80. Jimmy Soni: Author of The Founders

Hello, Book Thinkers family, and welcome to episode number 80 of our personal development podcast, Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books. During each episode, I interview one of the world's top authors. And as a listener, you can expect to discover new books, new mentors, and new resources that you can use to achieve more and to live better. In this episode, I have the pleasure to interview author Jimmy Soni. Jimmy's last book, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, won multiple awards. And our conversation today is all about Peter's brand new book titled The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley. This book details the stories of some amazing people, including Elon Musk, Amy Roe Clement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared. I am a lover of books like this. I call them entrepreneurship biographies. And seriously, Jimmy hit a home run with this one. You're going to hear the enthusiasm in my voice and his as we talk about the process of writing a book like this, as well as some of the more famous stories in the book. So without further ado, please enjoy this amazing conversation with author Jimmy Soni. Jimmy, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. How are you doing today, man?

I'm doing great. Thank you for having me.

I'm really excited for today's conversation. I loved your book, but for those in the audience listening today that are not familiar with you and who you are, what you wrote, can you introduce yourself to everybody?

Sure. My name is Jimmy Stoney, and among other things, I'm the author of a book called The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley. And it was a long project and a really deep look at the creation of PayPal and the lives of the people that are frequently known as the PayPal Mafia, which include people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and a whole bunch of other people, some known, some unknown, who helped create PayPal and then later went on to found a whole bunch of, I would say, generation-defining startups.

And I love business stories like this, but before we get into some of my takeaways, let's go back to the beginning of this process. So when you first got the inspiration to write this book, where did it come from? Have you always been interested in the PayPal story or did you get a special introduction? What happened?

Yeah, no, it's pretty random actually. I'll take you even a step before the PayPal thing, the idea happened. I had actually— this is funny— I had finished a book proposal to do a book on Bruce Lee. And so I got really interested in Bruce Lee's life. And I thought he was like Jackie Robinson for Asian people in Hollywood. He is the patron saint of self-improvement, like all the self-improvement people, that we have today, kind of all— he really mainstreamed a lot of these kind of body hacks and life hacks and some philosophical concepts that touch on Stoicism and Taoism and all the rest. So I became interested in Bruce Lee. So I wrote this whole proposal and it's a long proposal and I'm super excited about it. And I go to Simon& Schuster and my editor at the time was a woman named Alice Mayhew. And she's like, I don't think she was totally thrilled about the idea of Bruce Lee, but she was willing to tolerate it because I was really excited about it. And then I find out that Simon& Schuster is buying a book by an author named Matthew Polly that's the Bruce Lee biography. And they were really nice about it. They came to me and they basically said, look, we have this offer to buy this other book. It's pretty much done. And the author is a Mandarin speaker and does martial arts. And so are you sure that you want to do this? Because you'll always kind of be drafting in his wake. And I was like, no, I'm not going to. I don't need to do a copycat book. There's no reason in the world for me to do it because he's probably done all the work that needs to be done on it. It was long. He had had a past book on martial arts that did really well. So I'm like, I finished the proposal. I'm pretty far, like I was done. And then I had to totally change direction. And when I was doing my last book, which was called A Mind at Play, it was about a scientist, a mathematician and engineer named Claude Shannon. I researched to a great degree, in some depth, the place that he worked, which is a place called Bell Labs. Bell Labs in the 20th century is like the dream team of technology. They invent the transistor, they invent touch-tone dialing, they invent the laser. I mean, they win a bunch of Nobel Prizes. I mean, it's the place to be. The Labs Group within the Bell Telephone Company is like— it is, it's a dream team of technology. I started to think about other dream teams. I was like, where else have we found these groupings where you get just a concentration of crazy talent? It's like when the US fields an Olympic team for something, where do you get that? And I found it in places like General Magic and Fairchild Semiconductor. The other place I found it was at PayPal. And I sensed, I was like, what's happened here is that because these people have all become successful in other ways, the other things they've done obscured PayPal. I kept noticing that if you'd read a profile about, let's say, Elon, PayPal got a sentence, maybe a paragraph, if it was mentioned at all. If you look at even books about these folks, PayPal is a chapter, or it's a tiny little sliver of a sliver of a thing. But I kept also noticing that the lessons from PayPal affected all the other startups they made, including YouTube is probably one of the best examples of building a new platform and they copied a lot of the tactics that made PayPal successful. I realized there was an opportunity here. And then I had a friend make an introduction to Peter Thiel, and I made the same pitch to him. I said, look, there's all these people who write about you, but they seem to never ask you about your first big successful startup, which is PayPal. And I said, it seems to me that there's a lot of stories here that probably people just forgot to ask, and it's been 20 years, so now it's not a big deal to ask them because who cares? And that's— so that's where it started. And once I had that, I went back to Simon& Schuster and I said, look, here's my concept. Like, I have this notion that like the PayPal story needs to be told. And my editor loved the concept. She got it right away. She'd actually done a book with one of the writers that you admire and that I admire, Walter Isaacson. His first book with her— she was his editor, Alice. She passed away in 2020. His first book with her was called The Wise Men. And he had written it with Evan Thomas, and it was a look at like the 20th century foreign policy dream team. So she kind of got the idea of like, what if you did a story about the team? And that's what this book is. It's just The Founders is a story about a team.

