Jimmy Soni on Why PayPal Was Successful

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Hi, I'm Matt DeVoe, CEO of OODA, LLC, and thanks for watching and listening to the Oodacast today. I have a great guest, Jimmy Soni, who actually was the author of the book the Founders, who was one of the top 10 business, security and technology books for me for 2022. So really enjoyed the book and he offered to come on the podcast and talk about it. So, Jimmy, thank you for joining us.

Well, Matt, thanks for having me and for spotlighting the book the way you did. It really means a lot. So I'm glad to be here.

Yeah, absolutely. And I apologized in advance. I don't have a physical copy with me to hold up in front of the camera because I actually gave my copy to an entrepreneur a few weeks ago. So at least you know that it's in good hands.

Well, this is where authors get to be shameless and, you know, hold it up and help you out and, you know, and so that's the book.

Excellent. Thank you for that. So first, I'd like to start with your origin story and tell us a bit about yourself and your path to writing this book.

Yeah, you know, I think a lot of authors, for a lot of others, it's a circuitous thing. You sort of don't, you know, the industry is a little opaque, so you end up actually, like, figuring it out as you go along. But the brief synopsis of it is, I mean, I think, like, a lot of people who end up writing books, I grew up just loving books, right? Like, it was a thing that was. That was a big part of my childhood. I would just go to the library all the time. We, you know, we were immigrants. And my parents, like, you know, it's interesting about being an immigrant is like, your parents don't know about summer camp, Boy Scouts, like, none of. None of the usual things that, like, someone would do with a summer. Like, your parents just, like, it's like veil of ignorance. They have no clue that these things exist, right. And. But they knew about libraries. And so my brother and I would just be sort of carted off to the library during the summer, and you end up, like, you get into, like, the summer reading thing, and you try to, like, win the cheap prizes they give away. And, like, it's just total number of books read, right? But when you're a kid, you have this sort of, like, default honesty where you're like, no, I actually have to, like, read all these books. In order to win the prize. So I just became, like, a pretty devoted, pretty aggressive reader of all. Just all genres. A lot of, like, everything from, like, Redwall and the Moss Flower, Mata Mayo books, to, like, Garfield comic books, you know, and everything in between. And I think at some point, you start to. That converts for a lot of people into, like, a love of writing, which I did, and sort of in an amateur way. And then when I was just out of college, you know, I actually got really interested in Roman history when I was in high school and in college, and took a bunch of Roman history classes, learned Latin. And I had this idea, like, I'd been reading this book. It's a really good book called Rubicon by Tom Holland. You might have come across it. And I bought biographies of Caesar and about biographies of Cicero. And then I was like, well, I should buy a biography of Cato. He's, like, the other big player in that era. And I didn't find one. And so that was my first book, was actually this story of this ancient Roman senator about as far from, like, Silicon Valley as you could get, you know, 2,000 years ago. And so I reached out to my buddy Rob, who was my debate partner at Duke. I just reached out to him, and I said, hey, you know, we should do a proposal for a book on Cato. I mean, this is, like, actually how this started. And he was like, that's nuts. We're not, like, professors of classics at some university. And I was like, no, no, no. We'll just do the proposal, and if somebody buys it, we'll write the book. But if nobody buys it, like, at least you and I learned how to do a book proposal. It might be something we want to do someday. And that seemed, like, persuasive enough to Rob, who was always, like, sort of indulging my crazy ideas. And so we wrote this proposal, and, like, lo and behold, without any formal training, somebody paid, like, a, you know, a microscopic amount of money to publish it. But we had a book contract, and so then we went and did that book. And I did another book on Claude Shannon, who is this, the founder of information theory. And it was called A Mind to Play. And for that book, you know, I spent a lot of time looking at Bell Labs, which, like, was the, like, American hub of innovation in the 20th century. And when you start, like, anytime you look at one of these clusters, like, one of the first things you get is really envious. You're like, man, like, I really wish, like, you know, what would it have been like to Be there. And I also started thinking, like, what are the parallels? What are the cousins to Bell Labs? And you know, there's a cousin at Xerox park, there's one at Fairchild Semiconductor. There's, there's definitely cultural like equivalents. Like there's the soulquarians, which is like this music collective in New York and kind of, or you know, what, 80s and early 90s, you know, there's a few of these and then you fast forward, you're like, well, PayPal, you know, the PayPal mafia as they're famously known. That's one of the clusters. It's not Bell Labs in like the scale, but it is Bell Labs in like the scale of talent. So like individual talent. Elon Musk, Max Levchin, David Sacks, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, the founders of Yelp, the founders of YouTube. And I honestly just went looking for the book that I would end up writing that became. That's called the Founders that you read. I went on Amazon and I just searched for like, who wrote the single volume history of those years, not of who these people are today. Because that's just, you know, the story's still being told, as we've seen in the last like six months. But who were all of these individuals when they were in their 20s, early 30s, just out of school, figuring life out. And I didn't find what I would regard as like a comprehensive answer to that question. And I thought, same sort of thing, like you sort of throw the long ball and you see if somebody catches it. I figured if I could get in front of a couple of them and they were into the idea, then I could, then I would be able to gather enough string to do the book. But that, that was. And so that sort of started with that. It was like, let me make a pitch for why I think this book should exist in the world. And the early discussions went well. And then sort of, it took six years end to end from that period to like finishing the book. Because as you can imagine, like it's a 20 year old story. A lot of high personality, big, you know, high wattage personalities. And so you have to sort of go through and separate, you know, true fact from fiction. But that's the story of my life as an author. You know, I, it's not, there's no straight line. Most people I know who end up doing books, it's, it's a lot like entrepreneurship, just without the financial return. Right. Books are basically underfunded startups with like one CEO and had a product and that's what you, that's what you are. You're this person who has like, you get a little bit of money as an advance to see if you can do the idea and if you can make it come to life, then, you know, you get, you get, you can finish it up.

Awesome. You know, I'm embarrassed to admit I didn't realize you had written the Shannon book that is actually on my bookshelf behind me. So we could have had a whole separate conversation about that. So might, might have to rebook you. So, you know, you talked about kind of telling the early story of PayPal was important. So you know, what was compelling about the early story? Was it you just wanted to understand the origin story or was it because of the amplification that this group had had kind of post PayPal? What did you go into it expecting to find and how did that relate to what you actually found out about the, the cast of characters? And maybe it'd be good even as part of this to talk about who were, you know, those kind of key folks within PayPal that were part of the team. Because I think there's some very well known names that people recognize, but also others, you know, names that they would recognize but wouldn't associate them as being part of that PayPal mafia.

