sooni’s real achievement in landing key interviews, but he doesn’t make much of the context here especially interesting. I admit I did not finish the book. But the play by play is well done.
June 20, 2023
No clear structure, story or flow. This book is just an information dump on the history of Paypal, with unnecessary details all over and lacking any critical thinking.
September 22, 2023
Amazing read
Reminds me of a viral tweet I saw recently 'Always funny when you read about a really successful person and it turns out they’re really smart and work very hard all the time, oh well'
As someone who works in tech and appreciates the lax dress codes and late start times it was fascinating to read about the people who were involved in starting the industry culture.
The author provided enough detail for me to understand the many problems that faced the company as it grew, and to appreciate the often ingenious solutions they came up with, without giving so much detail that I'd be bored
Learned a lot about internet 1.0 and the era of the dot com bubble
And I have to mention that I understand why Elon Musk haters criticize him for his twitter takeover and being sucked into the culture wars. But human beings are complex, and you can say both good and bad things about them, they're not one or the other. This book paints Elon as extremely hard working and successful in his early entrepreneurial ventures. I loved that he would put his money where his mouth was and believed so much in his new idea that instead of retiring with the $20 million fortune he made from his first start-up, he gambled it on X.com. And it paid off in a big way!
Another takeaway was that 7/10 first paypal employees were immigrants. Immigration is a good thing! We take the best of the best when we filter for the humans in other countries that are willing to uproot their families and risk it all for a better life in the land of the free
Lastly, I loved how many of the early payapl employees were from U of I computer science or Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. Like lots of people I know!
Reminds me of a viral tweet I saw recently 'Always funny when you read about a really successful person and it turns out they’re really smart and work very hard all the time, oh well'
As someone who works in tech and appreciates the lax dress codes and late start times it was fascinating to read about the people who were involved in starting the industry culture.
The author provided enough detail for me to understand the many problems that faced the company as it grew, and to appreciate the often ingenious solutions they came up with, without giving so much detail that I'd be bored
Learned a lot about internet 1.0 and the era of the dot com bubble
And I have to mention that I understand why Elon Musk haters criticize him for his twitter takeover and being sucked into the culture wars. But human beings are complex, and you can say both good and bad things about them, they're not one or the other. This book paints Elon as extremely hard working and successful in his early entrepreneurial ventures. I loved that he would put his money where his mouth was and believed so much in his new idea that instead of retiring with the $20 million fortune he made from his first start-up, he gambled it on X.com. And it paid off in a big way!
Another takeaway was that 7/10 first paypal employees were immigrants. Immigration is a good thing! We take the best of the best when we filter for the humans in other countries that are willing to uproot their families and risk it all for a better life in the land of the free
Lastly, I loved how many of the early payapl employees were from U of I computer science or Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. Like lots of people I know!
February 19, 2024
A lot of interesting stories from the founding of PayPal like the Unix vs Windows OS battle, the branding issues of Confinity, x.com, and PayPal and how eBay’s acquisition of PayPal almost didn’t go thru cuz of Eliot Spitzer
October 5, 2024
Może i dobra ale nie dla mnie. Okropnie się wymęczyłam, żeby ją skończyć.
January 15, 2025
S/o Max
January 16, 2024
well written. gives a real understanding of the paypal evolution and the key decisions and players along the way.
May 9, 2022
Paypal needed a book that would tell the story in a proper way. Eric Jackson, while doing a nice job needed a follow up. Now it's here. And it's really good.
August 5, 2022
Much more ordinary than expected. Turns out there is a reason the PayPal backstory isn’t a big as a part of tech lore as say: apple.
May 1, 2022
This book dives deep into the history of PayPal. It's a riveting tale of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship in the late 1990s and early 2000s. PayPal went from a small startup (actually, two small startups) to IPO and shortly thereafter acquisition by eBay in less than 5 years.
Soni's history has great detail on what it took to make such fast progress, including a brilliant team, tireless work, lots of self-promotion, strategically-timed fundraises, and much more. Due to its level of detail, this book contains lots of nuggets of wisdom for founders. Read it!