When you were writing the book, who is the target reader that you had in mind? Was it a young professional interested in technology? Who was it? People interested in Elon?

Hmm. That's a great question. No one's really asked me that. And it's an interesting question to ask. So I would say there are 2 readers in my mind. One is the one that you live with every day, which is like, I was writing the book for myself. I was like, what would I want to read if I were writing the book? And that's helpful because I was like, I knew, I was like, look, if you just give me a book that's business strategy, that's not going to be that interesting to me. If you just give me a book that's gossip and anecdotes, then it doesn't feel as substantive. And if you just give me a history of the internet from 1998 to 2002, I have plenty of other better ways to spend my time than reading that. So I wanted a mix of those 3. That was me as the reader. But then I have to always think, who's my ideal audience? And in some ways, you want to think about that, some ways you don't. I got the sense that readers who are interested in business and technology and how things are made, so creative people, I would actually like— that's probably my answer is I was thinking about creative people. I was thinking about somebody who is making anything, whatever it is. I don't actually care what you're making. You will face the same anxieties, the same frustrations, the same challenges, the same difficulties that Max Levchin faced when he was starting PayPal. And it seems to me that one of the things that has helped me in my life in creating things is recognizing that even— like, I remember hearing this one story once about Helen Mirren when she won an Oscar. And I— it was something like either after the Oscars or during the speech, she talked about feeling like a gigantic imposter, right? And this is like Helen Mirren. Like, this is like one of the, like, the greatest actresses probably ever, but certainly of her era. And I remember thinking like, it's really comforting for me to know like that, that somebody who's as badass as Helen Mirren is feeling fear. I don't know why that comforts me, but it does. And so I was thinking to myself, okay, if you're a creative person and you're building a team or you're building a company or you're building a product, why does this PayPal story speak to you? And I think the reason is, this is before all of these people are famous. It's before all of them are wealthy. It's before all of them know what they're doing. And they found the company in the middle of the dot-com bubble bursting, which is the hardest time to succeed at what they're trying to do. And so I thought to myself, this is a different story than what people think it is. They think, oh, it's Elon. He was destined for success, or, oh, it's David Sacks, destined for success, or whatever. But that's all wrong. It's actually a terrible way to think about it. And more to the point, it makes creative people think, I can't do it too. By the way, just to be clear, I didn't write this book to inspire people. I wrote the book to tell the story accurately. But I think the reader response I'm getting I have a lot of people sending me notes like, thank goodness they were anxious too. And thank goodness they didn't know it would work out too. Because people who are building things like yourself, you don't know if it's going to work out. You never ever know if it's going to work out. Everything's a leap of faith. Almost every day you wake up and you're like, well, this could be it. Today's the day it all falls apart. Instagram changed its algorithm and I'm done. Or whatever it is. That creative reader, those people also happen to be a lot of friends of mine, you know, I'm drawn to those people. And I kind of had this feeling, I was like, you know, that's who I'm writing for. I'm writing for the person who's making something. Not consciously, it's not like a guidebook, you're not, you know, you're gonna learn lessons, but I'm not like, here's lesson 1. You know, it's a story, but I hope the story actually reaches people who are making things.

