A SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS FINALIST
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER
National Bestseller * New York Times Editors' Choice *
Financial Times "Books to Read in 2022"
"A gripping account of PayPal's 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, 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.
Described as "an intensely magnetic chronicle" (The New York Times)
and "engrossing" (Business Insider), 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.