Some key take-aways:
**Change your product focus when you feel user pull.** Neither X.com nor Confinity had planned to allow users to email money. Confinity was going to beam money between PalmPilots. X.com was going to be the digital bank. When they saw strong traction from users who wanted to email money, they simply followed them. One day after Thiel and Levchin raised $4.5M from Nokia Ventures, they sent an 18-page memo to their investors to explain how they were pivoting to another product. X.com had a similar experience: “We would show people the hard part—the agglomeration of financial services—and nobody was interested. Then we’d show people the email payments—which was the easy part—and everybody was interested,” Musk explained in a 2012 commencement speech at CalTech. “So I think it’s important to take feedback from your environment. You want to be as closed-loop as possible.”
**Don't shy away from friction.** Many of PayPal’s signature achievements emerged from the productive friction of the group—the tension among the product, engineering, and business teams yielding pearls of innovation. Disharmony produced discovery. As Levchin puts it, “It was ‘truth-seeking’… there was a lot of friction. We all respected each other and that’s why it worked."
**Set a high pace.** The book mentions that PayPal asked someone to stop by at 10pm, then interviewed her till 2am. Or, when Thiel pushed the team to launch a product. "We worked seven days a week, twenty-hour days, just writing code, trying to get this thing to work". Elsewhere, Levchin recalls a night he was coding till 5am after discovering a problem with the cryptography. Even later, people described the magnetic pull of the company’s chaos. “You get sucked into it. Unless you leave the company, you can’t not be in it,” As Soni puts it, "For Musk, Thiel, and other PayPal executives, urgency was the default posture on all things—including and especially its international expansion campaign."
**Trust your team.** One of the early PayPal engineers explains how he was handed the password to the root server within his first day and was told to "play around". Later, the CTO came by to ask, "the website just had a blip. Did you do that?" When the engineer said, "no", the CTO looked at another senior engineer, simply said "cool", and walked away. This shows the tremendous amount of trust people put in the other once they were in the door. The same is said about Musk: "Musk gave employees ample freedom—“the room to be everything they could be”—but set palpably high expectations for performance. “I have never worked so hard and fast in all my life,” she said."
**Celebrate experimentation, don't punish failure.** This is similar to the lessons from improv comedy. Musk and other senior leaders tolerated failures as a side effect of iteration. “I remember once Elon saying one thing which was like, ‘If you can’t tell me the four ways you fucked something up… before you got it right, you probably weren’t the person who worked on it,’ ”
Soni's history has great detail on what it took to make such fast progress, including a brilliant team, tireless work, lots of self-promotion, strategically-timed fundraises, and much more. Due to its level of detail, this book contains lots of nuggets of wisdom for founders. Read it!
Some key take-aways:
**Change your product focus when you feel user pull.** Neither X.com nor Confinity had planned to allow users to email money. Confinity was going to beam money between PalmPilots. X.com was going to be the digital bank. When they saw strong traction from users who wanted to email money, they simply followed them. One day after Thiel and Levchin raised $4.5M from Nokia Ventures, they sent an 18-page memo to their investors to explain how they were pivoting to another product. X.com had a similar experience: “We would show people the hard part—the agglomeration of financial services—and nobody was interested. Then we’d show people the email payments—which was the easy part—and everybody was interested,” Musk explained in a 2012 commencement speech at CalTech. “So I think it’s important to take feedback from your environment. You want to be as closed-loop as possible.”
**Don't shy away from friction.** Many of PayPal’s signature achievements emerged from the productive friction of the group—the tension among the product, engineering, and business teams yielding pearls of innovation. Disharmony produced discovery. As Levchin puts it, “It was ‘truth-seeking’… there was a lot of friction. We all respected each other and that’s why it worked."
**Set a high pace.** The book mentions that PayPal asked someone to stop by at 10pm, then interviewed her till 2am. Or, when Thiel pushed the team to launch a product. "We worked seven days a week, twenty-hour days, just writing code, trying to get this thing to work". Elsewhere, Levchin recalls a night he was coding till 5am after discovering a problem with the cryptography. Even later, people described the magnetic pull of the company’s chaos. “You get sucked into it. Unless you leave the company, you can’t not be in it,” As Soni puts it, "For Musk, Thiel, and other PayPal executives, urgency was the default posture on all things—including and especially its international expansion campaign."