Yeah. So, yeah, you asked a bunch of questions. I'm going to try to address them a bit in sequence and hopefully make some sense of it all. To take a step back, I don't know how other people read biographies. Like, you know, sometimes when you become a writer, you read in really particular ways, but I think all people read books differently. For me, one of the things that I have learned about myself over time is that when I was reading biographies, I was always like most interested in, let's say years like 15 to 30, you know, so like you could read about Teddy Roosevelt when he becomes president, but, but what was he like from his teen years to 30 and what were the defining experiences that made him who he was? And if anybody is looking for a great book on that, by the way, it's called Mornings on Horseback. It was written by David McCullough. It's a really good book. But every time I would read even a full end to end biography, I always found myself intrigued by the years when people don't have it figured out. We sort of start our careers maybe let's say post college. And the problem with later journalism about successful lives is it can't dive like back that far right. You kind of have to cover whatever's happening today. If you were writing a story about Twitter today or SpaceX today, you would not be interested in who Elon Musk was when he was 19. It's just like you'd sort of be committing, I don't know, some kind of like journalistic error if you went back that far. Right? But for me, as somebody who loved history and like reading history growing up was always really interested in like, like what were the chance occurrences, the meetings, the people. And some of this was just selfish. Like, you want to learn how to advance in the world. You want to learn like, what makes people who they are. You know, how do you get an intro to somebody, that kind of thing? Or do you want to figure out, like, where, where could they, where could it all have gone differently? Right? So I was always sort of primed to like, want to understand that to begin with. And then I would say that was connected to the, this idea that like there was a hole on, in, like there was a space on the bookshelf, like where the PayPal book should have been. Right. So if you wanted to understand, I don't know, Apple. It's a bunch of books about like Steve Jobs, right. If you wanted to understand Elon's life, there's the Ashley Vance biography of Elon. Peter has his own book, zero to one. Reid Hoffman's written his own books. But I just noticed, I was like, there should be something here. This company A is huge even by market cap today. I think the last time I checked it was like $100 billion in market cap. It's one of the few.com success stories that's still around today. Like think of, you know, all the dot coms that went under. I mean, lot of your listeners probably lived through that experience. So it's still around today. So it has longevity. And then the third. And I think this is what you were alluding to. If you look at both the, the E, economic, political and cultural impact of the alumni, I mean, it's immense. Right. I sort of write at the opening of the book that like, their combined net worth is bigger than the GDP of New Zealand. Right. And you've had multiple billionaires come out of this group, plenty of millionaires, but not just like personal wealth. It's more that like they continue to impact culture and they're most of them or many of them in their late 40s and 50s, which is to say the impact is going to continue. Right. Even if you took out the year 2022 and everything that's happened, like while I was writing the book Max Levchin took Affirm Public. David Galzebek took Matterport public. Right. I think Palantir went public. Right. Like, there were just multiple firms, and you had people doing things in the world of politics or arts or culture that were hugely important. So I just found, like, over and over again, like, wait, this all sort of traces back. There had to, like, it couldn't have been an accident. There had to. They must have learned something while working together, even if it was just the basic levels of, like, how to get to know people who are in that group that, like the basic networking. So I wanted to take readers back to that because my sense was like, look, 1998 to 2002 was a really frothy time. It was also a really chaotic time. You had kind of like the tail end of the Internet bubble, you know, swelling, and then it bursts and things go chaotic for two or three years. And that was where this group, like, got its baptism by startup fire, right? Like, this is where it happened. And so it's like, one thing to listen to them on, like, a TechCrunch stage today. I mean, that's like, okay, like, they're going to be asked the same questions to kind of answer in the same ways. But I, because of the nature of the project, when I would sit down with them, I would, I would be able to say things like, okay, take me back to college. Like, how. What were the links between college and your first job? And then after your first job, how'd you get to PayPal? Right? That stuff was really interesting and it was new. And I would say, like, if you ask anybody those kinds of questions, it's actually fun to, to answer. You don't feel like you're under assault, right? And so that was kind of my methodology. A little bit of the methodology was, wait, like, you could cover, you could cover, let's say, Reid Hoffman today, and you would cover, like, his investments and Microsoft, like, all the things. But, but who was this person when he was, like, figuring out what to do back then? I, I, you know, and that was sort of what motivated a lot of. It was just no one had put that down on paper. No one. You know, in many cases, I was interviewing people who are part of the group, and when I would reach out to them, one of the first things I would get back from them is no one's ever asked me about PayPal before. And I was, like, flabbergasted by this. Like, and some of these people, by the way, they didn't want to talk to the media they explicitly avoided it. It took me a lot of work to get them to like, trust me. But there were so many people who were part of the group who had. No one had ever gone back and just simply asked them, like, what was your job there? What do, how did you get there? What did you learn? Like, these aren't, you know, I, I'm not a rocket scientist. Like, this is just basic kind of conversation. But I think that what happened is that, you know, if you have an alumni group, and the alumni group contains people who are doing things like electric cars and rocket launches and all the rest, it's sort of, you, you overlook all of these, the, the people who were there at the beginning. And I think one of the things that I'm proudest of with the project is that, yeah, I interviewed all the bold face names, but I also interviewed several hundred people who like, were enrolls in technology or engineering or security or fraud or analytics or whatever on the board. And they had inevitably had like the best stories to tell.

Cool. Can you step through a few of the personalities associated with the book just so we can kind of level set the audience?

