The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
A gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible. His richly reported narrative includes corporate intrigue, workplace hijinks, breakthrough innovation and first-class nerdiness ... Conflict and turmoil permeate The Founders ... Mr. Soni...keeps the story moving at a brisk pace and captures the quirks and whims of the people involved ... Anyone looking for yet more tales about Mr. Musk won’t be disappointed ... Captivating.
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The development of online “wallets” might seem particularly bloodless...and yet The Founders is an intensely magnetic chronicle in which ambitions and emotions run as red-hot as they did in the Facebook movie written by Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network. It helps that PayPal’s origin story...features two of the more complicated antiheroes of our time: Peter Thiel...and Elon Musk ... Soni...is balanced and fluid in this solo outing, making mundane projects like the creation of an online 'button,' or the dawn of CAPTCHA, somehow literary ... Soni does intermittently fall under the sway of business jargon ... But Soni also has a knack for the wry or lovely phrase ... Lest you believe the problems of a few future billionaires doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, Soni appends a coda about the power of PayPal’s 'mafia' to inspire that left this reader, at least, in sobs. No finance bro has accomplished that.
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Well-researched ... The story of [PayPal's] rise is gripping ... Mr Soni’s text is peppered with colourful quotations from Mr Thiel...and Mr Musk ... All this gives a taste of the chaos of startup life ... What the book lacks is a clinching answer as to why the PayPal gang have been so successful. Lots of theories are offered ... None of these explanations is convincing; most apply to other tech startups ... Even so, this is an engrossing glimpse of the PayPal mafia’s riotous early days.
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