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The Founders
Book

The Founders

The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

Simon & Schuster, 2022 more...


Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Eye Opening
  • Overview
  • Insider's Take

Recommendation

The history of PayPal tracks the ebb and flow of several famous Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel. Musk became a major shareholder of PayPal but the company fired him as CEO in 2000. He remained a big stakes shareholder, but his firing ended Musk's efforts to turn PayPal into a supermarket of financial services, including loans and deposits as well as online payments. Other Silicon Valley leaders, including Max Levchin and Thiel, refocused PayPal on fighting fraud and handling more transactions on eBay, which bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.4 billion. Musk received payment of $100 million, which he used to start SpaceX. In 2015, eBay sold PayPal in 2015 and its saga continues.

Take-Aways

  • Ukrainian native Max Levchin and two of his future PayPal colleagues met in college before moving to Palo Alto, California.
  • Elon Musk started X.com to build an online supermarket of financial services.
  • Levchin built Confinity around PayPal, an email-based payment service comparable to X.com’s business.

About the Author

Jimmy Soni also co-authored with Rob Goodman A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, which received the 2017 Neumann Prize.