Yeah, it's one of these things. The alumni group is who it is. So it's sort of tough to know exactly where to begin. You know, you could start, you could start to take a real step back. PayPal as we know it is the kind of byproduct or the fusion of these two companies. There are two companies. One company is called Confinity. Confinity is a, is a. The brainchild of Max Levchin and Peter Thiel and sort of constitutes, I call it like half of PayPal is that. And they originally started doing encryption for mobile technologies like the early PDAs, Palm Pilots. The second half of what became PayPal is known as X.com and that's owned and created by a then young entrepreneur named Elon Musk. He's fresh off the exit of his first startup and he creates this idea. He has this idea that like all financial services should just live in one place where, which will reduce friction fees, cost, et cetera. And so he has this idea. X.com, peter and Max have this idea called Confinity. Both companies launch products in the kind of email person or permanent person space. And that puts them into a situation where they're in a rivalry and they end up having to merge. But what happens also is they unite these talent bases, right? So like a name that might be familiar to a bunch of your listeners. I know it's Familiar to you is Max Levchin. So this is Max's fifth, sixth company, Confinity. He had had a bunch of failures in college, and he emerges, he moves. He emerges from the University of Illinois. He comes out west, and he meets this guy, Peter Thiel, and he pitches him on the idea of mobile encryption libraries. Like, he says that these PDAs have really weak encryption. I know how to do this stuff. And that's a real technical challenge at the time. Like, the question is, how can you squeeze out encryption out of these tiny little processors? Right? There's like a nothing burger amount of processing power on these PDAs. How do you do that? So they're sort of. That's sort of him. And he becomes the CTO of PayPal. He's the CTO when the company goes public. You know, he's responsible for recruiting a lot of the engineers. And I think today he's still very well regarded within Silicon Valley. The interesting thing about interviewing him as often as I did is I quickly discovered that he has an actual photographic memory. Like, it's. It's sort of eerie. Like, he can remember specific restaurants he was at, when certain meetings happened, where he was sitting in the restaurant. You know, he'll remember. And then the thing is, I would, you know, skeptical me, I would sort of be like, ah, that can't be true. And then I would find some email that confirmed exactly what he said. But he's one of the characters. Another one, you know, that's going to be, I presume, familiar to your listeners is David Sacks. David Sachs joins the confinity side of the company in a kind of somewhat of an amorphous operations. Product role. It's operations and then becomes product, and he becomes head of product, which really, we know what that phrasing means. But back in the early Web days, that was still a relatively new thing. What is this thing called product? He actually is a big part of the reason for PayPal's success. I think, again, most of your folks will know Peter Thiel and Elon for the various things that they're involved in. I would point, though, to just sort of show the, like part of it where people may not know someone who, you know, is important to the story. There's a board member I spent a lot of time interviewing. His name is John Malloy. And John, he's kind of like. Like, if you had, like an Obi Wan Kenobi in the story, he's like Obi Wan Kenobi. He, like, balances everybody out. He's a little older than this group. He later went on to invest, I think, also in ways. But PayPal was his first big investing success, and he was not some, you know, marquee VC person.

He.

He was fighting for scraps, right? And confinity, meaning Peter Thiel and Max Levchin at the time were scraps. They were not going to win a pitch. Like, if they were pitching to bigger firms, they got rejected over 100 times. But John Malloy invests in them, and he's a part of the company sort of from beginning, middle, and end through that early. Through that early history. And he's one of the people that even Max Levchen had referred to him as, like one of the unsung heroes of the PayPal story and so on and on. I mean, there are dozens of these alumni that we could go down the whole roster. But if you think about the concentration of talent, I think it's fair to say that it has almost no equals in Silicon Valley, certainly contemporary Silicon Valley. And there's a kind of nature, nurture, explanation. But it's what drew me to the book. I think it's what still draws people to this story.

Excellent. I want to talk about PayPal as a business, but first, you know, while we're on the topic of. Of the individuals, what do you think was the magic sauce? Was there something that happened at PayPal that set them up for this future success, or was PayPal simply the intertwining of individuals that were on that path already?

Yeah, you know, it's a question. I think even after writing the book, I still puzzle over it, like, all the time. So I'll offer what I think will be an abridged but, like, admittedly insufficient answer. You know, like, it'll always sort of be insufficient. There's a few elements that, like, in looking back at it and being able to look at it with the distance of, let's say, 20 years. One is the experience of success. You know, like, sort of success begets success. So one of the things that happened is you had all these people who were part of.com that went under, and they had a really difficult experience. The people who were part of PayPal had the experience of going through an IPO and then being acquired by ebay. And it wasn't just the financial or material returns that were important. The point more broadly was that they had seen that you could build a web business from scratch and take it public and then have it acquired, meaning it did not. Like, it wasn't the sort of super bowl ad to sudden death kind of narrative. Right? Um, and Peter Thiel said, said a version of this to me. And he said in other places where he said, we, we went through something hard that was successful and if it, if it had been easy and successful, we would learn the wrong lesson, which is like you, it's all easy. He said, if it was hard and we failed, people would have thought, well, you can't do that. I gotta go back and do something different in a different domain. But because it was difficult but successful, we kind of had the appropriate like experience early in our lives. Like, this is going to be brutal, like it's going to be really difficult, but you can actually eke out a success. Right? Which is, I think, a different experience than generations of people had up to that point. That's one, the experience of success. The second is this notion that like the talent level on the team was kept very, very high. And I had this. One of the engineers I mentioned, David Gok, who later went on to be the founder and I think CEO CTO of Matterport, which Matterport, if people have ever looked at one of like 3D renderings of homes, like, that's the company that does that tech. David is also one of the co creators of the captcha. So anytime you've had to like define a fire hydrant, you can, you can, you can give credit that to him. Davidson, after PayPal, his, his, his sort of standards for a team were just like that. Everybody was ridiculously talented, right? They're like, everybody on a team actually has to be up here. And again, I think that that's actually a pretty formative experience. Like that will influence people the rest of their lives. Who you hire, who you befriend, who your investors are, who your board is, how you interact with others. His experience was that a team is just ridiculously good and that's just what it should be, right? So it set a standard for excellence, I would say. Another important component is timing. So when this group finishes its PayPal experience, I sort of refer to finishing as like after the acquisition by ebay. They're true believers. Like they believe in the power of the Internet and you have a lot of people who don't, right? I mean this is like, this is, this is the Internet winter. Like there were front page banner headlines like Amazon Bomb, right? Or like people said the Internet was a fad. In that sort of sea of skepticism, you have this group of people who have a little bit of capital and experience of success and a really good network and what have they seen, like, their timing is like, well, the world's wide open, you know, so it leads Jeremy Stoppelman and Russ Simmons to launch Yelp. It leads Chad Hurley and jawed Kareem, you know, and Steve chen to launch YouTube. And so you have this, this thing of like, the timing was exquisite, you know, they're coming. And, and what happened is because all the sort of the money washed out of the system, you suddenly have like a renaissance, like there's, there's a, there's web 2.0 that comes onto the scene right, as they emerge from PayPal. And so that's, that's another piece of it. I would, I would also say, and this is probably one of the most important but underrated parts of the story, and it's good I can nerd out with on this stuff with you because it's like, not. My friends will not listen to this stuff anymore. Having to fight for product market fit was very important. And here's what I mean, you know, the sort of jokes within the company and even in the interviews I did is that sort of Google had it easy, right? Because if you're Google, what you could do is like, you launch something and then you just point your fire hose at it, right? It's sort of like you, you could, you could see if your users like your product. PayPal fought for every inch of product market fit. And what they were trying to do, just for listeners who might not be familiar with the story, is they essentially commandeered ebay's cash register. They made digital payments on ebay seamless and possible. And what happened is that if like, they were parasitic from ebay's perspective, they were this payments parasite which was like, we gotta get rid of you. We have to go, we have to block you, we have to like, disable your code. We have to do all kinds of things to gum up the works. PayPal had to fight for its user growth and fight for the ability to keep those users as time went on. And what I heard from multiple alumni of the product team is that no experience that they had was ever so formative as that, because it taught them all of these little, like, hacks and tips and tricks on growth and on growth strategy and keeping users and retention, which I think that's a language that is super well understood today. There are like whole guidebooks on this and courses and, you know, conferences and whatnot. But all the terms I just used were, were basically non existent in from 1998 to 2002, right? Those sorts of even Growth hacking as a term didn't really come about until later. Freemium, like they developed a freemium model. Freemium wasn't really coined until 2006. So you have all these like things that they learn that are advantageous at a time when they have an advantage with the experience of success and a network to make it all possible. That doesn't capture the totality of why I think the alumni achieve different things later, but I think it's a big part of it.