Yeah, well, it definitely does. I'm a good example of that. I have, I resonate with so many of the different things that you just said. I mean, when I read iconic entrepreneurship biographies, of which this is one, it's just about a company, not about one person in general, I get this romantic feeling of Silicon Valley, 1998 to 2002. And I love seeing somebody like a Max Levchin or a Peter Thiel or an Elon Musk without the superhero cape on. I love seeing what it was like sleeping at the office, getting in fights with each other, the anxieties, the insecurities, the fear, And you mentioned stoicism when you were talking about the Bruce Lee thing. In one of Ryan Holiday's most recent books, Courage Is Calling, he talks about how courage is sometimes attained by experiencing what other people experienced. Like they give you the permission to realize what's possible. And so when you read about somebody like an Elon or a Max or a Peter or a Reed, just being a normal human being and to see what they've accomplished by sprinting in the direction of failure over and over and over and over and over again so that they can learn faster. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I learn in the form of storytelling, or I guess you could call it history, because that's what it is. It's history.

Yeah.

Experience is not always the best teacher. Other people's experience is the best teacher. So I got all of those things out of it.

The other part about it that I think is powerful with this story is it would be one thing if it was a fluke. It would be one thing if PayPal was the only thing that these people had succeeded at. But they actually took everything they learned from PayPal and did it again and again and again and again. And they invested in other people who did it again and again. So it wasn't like it was sort of one and done. Anybody can win a lot— people can win a lottery ticket. It doesn't mean you have any special skill at winning the lottery. This is a particular skill at making things in the world. The other part about it that's interesting that a lot of people miss is they didn't just make things in the world of technology. These people are most famous for things like, let's say, LinkedIn or SpaceX. Those are just 2 examples. But what you would miss is one of the people who's a part of this group, Ken Howery, just served as an ambassador. David Sacks, his first thing that he did after PayPal was he produced a film in Hollywood. So he moved to LA and he produced Thank You for Smoking, which was a Golden Globe-nominated film. Reid Hoffman's written 3 books, maybe 4. There's a person in the middle of this story who became, I mean, I think it's safe to argue Silicon Valley's most famous magician. So you have people who aren't just creating in one domain, they're creating in many different domains. And so to me, it was the story of people who did technology and wrote code, sure, but it was the story of people who actually learned about more, call them character virtues, thinking about problems differently, hustle, cutting corners within reason when you need to, how to build a team where people can disagree really pretty strongly with each other, but still move forward. So I found that I was like, this is a much bigger story than some random Silicon Valley story, because these people have gone on to create in different spaces. One of the people I interviewed was a really interesting guy. His name is David Wallace. David was a journalist, He joined PayPal at the beginning to do customer service. After PayPal, he actually built, I believe, a school, a school from scratch that lasted 10 years or something. And that was the thing that he did. Now, it's never going to make the front pages of newspapers, but I found that this instinct was always there, that there was always some sense in which they were creating things if they couldn't find the answer they were looking for. Some of those creations worked, some of them did not, but a bunch of them we know about and they're house name creations. As I think about it, I'm like, it was funny because at various moments in even writing the book about PayPal, I had the fears and the anxieties and like, oh my God, what happens if this thing fails? Whatever. What if it doesn't work? I found it's the same. It's like art imitates life. In this case, my life was imitating the art I was trying to create because I was studying the fact that There was one particular moment in late '99 where the company almost goes under because somebody forgets to back up a bunch of documents. And I actually remember myself, I was writing it, and that day I got a second thumb drive and backed up all the documents that I'd already written for the PayPal draft. And I was like, oh boy, I can't have that happen to me. I don't know. I think creative stories are fun. I think they're energizing. And I think, like you said, they give people who are creating things you know, some measure of like, all right, I can do this too. Yeah.

And as somebody who's read hundreds of nonfiction books, I think that books like this that highlight creativity and there's a lot of fun storytelling are easier to read and implement than sometimes those, here's what you got to do, step 1 to be creative, step 2. So I really, I really enjoy that. Now you just mentioned your process. We'll go a little bit deeper on it for a couple of minutes.

What—

okay, so Peter Thiel gives you the permission to write the book. He gives you his blessing. Then what happens? Yeah.

And the story about what happens actually begins even before the Peter meeting, because you can't go into a meeting like that. Yeah, you just have to be careful because if you go in and you don't know what you're talking about or don't know what you're going to do, he's got, what, 25 other people on speed dial that could do something like this?

Yeah.

