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Paypal founders11/6/2022 I can also recommend A Mind At Play: How Claud Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman which is somewhat foundational to The Founders as well as the Internet Age at large.Payment service provider Paypal and private equity firm Carlyle are investing together $100 million in Shopware. It’s a book you won’t want to put down once you pick it up. This book illustrates a winner and shows just how close they came to going the other way many times. It wasn’t always that way, and it certainly wasn’t always as successful. It is a crash course in the dot-com Silicon Valley that we now take for granted as a hotbed of innovation. This is a book for people who want to know how things work and why. It was, What can we do? And how fast can we do it?” – Julie Andersonįor all these larger, more transferable ideas and concepts, these are just three I really wanted to share, there are stories and discussions and emails that articulate these points and others. “I never stopped and thought, Will this work? That question was completely foreign to those years. “All tech companies,” Listwon quipped, “seem to get caught up in the dumbest little quibbles while solving the world’s biggest problems.” – Benjamin Listwon Disharmony at PayPal was actually a side effect of very healthy dynamics.” – Max Levchin Rather, they’re angry that we’re ‘not there yet,’ i.e., that they have to solve x when they should be working on some greater problem. People who are smart and energetic are often angry. The mistake was to conflate anger with a lack of respect. “The idea of having meetings where people really liked one another seemed great. Time and time again they are summed up at varying important points. Three things will stand out as you read this book. There were lessons and concepts mentioned in those books that are more finitely highlighted here. I’ve read other books that have covered the dot-com boom and the startup world. But it’s also about entrepreneurship, immigrants, and outsiders. This book is about the story of Silicon Valley. It’s not about balance or measurement it’s about feeling and emotion and art. The research is immeasurable, but to be able to craft the narrative that authentically tells the story while maintaining that “messiness” is not easy. Jimmy did his homework and, to me, this just reiterates how good of an author he is. It is also in this section and the epilogue section that precedes it called “Debts” where we learn that this was a five-year project. In fact, after he uses the Bezos quote he acknowledges that “…the point of books like this is to capture that messiness.” He absolutely does. In his epilogue in a section titled “A Note on Sources and Methods,” Soni quotes Jeff Bezos: “When a company comes up with an idea, it’s a messy process.” And in this book, the linear storytelling narrative that it may be, Soni is able to capture that messiness. Long hours, late nights, sleeping at the office, CEO carousels and more – this book covers it all and does so from every manageable angle. This is the Silicon Valley of legend, and Founders cuts through the myth and shines a light on the facts. This book is more than just a story about the supposed PayPal Mafia it’s the story of Silicon Valley success.įirst, a question: Did you know that the PayPal of today was actually created when Confinity and X.com merged together after both racing to advance fintech beyond the vision of the dinosaurs of traditional banking? Did you know that that merger created a religious programming war between the zealots of Linux and Microsoft within the conglomeration itself?ĭid you know that Confinity’s original goal for PayPal was to pay your pal using the RF scanners between two PalmPilots? Sure, some of that you may have already know or have heard of these revelations, but to go through these decisions firsthand and feel like you’re in the room, is just one reason to read this book.Īnother, and perhaps the biggest reason, is to get an inside look at one of the few dot-com bubble survivors. These questions are answered in The Founders: The Story of PayPal and The Entrepreneurs who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni. How did the PayPal service that we take for granted today come to pass? How close did it come to going under more than once? Just how precarious was its position in the fintech field?
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