**Trust your team.** One of the early PayPal engineers explains how he was handed the password to the root server within his first day and was told to "play around". Later, the CTO came by to ask, "the website just had a blip. Did you do that?" When the engineer said, "no", the CTO looked at another senior engineer, simply said "cool", and walked away. This shows the tremendous amount of trust people put in the other once they were in the door. The same is said about Musk: "Musk gave employees ample freedom—“the room to be everything they could be”—but set palpably high expectations for performance. “I have never worked so hard and fast in all my life,” she said."
**Celebrate experimentation, don't punish failure.** This is similar to the lessons from improv comedy. Musk and other senior leaders tolerated failures as a side effect of iteration. “I remember once Elon saying one thing which was like, ‘If you can’t tell me the four ways you fucked something up… before you got it right, you probably weren’t the person who worked on it,’ ”
September 2, 2022
'The Founders' is a captivating documentation of one of Silicon Valley's prominent companies. It is a gigantic book which, to my surprise, is intelligible.
It covers the inside story of Elon Musk's X.com, Max Levchin's Confinity, and how Peter Thiel's investment into Confinity and merger with X.com led to the foundation of PayPal.
One of the best things I like about this book is its comprehensiveness. The research for the book is well-done. The author has spent almost 5 years in research and interviews to finally put down everything in words.
Though I appreciate the research and thorough account of the story, after a point, the book felt a bit stretchy. However, the sneak peeks into the start-up hurdles, successes, and groundwork makes this book a worthy read.
My Reading Story
I have read this book in parts. As you can see, this is a gigantic book, and it took me almost a month to finish, along with other books.
Recommend? YES, IF you are interested in reading books related to business. Due to the size and depth of the book, I would not recommend it to beginners. Start with lighter business books, and then maybe jump on this one.
It covers the inside story of Elon Musk's X.com, Max Levchin's Confinity, and how Peter Thiel's investment into Confinity and merger with X.com led to the foundation of PayPal.
One of the best things I like about this book is its comprehensiveness. The research for the book is well-done. The author has spent almost 5 years in research and interviews to finally put down everything in words.
Though I appreciate the research and thorough account of the story, after a point, the book felt a bit stretchy. However, the sneak peeks into the start-up hurdles, successes, and groundwork makes this book a worthy read.
My Reading Story
I have read this book in parts. As you can see, this is a gigantic book, and it took me almost a month to finish, along with other books.
Recommend? YES, IF you are interested in reading books related to business. Due to the size and depth of the book, I would not recommend it to beginners. Start with lighter business books, and then maybe jump on this one.
May 9, 2022
Soni does an excellent job of recreating the excitement, chaos, creativity, exhaustion, pressure and near-death experiences that defined the emergence of the start up companies that became PayPal. The book is very readable, and Soni has done exhaustive research and interviews to create this lively account. The characters are colorful and three dimensional and still in today's headlines (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and others). Their motivations are fascinating. The ups and downs in the struggle for the company's viability is suspenseful and nerve tingling. It reads like a novel. The book provides more than just the enthralling story of PayPal and its pioneering creators. It provides insight into the culture of Silicon Valley and the nature of the people who were drawn to it. It is a study of the revolutionary explosion that took place in the Valley in the last three decades and suggests what we may expect from these disrupters in the future.
April 29, 2022
Even if you don’t think that 500 pages on the origin of PayPal will be for you, this *might* be - it never strays into hagiography of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, but is much more of a history of how PayPal grew during and after the e-commerce bust and makes clear how much of it really was exceptional luck - eg the interaction with eBay. Two other parts of it that are fun:
1. The Epilogue comes with a great plot twist - proper post-credits scene.
2. It probably comes closer than any other business book I’ve read in capturing the secret sauce of a team that works well together because the people in it are completely consumed by a shared mission. It still doesn’t quite convey it - I expect it’s impossible to do so properly - but it comes very close.
1. The Epilogue comes with a great plot twist - proper post-credits scene.
2. It probably comes closer than any other business book I’ve read in capturing the secret sauce of a team that works well together because the people in it are completely consumed by a shared mission. It still doesn’t quite convey it - I expect it’s impossible to do so properly - but it comes very close.
April 27, 2022
As tech companies go, PayPal is a piker compared to the bold-faced names of the industry. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, not to mention Tencent and Alibaba in China, all dwarf PayPal on all the metrics used to measure success in Silicon Valley. What’s truly remarkable about PayPal, though, is the enormous impact its founders — the so-called PayPal mafia — have had in the years following their departure from the company. That’s the story that emerges most vividly from the pages of Jimmy Soni’s “group biography” of the team, The Founders.