Referral systems, incentives. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that they had to come up with in allowing for that success. We can, we can cross link your two books because I think one of the things that resonated for me, you know, in, in this, you know, deeper dive into the history of PayPal was the relation to the Claude Shannon quote that money is an information system. So it seemed like early on that even on both sides of the equation, they realized kind of this inevitability of the collision of the traditional financial system with the Internet. But then it seems to me, kind of post PayPal, if you look at the work that they're involved with, it's almost like they reverse it where it's information becomes a money system. So can you kind of take us through that evolution of the thinking around, you know, how they, how they had this vision around how money was going to change. But then it almost seemed to me, and this is just my observation, it could be wrong. You know, if you look at the later initiatives, it is all these buildings, very, very valuable. Either data stores or connectivity engines or content engines. You know, they went into the focus on the value of information.

Yeah, I'm smiling because you're a really perceptive reader and you picked up on one of the errors I made in the book, which is an interesting error actually, and I'm going to correct it in the paperback. The error is this. During my last interview with Elon, he said the line money is just an information system. And what he was referencing is the work of Claude Shannon, the information theorist. And he, when, when Elon would speak about money, he talks about latency, etc, using information theoretic terms for money. By the way, it's not just me. He's, he's tweeted about this too, years and years and years ago. So that line, the reason it's an error is because he said in that paragraph actually refers to Elon. So that it's. Elon's quote is like money is an information system. And what he says is people think money has power in and of itself, but it's really just an information system. It's so that we don't have to resort to barter and we can time shift in value. And what's really funny is there was a part of that quote that came after that I thought was really funny. Like, it made me laugh, but I didn't have room for it in the book because the book is already getting too long. So I'll share it with your listeners for the sake of giving us something it's not in the pages. And he goes. He's like. He gets really animated and very passionate about these ideas, right? Like, meaning, like, even ideas about money. Like, the conversations were delightful because you have a person who's so smart and he's, like, always thinking from first principles. So he starts, like, giving me this meditation about money as an information system. And then he kind of like, at the very end of the explanation, he catches himself and he says, you know, when I explain this stuff, like, people look at me like I'm crazy. But to me, it's like saying, like, the sky is blue or rain is wet or whatever. You know, he goes like this long thing. But he in particular had the following idea. And I think, by the way, like, you know, the idea passes the smell test. And there's a bunch of startups trying to work on it today, frankly. Cryptocurrency inherited some of these ideas too. The idea is, why is it that your bank charges when your bank is doing a digital transfer? Like, you get an eight, you get a wire transfer. Why? Given the fact that there's no paper changing hands, that it is just bits moving over the ether, why does your bank still have the right to charge you? I don't know, 25 to $75, $40. Yeah. Like, where? How does that make any sense at all? Because the cost isn't in, like, there's no overhead, there's nobody doing paperwork. It's zero ones and zeros moving through the world, right? Which is a very low cost relative to how it used to be to move money around. And so his belief is, well, that just means, like, the entire banking system is just filled with fat that we can cut. And if we cut all the fat and we have all the money in one place, x dot com. Why wouldn't everybody just, like, be at x dot com? He even described it to me. He said, I wanted X.com to be the global financial system, right? Which is like, this thought. But what he's referencing when he says information is Claude Shannon's definition of information. And so his idea is if you have the ability to send ones and zeros in a low cost secure way with limited noise and low latency, why should that cost you money? What right does your bank have to charge you excessive fees? Right. And so there's a way in which like you sort of combine Claude Chen's information theory with like I don't know, cost cutting, like a la Vanguard plus like a, a better product design. Right. Which is kind of like. And then you unite all money related entities into one thing. X.com now he never got to fulfill that vision for a variety of reasons that are explained in the book. What PayPal became is the PayPal that most people know today. They own Venmo. So if you use Venmo like you're, you know, and basically the idea is like I can send Matt 10 bucks, right? One to one. It's interesting your observation and I'm not sure I'm qualified to offer a thought on it. I can give it a shot which is it seems like the later they made money from the transfer of information. And I think that's true for some of the alums, not all. I mean I think Max Levchin's first startup after PayPal was Slide, which was sold to Google. So that was certainly like a photo sharing information transmission application. But if you look at any number of them, they sort of all went into different domains and fields. But I think you're right. Part of why your thesis might be correct is because that's where the Internet went. Right? That originally what you were trying to solve was how do you actually just make the information transfer efficient? And then once Internet speeds increased and the information transfer became efficient, then there was like, then, you know, then the oil wells were already dug and it was just a matter of getting the oil out of the ground.

Right.

But I don't know that I have a strong view on that. I think, I would say that I think SpaceX and Tesla are separate from that. That that explanation doesn't apply to the, the Adams business. Right. It really does. I don't. They're parts of Tesla I think probably. But SpaceX certainly not. But I think you're right. But you did pick up on the, the tiny little Grammatic not grammatical like I guess it is grammatical error that I made where the attribution is unclear that the quote comes from Musk, not from Shannon.

Good. Well I had, and maybe just I had assumed from reading the prior work on Shannon that I just made that connection. So I didn't even realize that that error existed in the book. But good for the clarity. Why do you think it is, you know, given that, that we don't see the PayPal mafia more involved in the world of finance. Obviously Max being the exception of Elon, you know, talking about cryptocurrencies. But given that early vision, do you think that they've abandoned it? You know, it seems like now they would be even more excited or you might see them putting some of their effort and capital behind some of these new, at least blockchain, you know, cryptocurrency type initiatives. But I don't really see it or maybe I'm missing it. Why? Why do you think that is?

