Book Read : The Founders-The Inside Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

Book Read : The Founders-The Inside Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley  - Pradeep Gupta 

I have just finished an interesting book titled  ‘The Founders-The Inside Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley’ written by Jimmy Sony. It is an interesting read. My take away from this book - if you have to progress and stay far ahead of your competitors than you need  the great Technological Institutions more than the religious places. 

During late nineties few  enthusiastic young people from these top grade universities in USA changed the entire technology and finance scape and helped their country to be far ahead of  other nations. 

You already know about the global entity PayPal , this company had played  a big role in making change the way we make financial transactions . The company’s founders and its earliest employees are now considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, Elton Musk, Max Levchin , Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era that includes  Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn. If you combine  turnover of the companies created by them , it must be definitely far bigger than GDP of many financially strong nations. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired. It is an interesting story how a once in a generation collaboration turned a scrappy startup into one of the most successful business of our time. 

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. It is also interesting to note that the top management of PayPal was not  senior in traditional sense. Many of its founders and early employees joined in their twenties, mostly fresh out of college. Actually working at PayPal was their first taste of the professional. The company had iconoclastic culture , its earliest hires included high school dropouts, ace chess players, puzzle champions-often chosen due to their eccentricities and peculiarities. In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, the founders faced bruising competition, legal battles , internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s.

Author Jimmy Soni explores deep into 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.

Success did not come so easily at PayPal. John Mallory, one of its  early board member shared about those turbulent times, ‘Calling us a mafia is an insult to mafias. A mafia is far better organised than we were’. The company cycled through three CEOs in its first two years of existence, its senior management team threatened to resign en masse-twice.

Ellon Musk said that it was not  hard to create it , it was hard company to keep alive. Twenty years later to this day, the company can claim a rare triumph for companies of its era, it still exists. Eventually, eBay spun PayPal out of its own, and today’s its worth is roughly $300 billion-making it one of the largest companies in the world. 

Book takes you to a long journey into the life and time of a startup turned into a multi billion dollar entity , peeps into life of its cofounders , employees , their centric and eccentric relationship, desire to create something to disrupt the existing businesses.The author Jimmy Soni , the author, was born to Indian parents in Toulouse, France, and raised in Chicago, Illinois.