A COMPANY WITH MANY FATHERS (AND MOTHERS)
The cover of the Kindle edition of The Founders features cameo sketches of five men and three women. The implication, of course, is that all eight were “founders.” By contrast, Wikipedia lists seven founders, all men. The iconic 2007 photo in Fortune of the “PayPal mafia” includes 13 people, all men. Elsewhere, I’ve read there were 20 founders. It’s true that a third of the people who worked for the company in its early years were women, and a majority of those in the most senior positions were foreign-born. So, after a fashion, diversity was a fact of life at PayPal. And there were, indeed, many people involved at the outset. But a reading of The Founders makes clear that three men were central to the company’s success: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin.
THE THREE PRINCIPALS OF THE PAYPAL MAFIA
ELON MUSK
Elon Musk needs no introduction to anyone who’s awake in the United States in 2022. A South African immigrant (by way of Canada), he is routinely identified as the richest person in the world, with a fortune pegged at $270 billion as I write. He’s also famously the man behind Tesla and SpaceX as well as The Boring Company, Neuralink, and OpenAI. (Musk is the founder or cofounder of all these companies except Tesla, for which he serves as CEO and product architect.) And at this writing he seems to have bought Twitter as well. With the possible exception of Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, no one has shined as brightly in the technological firmament as Elon Musk.
PETER THIEL
By comparison, Peter Thiel is poor. He weighs in at only number 551 on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list, with net worth estimated at a paltry $5.1 billion. However, it’s enough for him to wreak havoc on the American political scene. Thiel is a right-wing libertarian who scorns both political parties and the democratic system as a whole. As I write, he’s in the process of sending enormous campaign contributions to favored reactionary Republican candidates around the country. Although Thiel served as CEO of PayPal during a stretch of its most consequential years, he is not an entrepreneur. Instead, he identifies as a venture capitalist. However, Thiel did found a software company named Palantir Technologies, a $3 billion enterprise with some 3,000 employees. Palantir software is widely employed by federal and state government agencies and major corporations to combat terrorism, computer fraud, and other cyber crime.
MAX LEVCHIN
Max Levchin is the least well-known of the three principal cofounders at PayPal. A Ukrainian-American immigrant, he is a software engineer who designed several of the mission-critical features that made PayPal’s success possible. These included, most notably, a novel approach to cyber fraud and a program that was one of the first commercial implementations of the CAPTCHA challenge to identify Internet bots. Since leaving PayPal not long after the company went public, Levchin has founded several companies, including Slide (sold to Google for $182 million). He was an early investor in Yelp and became its largest shareholder. Levchin appears at number 2664 on the Forbes billionaires list with net worth of $1 billion.
HOW PAYPAL CAME TO BE
At first, there were two companies, not one. It was 1999. Elon Musk was fresh from selling an earlier startup and walking away with $32 million. He poured his newfound fortune into X.com. His goal was to turn the company into an online financial superstore, combining consumer banking, investment banking, insurance, and financial advisory services under one roof.
At about the same time, Peter Thiel teamed up with Max Levchin to form Confinity. After stumbling around in search of a niche, the pair settled on using a new feature on the then-popular PalmPilot. With an infra-red port on a new version of the device, one could beam information from one device to another. Thiel and Levchin decided the answer was to beam money. As an afterthought, both Confinity and X.com offered customers the option to send money by email.
It was only later that both companies discovered how much more popular it proved for customers to send money via email than anything else they were doing. Both then reluctantly decided to shift their focus to email. And when competition between X.com and Confinity threatened to sink both companies, they grumpily merged to form PayPal. The combined firm soon went public, but later in 2002 eBay bought it for $1.5 billion. EBay spun off PayPal as an independent company in 2015. But by then the principals of the PayPal mafia were long gone and well on their way to making history.
Today, eBay boasts 159 million users and a market cap of $32 billion. By contrast, PayPal counts 400 million users—more than 10 times as many—and a market cap of $128 billion. Roughly one out of every 20 people in the world uses PayPal.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
French-American biographer Jimmy Soni is the former managing editor of the Huffington Post. He is best known for A Mind at Play, his biography of Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory.