It's a great question and I have an answer that came from my research, which is what I can share and then I can think about some of the other examples. Reid Hoffman in particular spoke to me about. Once you do payments, you see how hard it is to do payments. Once you have to fight for the survival of your startup for this four year period and you go through every kind of fraud and interactions with the government and regulatory issues and all of the difficulties you see like how it is one of the alumni, actually a multiple alumni, refer to it as PayPal PTSD. They said like you sort of, because you know how difficult it is to be engaged with the financial system, you have kind of an allergic reaction to like doing payments right away. Like it just makes it very hard because it's a complicated system with a lot of different points of friction and a lot of points for. And this is like where PayPal really shined was fraud, right? Fraud is really like the challenge that multiple people have noted that it's really not that hard to design a system to email money to Matt. What's difficult is making sure that Matt is not, is Matt and not, you know, Vladimir like stealing money from Russia. And so, so that's like part of the, the challenge is like they had seen so much that they almost knew too much. But I will say, you know, I know that a number of the alumni, either as investors or operators are invested in various kind of call it financial startups of different kinds. Whether that is like in, in Creative Crypto and Web 3 and, and Blockchain or is, you know, affirm, which is Max Levchin's latest, latest venture. So it's not that they've stayed away completely. I think it's very alum to alum. Like it's, it's sort of. There were a group of people who never want to do anything with payments again, because they knew how hard it was. And then there were group people who dabbled in it in the way that they might any, you know, in any other capacity. But I think the most telling comment came from Reid Hoffman where he said, you know, we just seen, like how taxing and difficult this was. None of us were racing to do it, you know, at the, to do it again. It was pretty brutal.

Yeah. You just alluded to what was the question that I'm most anxious to ask, and that is that in all of the success of PayPal, it seems to me like this is a hacker story and not a business story, because the real differentiator was Max and the fraud, you know, counter fraud mechanisms that he put into place. And really what was almost the earliest fraud form of two factor authentication with the model that they developed around, well, I'll put two tiny deposits in your bank account, which are pennies on the dollar. Right. But allow me to validate that you're the actual owner of that bank account. So can you, can you give me your perspective on that? You know, I know we had talked earlier. It really does seem like there's a great security story here. And Max is kind of the hacker hero, does kind of save the day because they build this system that allows them to differentiate in the market and by preventing fraud.

Yeah, I mean, you know, you, you nailed it in the, the, the word hacker is a word that has some reverence among the alumni. You know, I would hear it from different people and, you know, I'm always cautious to like, make sure that listeners, you know, don't just take my word for it. And I'll, I'll take a step back to just talk a little bit about what I mean by that because it helps inform this answer, which is the value of doing a book 20 years after PayPal was created is that I didn't just depend on interviews that I did with, let's say, Max Levchin or Elon or anybody. Actually, what was almost always far more illuminating were interviews that they did much closer to the events in question. Right. So what I would do is I would just develop these elaborate spreadsheets of like every, let's say every interview that Reid Hoffman has ever given. Right. Then I would kind of give myself a reasonable end date. Like it'd be from like, you know, 1995 to like 2005. And I would watch every single YouTube link. The reason I mention it in this context is there's this interview that Max Levchin gives. That's when he it was must have been like two to three to four years after PayPal. And I think it was at some early Y Combinator event and he was talking about there was a moment when Yahoo almost acquired. Was in discussions with PayPal and X.com to sort of like think about an acquisition. And there was some CTO of Yahoo, had a very strong accent. And he looks at Max, he said, how many hakas do you have? And Max is like what? He's like, hakas, how many hakas do you have? Right. And so I think his name was Zod or Saad. And so the interesting thing is that that question and Max's reaction to it was positive in the sense that what they were trying to do was sort of white hat, like be the people who are protecting, you know, money and the transmission of money against bad actors. And I think the most, one of the most important quotes in the book is this quote from Max where he says, you know, PayPal, people think of PayPal as like this little interface for sending money. But that's just the tip of this enormous submerged iceberg. And the submerged iceberg is a very complicated and complex and, and well designed system of fraud fighting to reduce the risk of every transaction. And part of, you know, I had a like 25 different analogies or explanations for what all of this, like how all of this fit together. But one of the best came from a co founder of Confinity, his name was Luke Nosek. And he said, you know, fraud was our tuition. Like what fraud did is it taught us how to beat fraud. And so you so like just to do the sort of ABCs of the story for listeners, you design a payment system and you give away incentives so that people join the system while the entire Internet decides it's going to take advantage of you and get 10 and 20 bucks from you, right? Because you're giving this away in order to get people on the system. Then you've reached scale. But now you have a different problem, which is people are creating fake accounts or they're using fake accounts to swindle other people out of real money. And so that's sort of problem set too. Then you're in the business of transaction for real goods and services. So now you have to deal with chargebacks. I'm like, God, that's a whole other order of magnitude of challenges. Through it all what happens is the combination of the entire team, but I would say the engineering, product and fraud fighting teams come together at PayPal to devise a whole different series of like like hacks, like clever solutions to problems around fraud. And it is the story that I was like most excited to tell because it was the story that everyone ignored, you know, of the sort of PayPal narrative because it's hard to tell. You actually have to like really dive in to like get into the arcana around fraud fighting. I'll highlight the one, the one story you told that's really, that's a. It's an amazing one. And also it's really important because it still lasts to this day. It's one of several innovations, but it is a primitive version of two factor authentication. It's called random deposit. And probably everybody listening has gone through some version of it. You register your, you. You link your bank to some third party service or vendor in order to confirm that it's your bank, that vendor or service sends you a couple of deposits. Let's say it's like 2 cents and 10 cents. They've given you a code. 2 cents is 02, 10 cents is 10. The code is 0210. It's like a pin. It's like an ATM that was created at PayPal. It was invented, the concept was invented by a guy named Sanjay Bhargava who was recruited by Elon to work@x.com and it was put in place by the team and refined over time. And actually one of the funny refinements, this is like not in the book, but Roloff both to explain this to me. And as soon as we put it in place, we realized, this is really smart, it's working really well. But he said, but we realized also that we like cut 50% of our costs. If we kept all the amounts under 50 cents, we got the same fidelity, but for half the price. So he's like, so we only went up to 50 cents. Like, that was the most you could ever get from us. And even funnier is that I sort of write this in the book. Like it was a system designed to make sure you were who you said you were, right? That if Matt plugged in his bank account, that was Matt's account, you had access to it. People were so, weirdly, some people were so honest that they started mailing back change to the PayPal office. So like all of a sudden the office is like flooded with these envelopes with like change, taped index cards that this one person had to like take and deposit to Silicon Valley Bank. And so you had this sort of perverse thing of like, we're trying to find really bad people and like, make sure Matt's Not a bad person, but it actually turns out, like you're astonishingly honest. Like, you're mailing back change, you're probably spending more on the postage stamp than PayPal gave you for the actual thing itself.