And the truth is, I could have written the book without his permission. I just didn't. That's not the kind of work I do. I didn't really want to do it that way. It would've been way less fun. I wouldn't have had as many people say yes to being interviewed, I think. So before I met with him, I created the first of what would become many, many, many spreadsheets. And the spreadsheets were every video or article I could find about him and his co-founder, Max Levchin, dating back to as far back as I could go. And I would literally just— it was like no highlight if I hadn't watched it, yellow highlight if I was halfway through, green highlight if I was done. And I went through this spreadsheet and I basically just got to the place where every single video was green highlighted. I mean, that was dozens of hours of footage. So it took me a while to watch everything, understand everything, but it gave me a sense for how he spoke about PayPal, what questions did he already answer, but then more importantly, what did people miss or what did people forget to ask? What kinds of things lit him up? What kind of things lit Max up when they talked? What was it about the story that was interesting? There was this really interesting talk they gave in 2004 at Stanford where they're on a stage together. People can still watch it. It's at Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. If you just Google that and Stanford, you'll be able to find it. And the two of them are talking together and they sliced and diced it in all these little videos. And I actually reached out to Stanford to see if somebody had the whole uncut video. They unfortunately didn't have it, but I must have watched those videos honestly, I mean, let's just say an embarrassing number of times before I went into the meeting with him. Because I needed to persuade him that it was worth the most valuable thing that he has, which is not money, but time. I needed to convince him that I'm not going to mess around. If I'm taking your time, I'm going to like respect the value of it, which means having done my homework before I come in and not leaving a single stone unturned in terms of what you've already said about this. And I had a suspicion. There's a lot of stuff that they haven't said that I can ask them about. It also gave me a way of feeling confident when I came into that meeting to know that if I had watched all those videos and everything that was said about PayPal was already said, and there were no mysteries, and there were no secrets, and there were no anything interesting, then you wonder, you're like, okay, maybe this story's not as exciting as I think it is. But I came in and I realized, I was like, wow, he has said a lot about this, but he has not said everything. And because of his later life, people want to ask him about all these other things he's doing. They don't want to ask him about this anymore. So when he's interviewed today, PayPal barely makes the roster. I mean, there's no point there. You want to ask him about everything else. Same thing is true of Elon. Same thing is true of Max. They do different things today. That was the process before I came into the meeting. And that kind of very simple, it sounds sort of basic, but very simple spreadsheet process. And then I used— I live in Brooklyn. I used my Brooklyn Public Library access. So what people don't know about public libraries is public libraries have all these relationships with databases. So they have all these relationships with the big, like ProQuest, which is like if you go on ProQuest and you can get access to your library, you can type in any word, any phrase, and you can pull up every article that was ever published about it ever, which is really cool. So I went and I would just sit and print every article. And even now, in the corner of my room, I have these huge boxes filled with paper. And it was all the paper that I read that had the word Confinity in it. And Confinity was the name of the company before it was called PayPal. So I read hundreds of pages of stuff. I didn't tell him that I was doing any of this. I didn't tell Max that I was doing any of this. I didn't tell him because it's weird. If somebody said to you, hey, Nicholas, I'm going to school on you, I'm going to like— that's weird. It's sort of like stalkerish behavior. But what I did was I was like, I want to come in with the best possible understanding that I can have. So for every person I interviewed, that's basically what I did is I would assemble spreadsheets, particularly with the people who are very public. That's like a really good way of not feeling like you're like, okay, I know what I'm doing here. I've seen you get interviewed a lot and I kind of know what I'm bringing myself into.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I love to hear that kind of, I don't know what you would call it, the fun stuff behind the scenes. And so in terms of process, you watched a bazillion videos, you went into this meeting, what was his reaction? Was it just like, yeah, sure, like let's do this, or Hey, you seem to know a little bit too much about me.

No, no, he was really gracious actually. We had a really good conversation. And granted, this is 6 years ago and I honestly, I'm going to remember bits and pieces of it, but I'm not going to remember the whole thing. I handed him my Claude Shannon book and I told him about Claude Shannon. Here's this other person I wrote about. He knew who Claude Shannon was and he had enough knowledge to know who he was. And then I basically pitched him. I said, look, here's the idea. I gave a whole reason. I was like, look, you have this interesting period in your life from 1998 to 2002, but it seems like it got not written about by a person who could interview everyone. And I have this view that you're all pretty removed from it. And I did this whole thing, and then I was like, it's like Lord of the Rings, but set in Silicon Valley. And he laughed at that. And I was like, yeah, but if you think about it with Lord of the Rings, different people come together. And they have a specific mission.