A COMPANY WITH MANY FATHERS (AND MOTHERS)
The cover of the Kindle edition of The Founders features cameo sketches of five men and three women. The implication, of course, is that all eight were “founders.” By contrast, Wikipedia lists seven founders, all men. The iconic 2007 photo in Fortune of the “PayPal mafia” includes 13 people, all men. Elsewhere, I’ve read there were 20 founders. It’s true that a third of the people who worked for the company in its early years were women, and a majority of those in the most senior positions were foreign-born. So, after a fashion, diversity was a fact of life at PayPal. And there were, indeed, many people involved at the outset. But a reading of The Founders makes clear that three men were central to the company’s success: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin.
THE THREE PRINCIPALS OF THE PAYPAL MAFIA
ELON MUSK
Elon Musk needs no introduction to anyone who’s awake in the United States in 2022. A South African immigrant (by way of Canada), he is routinely identified as the richest person in the world, with a fortune pegged at $270 billion as I write. He’s also famously the man behind Tesla and SpaceX as well as The Boring Company, Neuralink, and OpenAI. (Musk is the founder or cofounder of all these companies except Tesla, for which he serves as CEO and product architect.) And at this writing he seems to have bought Twitter as well. With the possible exception of Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, no one has shined as brightly in the technological firmament as Elon Musk.
PETER THIEL
By comparison, Peter Thiel is poor. He weighs in at only number 551 on the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list, with net worth estimated at a paltry $5.1 billion. However, it’s enough for him to wreak havoc on the American political scene. Thiel is a right-wing libertarian who scorns both political parties and the democratic system as a whole. As I write, he’s in the process of sending enormous campaign contributions to favored reactionary Republican candidates around the country. Although Thiel served as CEO of PayPal during a stretch of its most consequential years, he is not an entrepreneur. Instead, he identifies as a venture capitalist. However, Thiel did found a software company named Palantir Technologies, a $3 billion enterprise with some 3,000 employees. Palantir software is widely employed by federal and state government agencies and major corporations to combat terrorism, computer fraud, and other cyber crime.
MAX LEVCHIN
Max Levchin is the least well-known of the three principal cofounders at PayPal. A Ukrainian-American immigrant, he is a software engineer who designed several of the mission-critical features that made PayPal’s success possible. These included, most notably, a novel approach to cyber fraud and a program that was one of the first commercial implementations of the CAPTCHA challenge to identify Internet bots. Since leaving PayPal not long after the company went public, Levchin has founded several companies, including Slide (sold to Google for $182 million). He was an early investor in Yelp and became its largest shareholder. Levchin appears at number 2664 on the Forbes billionaires list with net worth of $1 billion.
HOW PAYPAL CAME TO BE
At first, there were two companies, not one. It was 1999. Elon Musk was fresh from selling an earlier startup and walking away with $32 million. He poured his newfound fortune into X.com. His goal was to turn the company into an online financial superstore, combining consumer banking, investment banking, insurance, and financial advisory services under one roof.
At about the same time, Peter Thiel teamed up with Max Levchin to form Confinity. After stumbling around in search of a niche, the pair settled on using a new feature on the then-popular PalmPilot. With an infra-red port on a new version of the device, one could beam information from one device to another. Thiel and Levchin decided the answer was to beam money. As an afterthought, both Confinity and X.com offered customers the option to send money by email.
It was only later that both companies discovered how much more popular it proved for customers to send money via email than anything else they were doing. Both then reluctantly decided to shift their focus to email. And when competition between X.com and Confinity threatened to sink both companies, they grumpily merged to form PayPal. The combined firm soon went public, but later in 2002 eBay bought it for $1.5 billion. EBay spun off PayPal as an independent company in 2015. But by then the principals of the PayPal mafia were long gone and well on their way to making history.
Today, eBay boasts 159 million users and a market cap of $32 billion. By contrast, PayPal counts 400 million users—more than 10 times as many—and a market cap of $128 billion. Roughly one out of every 20 people in the world uses PayPal.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
French-American biographer Jimmy Soni is the former managing editor of the Huffington Post. He is best known for A Mind at Play, his biography of Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory.
May 18, 2022
Though this book is probably for more of a niche audience than something like "Billion Dollar Loser" or "Super Pumped" (which read like actual soap operas), "The Founders" is foundational reading for anyone interested in the history of the internet and Silicon Valley.