This is crazy. Yeah. I mean, that obviously resonated with me, you know, with my hacker heritage, to see that highlighted in the book. It definitely was. One of my favorite stories was that dive into the work, you know, the complexity that that team had to pull off in problem set after problem set after problem set. And it seemed like they weren't getting any breathing room in that regard. So definitely appreciate that being covered. And I do remember, I mean, certainly we were talking the other day about, you know, the old experience of sending money through our palm pilots, you know, when you had to go back and connect to your doc for that transfer to take place. And I do remember the deposits from PayPal into my account that served as that form of authentication. So there were a lot that was being done on the encryption encounter, fraud side.

And I would. I would add two. Two components to the story that I think will be interesting to. To listeners and. And to you. What one is, they were in touch with the bad actors. So this is like my. One of my favorite things in the story is the extent of the interaction between the good guys and the bad guys, right? And so Max Levchin was communicating with the people who were defrauding the company and often in. In Russian and, you know, and there were other interactions, like there were people on the fraud fighting team who were in regular chats or emails, like, with the hackers. And what would happen is it was a cat and mouse game. PayPal would release an innovation. Like, the hackers were like, nah, I got this. And they would try to break it and they would send back, like, little taunting notes to the team. And so it was actually this. There was. Intimacy might be the wrong word, but that's what it felt like. Like if somebody was in your inbox all the time communicating with you back and forth, you developed a weird sort of relationship with them, right? And so they're in this perverse relationship with the people who are trying to steal money from. From people on their platform. And so you have this, this series of notes, some of which I published in the book, just because, I mean, they. I thought they were amusing, but also they were informative. It showed you. It showed you that in this era, the CTO was, was potentially in direct contact with people trying to do bad things on the platform as a way of gaining the intelligence to then fix what they were trying to do. That was kind of like one thought that really stood out to me. The other is this at the strategic level, part of what PayPal did. One interpretation of the PayPal story is that they absorbed all the risk in the system that banks and other financial institutions did not want to absorb. Because if you think about it, someone else should have like eaten their lunch. Visa, Visa could have owned the small dollar, person to person digital payment space. JP Morgan, like any one of the big banks, like they had the users, they had the capital, they had the experience of fraud fighting. And there are some efforts made like the furthest I would say is like this entity, billpoint, that was sort of co owned by Wells Fargo and ebay. But part of what I had heard from interviewing people who were there is that when Wells Fargo became involved, all of a sudden the risk tolerance went down because they don't want a bunch of like, like craziness happening on their platform. They're subject to more rules and regs. Right. And so there's one, you know, there's this sort of view of the story where it's like, oh, like, you know, PayPal was successful and then all its alumni went on to create great things, you know. But the part that everybody missed is how much work it took to fight fraud and to bring fraud down from what were company ending dollar amounts, meaning in mid-2000, the company has roughly, like, if you did the math, roughly either like four and a half to seven months of Runway left, right. And that's like, I'm not, I'm not saying anything that I made up. This is what's being played back to me by people I interviewed as well as spreadsheets and other, other documents. So you have very limited Runway. And what has to happen is you've got to fight fraud really fast without cratering user growth. So that whole dance is a big part of the story. The second, the sort of second part of it, the bigger strategic insight is their ability and willingness to embrace risk. Like the risk tolerance during this time was a lot higher than many of the other sort of well heeled names in the space. And that was one of the things they did very well, is that you could have a CTO who was going to fend off the bad actors and a company that was going to continue to improve until the fraud rates went down to frankly industry beating levels, which was really amazing.

Yeah, excellent. So if we think about it from a founder perspective, you have a lot of people that watch that are founders themselves. You know, there's a couple of thematics that have emerged. One is the A players hiring A players. Right. Kind of the quality of the team contributed to the success. There's certainly the work on the engineering side. So we'll call it the hacking approach. And I always use hacking in the most positive connotation. In fact, when I do my newsletter every Sunday, I relight, I rewrite the headlines that use hacker in a negative context. It's how absorbed I am with that. So there's the hacker mindset, we'll call it right in the growth hacking, the customer acquisition, the behind the scenes counter fraud. And then we have this high tolerance for risk they were willing to take on, the risk that other organizations weren't willing to take on. And I guess the risk for them was that the company fails and they go out of business. The risk for a Wells Fargo bill point is a little bit higher given that they were established organizations. Are there other thematics, you know, from a founder perspective that you think we should be highlighting?

Yeah, you know, the thought that jumps immediately to mind is basically the entire sort of book for me was an experience of hearing different stories that could be useful for founders along the way. And I once described the book to a friend, I was like, you know, this is a narrative history, but it's also sort of a scrapbook. Like, it's like a little scrapbooky in that you have different lessons that where I would pick up on something that someone said and I hadn't quite heard it framed that way. And I would find a way to sort of shape a chapter around it. Right. One key thematic that emerged that I hope people walk away with is this. This team was very intense and they were intense with one another and the conversations weren't always pleasant. There was a lot of fighting, there was a lot of infighting, there were two coups, three CEOs, you know, a lot of drama. And I would obviously like. In the course of doing hundreds of interviews, I sort of like got a sense of the people. And one of the things that I learned was the importance of those fights, of that, that sort of tension. And so one of the things that. There's a great meditation kind of at the end of the book where one of the co founders of the company says, you know, if people are saying bad things about each other behind their backs in a company, you have a real problem. It actually is important for you to be able to respectfully yell at each other about ideas face to face. And the way I described it, you know, Again, with the remove that I had, the luxury that I had was, like, disharmony led to discovery. And so it's a. It's a way of, like, it's not the easiest way to work. Like, I'm not sure, actually that I could work that way. But psychologically, I think this team was successful because there was. They didn't suffer fools. And your ideas got called out, and you were kind of always. You felt like you were always in, like, combat a little bit. Right. And again, this did not always make for, like, a pleasant place to work, though. The friendships from this group run very deep. But that kind of honesty and that kind of intellectual rigor is very hard to achieve. And I heard it from person after person after person that. That one of the things that made the place work is that if you thought someone was dumb, meaning if you thought their idea or their analysis was dumb, you didn't have to beat around the bush. You sort of called it out and went for it. And it really didn't matter what rank they were either. Like this. This operated irrespective of hierarchy. So that's kind of one lesson is, for a founder, the question would be, who on your team is not going to win Miss Congeniality but is consistently adding value by, like, being, like, being direct? Right? Like, directness as a virtue. And again, this can be taken too far. Like, you know, there are understandable ways in which this can go way off the rails, but there's this culture managed to bottle that up, the sort of bracing directness that leads to better insights. That the second important thing that I take away, and certainly it applies in my life now, any number of people who were in the roles they ended up in, let's say, at the ipo, were not the people you would have picked from central casting. A lot of the people here, like, I interviewed, what, three, four people who never even finished high school. Like, just like, we're like, nah, I'm gonna go do something else. You had people who were fired from jobs and met Peter Thiel, and Peter saw something in them and brought them aboard. You had board members who had taking a company public. You had CTOs and CEOs who had never done that, right? And so there was this. There was a healthy skepticism of experience of titles, of sort of past roles and responsibilities, right? And it was this kind of thing of people were willing to take a chance on talent. And I think for founders, sometimes you sort of get caught, maybe get caught into this idea that there's some minimum threshold of let's say, experience or prior work that's required. The PayPal story is an object lesson in how outsiders can change an industry. And it's really important because that's such a hard, you know, if you have limited resources as a founder, CEO, if you, you know, are you going to take somebody who's like, fresh off out of school with some bright ideas and a lot of will, or are you going to find somebody who's sort of done this before? Now, in some cases, it might be the case you want the best person for the job is a person who's done something like this before. But PayPal did not have that. It had a lot of people who were figuring it out for the first time and sometimes came into an organization that was totally in chaos. Right. And I'm smiling because I'm thinking of several stories in which somebody was like, yeah, he hired me and I showed up and I didn't really know what I was do the first day, but I figured it out along the way. Right. I think that's important and it's a virtue that is worth highlighting because it teaches you actually to suspend judgments about people. And that's like one of the. I think it's one of the most important things I took away is the number of times when someone very senior suspended judgment about a candidate, brought them on and watched them flourish. Like, that was a really valuable lesson for me.

