The Founders

The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

By: Jimmy Soni

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

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 SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS FINALIST

A “deeply reported…bracingly written” (Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Code Breaker) and “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 21st-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.

Inspiring

I've being an entrepreneur that burst twice, this kind of book inspires one to get up and continue trying. Must read.

Great story with good detail and narration

Fantastic read for anyone looking for business inspiration and historical PayPal accuracy. Awesome book

The American dream

A story about immigrants working hard, fighting through challenges, and building something bigger than themselves

Captivating

I usually judge a book by how eager I am to be done and when I start increasing the audible playback speed. This was one of the rare books that I felt sad when it was over. Well written and a truly compelling story. Highly recommend!

🤯

love this story and especially the epilogue which really helps add a perspective and round lessons covered throughout the book.