Surprisingly, there were also a lot of interesting takeaways for my work — marketing insights, product development tidbits, and plenty of relational advice that was far more realistic and relevant than I’ve seen in other Silicon Valley tales.
"The Founders" is highly recommended for those with an interest in tech and Silicon Valley history — which, it should be noted, is also American cultural history.
Surprisingly, there were also a lot of interesting takeaways for my work — marketing insights, product development tidbits, and plenty of relational advice that was far more realistic and relevant than I’ve seen in other Silicon Valley tales.
"The Founders" is highly recommended for those with an interest in tech and Silicon Valley history — which, it should be noted, is also American cultural history.
July 2, 2022
If you’re thinking, “What, Christie read a book about a tech start up? WTH?” that is correct. I have no interest in PayPal, technology, math, business, or anything else involved with starting a company that because a huge success and is most likely something you will use today. But what does interest me is people who do things that other people don’t do, and the PayPal team certainly did that. Why did PayPal becomes what it is when so many other companies didn’t make it? Read this book to find out. It shows perfectly how success is never JUST because someone is good or an idea is great or you get lucky — you really have to have all three, like the PayPal founders did.
August 26, 2022
Perhaps I'm slightly biased working for one of the "mafia" members, but I can't imagine a more motivating read than this one. The amount of hard work and talent within this group is almost unfathomable. Imagining the small cohort of people all sleeping under their desks in sleeping bags, doing everything they can to build something incredible - it's impossible not to be inspired by them.
It's so wild to think this small group of people have gone on to build and support some of the largest tech companies to ever exist. That last story in the epilogue was the perfect ending - what a wild ride.
It's so wild to think this small group of people have gone on to build and support some of the largest tech companies to ever exist. That last story in the epilogue was the perfect ending - what a wild ride.
Read
September 21, 2022It's a slow start with nerdy, white-collar shenanigans that don't always hold one's attention but it has it's exciting moments. However, this book feels like it's 900pgs long because there are more dull stories than interesting ones. I would definitely choose the audiobook but don't look for an entertaining story there: the narrator is as dull as the book most times. The only relief is that you can speed up the audio.
Dryness aside, Jimmy Soni talks to all the major players involved in the making of PayPal. You definitely get the startup culture vibe of the beginning years. The rivalry between and transition to an eBay company--primarily the last chapters [as well as the ousting of Elon Musk]--read like a thriller but it is definitely not a page-turner from start to finish.
Dryness aside, Jimmy Soni talks to all the major players involved in the making of PayPal. You definitely get the startup culture vibe of the beginning years. The rivalry between and transition to an eBay company--primarily the last chapters [as well as the ousting of Elon Musk]--read like a thriller but it is definitely not a page-turner from start to finish.
February 10, 2024
I breezed through this book. Jimmy Soni did his due diligence on this one.
Once I finished this book, it gave me more appreciation for what these entrepreneurs built with PayPal.
Being within a startup myself, it gives me a connection to others who went through the thick and thin of building something great.
The PayPal team is certainly a unique one. Their rare skills and work ethic is shown by most of the original team going forth to build the cornerstones of the internet — post-PayPal acquisition to eBay.
Enjoyable, insightful read.
Once I finished this book, it gave me more appreciation for what these entrepreneurs built with PayPal.
Being within a startup myself, it gives me a connection to others who went through the thick and thin of building something great.
The PayPal team is certainly a unique one. Their rare skills and work ethic is shown by most of the original team going forth to build the cornerstones of the internet — post-PayPal acquisition to eBay.
Enjoyable, insightful read.
September 29, 2022
"You show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser" - Peter Thiel.
the monolog at the end is about the two prisoners (Michael and Chris) who read about PayPal in a magazine then devoted a decade of their life to writing code (at first on paper by hand) then started a company when they got released is amazing. I hope to share the stories of PayPal and other scientists and technologists with my students in the hope they get inspired like Michael and Chris.
the monolog at the end is about the two prisoners (Michael and Chris) who read about PayPal in a magazine then devoted a decade of their life to writing code (at first on paper by hand) then started a company when they got released is amazing. I hope to share the stories of PayPal and other scientists and technologists with my students in the hope they get inspired like Michael and Chris.
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