That's great. No, that resonates with me as well. Some of the most brilliant people I've hired had no college education or were on different pathways and ended up making incredible contributions to the team. So glad to see that get reinforced as well. Is there any aspects of the book, you know, where you think it's worth covering for our audience that I haven't covered? And if not, I'll get to my closing question about what you're reading today.

Yeah, you know, I think one of the. One. One of the things I think is important is people have a tendency, because of the label PayPal mafia, to think of the group as pretty monolithic. So they had this misfortune, which is like this, this cover story on Fortune magazine, 2007, 20ish people, whatever it was, 14 people. But the actual group that created PayPal is 230 in Palo Alto, several hundred in Omaha doing customer service. And it's a much bigger group and a much more like just a much more heterogeneous group than I think the culture appreciates. Right. And the reason I did the front and back cover the way I did the Reason I did my interviewing the way I did is because you had young and old experience to. Not men and women. I mean, you just had like politics left, right, center, all over the place. It is not characterized that way today. And it's one of the hurdles that just like even in explaining the story, I have to overcome because everyone assumes they're like, oh, well, everyone's a carbon copy of, you know, insert the name. Right. Or, or there's a sort of, oh, well, Peter recruited everybody. Well, no, that's just not true. Right. Like, there was, there were many different ways people found their way to the company. And so I think that's like one of the more important things that listeners can also take away if they are founders, which is, you know, a team of all elons for PayPal would, I don't want to say it wouldn't have succeeded, but I think it would have been a much harder road to hoe. A team of all Maxs might not have been able to raise money. You know, a team of all David Sack. You know, there's sort of this, this, there is a bit of. You actually have to think about the identity of your team and about all these different component parts and what they can do. Well, and I think the best CEOs do that. I think part of, I think it, like, it's not chemistry, it's alchemy. Like, I think genuinely, it's like hard to get right. But it's a part of the PayPal story that's underappreciated because they had this misfortune of being branded as the PayPal mafia. And everyone's like, oh, well, everyone had expertise in payments, they were all brilliant, et cetera, et cetera, but that's just simply not true. Like, there's so many different voices and faces. It's one of the things I hope listeners take away, which is, you know, you, you know, you look at the story and you're like, well, you know, Max and Elon. Well, yes, and David Sachs was at McKinsey & Company, you know, and was actually very skeptical when he joined the. Joined Confinity. But, but, but made it work and it was a big part of his, his growth and development and became a leader in product. It's not all kind of, there's, there's a lot of different sorts of people in this story.

That's great. I was actually going to use the term alchemy, you know, before you got to it. So I like that, that analogy. Is there a, a definitive list of all of the Companies that have originated out of the entirety of the PayPal team that operated during those key four years.

Yeah. So you know, if you opened up the, the front cover and the back cover, I actually like, I did this thing called End Papers where I listed a name and then a company and a name and a company and it. I think if anybody has the definitive list, it's me. The challenge is that there are just so many because do you count, do you count like investing, like. And sort of, sort of do you count Seeds Series A, series B, like where on the life cycle? So it's hard in some ways. You know, the fame, the, there are the names. Everyone knows, LinkedIn, Yelp, YouTube, etc. But there, there are, I think the permutations are endless because these people also took senior roles at other startups where they weren't necessarily the founders, but they were just, you know, enormously important. I mean they were all but founders. Founders in, in all but name. Right. And so it's hard to come up with a definitive list. I tried in like a limited way, but it's, it's imp. By, by any measure it's impressive. Right. Because there is, there is something about that founding ethic that was, that was forged there.

What are three that are kind of the most surprising from your perspective or that you think that aren't often affiliated with that early stage PayPal group?

Well, my answer actually is going to be a little, My answer is going to be maybe too cute, but it's going to be the founding stuff that had nothing to do with companies. So people don't know that. You know, after PayPal, David Sacks went into movies. He's one of the, he's the producer executive of thank you for Smoking. And if you watch the movie and you look at the credits, Elon Musk, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel are the other co producers. So that's kind of one was like the movies. A number of people who are alumni have written books. So they've, you know, you could think of a book as a founding experience. I mean it's certainly, I speak from painful personal experience, but it's as difficult. And so they're. Deb Liu, who's in the book, who's in who I interviewed for this, just published a book. Jason Portnoy, it's another alum, he just published a book, Obviously Peter Keel, Zero to One, Reid Hoffman's books, etc. So there's books, movies. And then actually I interviewed a gentleman who created a charter school network like after his time PayPal, he sort of solving his own problem. I think he was looking for a school, school for his kids, and then he went out and spent, I think, seven or eight years, like, building this charter school network in terms of the companies, like, more formal, just like tech companies that people may not necessarily appreciate. I mean, it's sort of even hard to get, like. I mean, the list just goes on and on. I think it's sort of endless, right? If you were to pick one, you'd be missing five others. To me, the stories that are most interesting, I would say, are, it's hard. It's even hard for me to choose.

