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.
