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  • The Founders

  • The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
  • Written by: Jimmy Soni
  • Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
  • Length: 18 hrs and 25 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (49 ratings)

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The Founders

Written by: Jimmy Soni
Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
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Publisher's Summary

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 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.

©2022 Jimmy Soni. All rights reserved. (P)2022 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

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it's fine

likely an accurate portrayal of everything that happened, but I wouldn't exactly call it riveting

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  • Ismael Becerra
  • 2022-02-26

Wonderful, Engaging & Insightful

This book was well written and kept me engaged throughout its entirety. The author was unbiased in his approach and provided enjoyable insights about Max Levchins & his technological prowess along with David Sacks and his masterful operational abilities.

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  • Anonymous User
  • 2023-10-29

Well researched and well written.

The author did a very thorough job researching and writing this book. I thought the book was very well written, entertaining and informative. It is worth the listen even if the listener already has a fairly good understanding of the PayPal story.

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  • Emerson Corzo
  • 2023-10-17

PayPal

Great book, excellent storytelling, easy to listen too. And very informative and historical when it comes to the PayPal mafia.

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  • Jacob Gill
  • 2023-09-07

Super well done!

Great story and narration! Lots of information read in a compelling way. Last part was an amazing story.

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  • Anonymous User
  • 2023-05-23

Great audio book

A very entertaining , inspiring and educational audio book. The various angles from which it is talked give it a very complete perspective on what made the team a success story .

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  • AntMc
  • 2023-05-13

Awesomw and inspiring!

Loved this read, a great narration of the backstory behind the players behind a gamechanging company.

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  • Jedd
  • 2023-02-23

Great story!

High recommend checking this one out. Will be amazing to look back at what all these founders do in the next 20 years.

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  • Jason A Mulliner
  • 2023-02-20

Excellent book

The pacing was great and the stories were fantastic. I used 1.2x speed and the narration worked well.

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  • Richard Cheong
  • 2023-02-19

The beginning and ending chapters are the best

The book was best when it started with the back story of the founders. The early days of Paypal was a little ponderous. Starting with the IPO was where it got interesting again.

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  • Anonymous User
  • 2023-02-08

Incredible

Such an amazing deep dive into some legendary innovators. 6 out of 5 stars. Maybe 7.

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