Which was most surprising. In your research, you're just like, oh, wow, I wouldn't have made that link.

That's a really good question. I. I think one. One thing that surprised me is I did not realize how much of the ethos of PayPal was a part of Founders Fund, which was the venture capital firm founded by. I think it was founded by Peter. But Luke Nosek was an early involved. Ken Howery was very involved very early. And I don't think that I fully appreciated or understood the role that they have played in sports. So, I mean, dozens, maybe hundreds, I don't know. And I think, by the way, part of that is, like, I did not come in as a tech specialist or as a writer about tech. I was a historian who kind of wandered into this story a bit and learned kind of on the job. But the. The ethic at PayPal was that you. You would support the founders because the founders had something special to add to a company. That ethos found its way to Founders Fund, it made its way to Founders Fund, and that they've supported their founders through thick and thin. And so I think that's, like, maybe that's the most surprising and interesting because it isn't just that the people who happen to be employees at PayPal in these four years went on to create companies. It's also that they created entities that supported the future creation of companies. So the multiplier effect was substantial. The first money into Facebook comes from this group. The first money into, I mean, a bunch of startups comes from this group. And it isn't just the funds. It's a philosophy of how you approach investing and approach supporting a founder that is fundamentally different than many of the, you know, the biggest names on the block on Sandhill Road is actually informed by the experience of PayPal.

Excellent. So final question for you, I always like to ask is, you know, what are you reading or have read recently that you would recommend to the audience.

Oh, that's great. I mean, I'm sort of always in the middle of three or four books. You know, this is a. It'll give two. One's a little random, but it's short enough that if you spend some time on it, it's a pretty good read. It's called A Night to Remember. It's this book. You're gonna have to buy it probably, like used on Amazon, but it's actually the story of the Titanic. And look, look, you know, spoiler, like, the ship sinks. We know where that story goes. But the point, I'm singing in jest, but the point is what the writer did that impressed me is the book was written, I think, four or five decades after the sinking of the Titanic, but he finds every living survivor and interviews every living survivor and a bunch of other people that were involved, and he writes a history that became a bestseller when it debuted. I think it debuted in the 50s or 60s. And it's this. Even though, you know, I mean, we've all sort of seen the movie, like, we know how this story is going to end. It is riveting throughout. I couldn't put it down. I mean, I think I read it in like two sittings. And it's a slim book, 200ish pages. And it's, it's such a detailed history and it shows such an appreciation for, like, the craft of, like, getting to these facts. And I just, I, like, I was blown away by it. I didn't. Look, you pick up a book on the Titanic, you don't really think you're going to learn anything new or. But this really did it for me. The other book I actually just finished, a friend of mine just published a book called Paper Belt on Fire. His name is Michael Gibson. He's a phenomenal writer. And this book is about the creation. It's sort of his personal story, joined to the creation of the Thiel Fellowship, the program that finds folks who are, like, in college or just before college and then recruits them to go build something for a year. Right? And it's really the thing that makes the book work so well is that it's really Michael's story. And he's got a hell of a story to tell. He was like, pursuing a PhD in philosophy, found his way to Silicon Valley somehow, and you sort of follow him on this incredible adventure that he's doing. And it's, it's just such a superb book. I actually, the thing that I've told friends is I Was like, it's actually not a book about tech. It's a parenting book masquerading as a book about tech. And as somebody who has a seven year old, like, it forces you, as you're reading it, to like, rethink all of your assumptions around everything. I mean, like grades, how we learn things, what we do in the world. And I thought it was just a really, really good book. And that book is called Paper Belt on Fire. I can't recommend it enough.

Excellent. Cool. We'll include links to both of them. It sounds like the Titanic at night to remember might be a little harder to come by.

It's a, it's a. It was a slim paperback, but it sold so well that I think it's still out there. People can find it. Yeah.

Excellent. It makes me. Your description makes me think of Garrett Graf's the Only Plane in the sky, the oral history 9 11, which I thought was just fantastic. That first person voice, you know, telling the stories through the interviews is a powerful approach. Yeah.

No, and the thing, the thing about me and sort of end with a thought or offer a thought, which is people. So there's a board member of PayPal and his joke to me is like, you spent longer writing the book about the company than I did when working at the company. And I was like, well, yeah, you're right. And he was sort of giving me a little bit of grief for it. And I took it in stride. But the reason is that it took six years, because it took six years to earn the trust of the people I was interviewing. Go through several hundred thousand pages of email, and I had like 5 gigabytes of email that were shared with me, corporate email from that time to fact check footnotes, cite everything. To not make things up. Right. But still not to make the book like eating your vegetables, like, to not make it homework, you know. And I like to think the book was pretty readable. But it's one of those things that I think because the way, the way a lot of publishing and writing and work, this sort of work happens now, like you, you kind of. You have to like fight for the time to do that, you know, So I want to sound a note in like defensive of. Call it like the, the half Robert Caro method. Like, if you can get the five or six years out of 10, you're probably doing it all right. But there's real value in detail. Like, I think, and I hope what stood out to you, I mean, I know it did because you're a careful reader, you know, Having notes and individual emails from hackers that I could write and work into the text gives people a better vantage point to the story than if I had tried to make something up or if I had tried to paraphrase. So I tried whenever possible. Like Peter's note after 911 is in the book. Elon's resignation note to the company is in the book. And so it does like, I hope people like it, if only because it's a scrapbook, but also because that level of detail, you know, it's the thing that a founder can actually take with them and learn from.

Yeah, that was one of the things I loved was the detail of the book.

Right.

I think we all know the story of PayPal in the broad strokes, but the ability to kind of hop into a time machine and get back into that level, you know, granular detail of what was happening and the conflicts and the correspondence. And for me, that was what I really appreciated about the book, was that, you know, the behind the scenes, the real look, the detailed, you know, kind of deliberate look at the founding of the company. So definitely appreciate that, and I think that's what made it a great book, and it's why it wound up on my top 10 list for the year.

Well, thank you. I really appreciate that.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Definitely appreciate you participating in the oodacast. You're the only. Only one on Twitter when I. When I. Oh, no way.

Yeah.

So maybe I have to go purs. Few others. So I do appreciate you taking the time to chat with the audience and definitely do appreciate the book.

No, this is great. Look, I. I write books for careful readers. You know, it's like. It's a. It's a. It's a real thrill to connect with somebody who notices the things that you're. The little. The little nuggets you're hoping to layer in. Right. And the. The. The connections to Claude Shannon. So I am just enormously grateful to you for. For offering me the chance to talk about it.

Excellent. Well, thank you.

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