That's a fun way to describe it.

Tossing the ring into the fire is about to do it. It was like, that was their mission. And I was like, this is a different thing where it's like all these different kinds of people come together and you have different board members who are involved and not involved in the day-to-day, but involved in strategy. You have investors, you have competitors. I was like, there's a whole series of things here. And he got it. I mean, I made the pitch and he got it. But then he actually is really, he's not somebody who has limited time and limited things that he could commit his life to. So one of his questions for me was, how do you avoid falling into the trap of either just making it a business principles book or just making it a series of stories? He was like, so how do you think about that? If I remember correctly, and I might be misremembering this, but I got a little anxious. I was like, oh crap, that's a really good question. But then I remember I said to myself, you know, I was like, there's a reason like the Bible is told as parables, as stories. So you can learn wisdom. There are principles, pearls of wisdom, but you don't learn them because the Bible says, like it often doesn't say like, here's the lesson. It actually does the story. And the story is subject to like interpretation for thousands of years. There's, you know, people just now like reinterpreting the Book of Job. and everything else. The Bible's forever going to be subject to reinterpretation. And so I sort of said, I was like, look, you can't miss the business principles. I'm going to write about viral marketing. I'm going to write about Metcalfe's Law, but I'm also going to tell the story of the near-death experiences and the McLaren car crash and all these other things that happened because you do both. The other thing I said to him is, if you only do the business principles, you will lose a lot of the reading audience. Because many readers don't— they read for the same reason, like I like watching The Crown on Netflix. They read to be entertained. They're not reading because it— adults don't have homework to do if they're not in school. Like this book is not homework. It's a choice. So if I don't make it interesting, if I don't make it engaging, like you've got plenty of other ways you can spend your time. There are better books out there. I said, you have to do stories because it's actually what makes people understand what business is about. And he was at least— look, I don't know if I sold him. He might've thought that was nonsense. Even saying it out loud, kind of like maybe he thought it was nonsense, but he was persuaded enough to say, sure, you should do this and I can help you. And I knew also, I was like, I'm not going to— I wasn't going to ask him for that much. The things I needed were introductions to a couple of people who were his friends who are high profile and where if I went to them cold, it wouldn't have made any sense. And then the other thing I said is, I just need you to sit for interviews because if I don't get to talk to you, this doesn't make any sense. He agreed to both, and then we were off to the races.

How many people did you interview in total? Do you know?

Oh man, it's like a moving target because I'm actually— it's funny, I'm still interviewing people. The book's done and out, but I like have this obsession with like maybe the paperback I can make it different. It was over 200. I think the end— because I interviewed some people multiple times, I think the end number was like 240 or something. It was a lot. It was a lot over, but that was over 5 and a half years. So The other part of it is I really benefited from the interviews of a lot of other people. If you go to the endnotes in the book, a lot of those quotes are mine, but I also drew on random interviews they gave closer to the events in question. The reason is because the memories were more fresh in 2003 than they are in 2022. So I would often look at, okay, how close can I get to the action? Because it's like one thing for somebody to say something in 2022, but like if you're quoted from a video and I listened to you speak in 1999, right, or whatever, that's like, it's a little, it's a little more accurate. So I was depending on those interviews too. So it's a mix of my interviews and those interviews.

Well, I love the analogy with the Lord of the Rings sort of style because it's totally right. Like the book starts off with all of these individual stories and everybody ends up coming together. and in an unpredictable way. So it was a lot of fun to read. And you talked about the entertaining pieces. So let's give today's audience a little taste of that. You mentioned the car crash. So a lot of people probably aren't familiar with Elon and Peter Thiel sitting in the McLaren F1 going down the road, and then boom, what happens? Hello, Book Thinkers family. A quick word from today's podcast sponsor. Today's episode is sponsored by Audible. Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment and audiobooks ranging from bestsellers to celebrity memoirs, business, and my favorite, personal development. And as part of Audible's partnership with us, we're actually offering listeners a free 30-day trial. This trial includes one credit good for any premium selection titles you'd like on the whole platform. So that's pretty much any book, including the one we're talking about today. That book is yours to keep even after the trial is over. Now, this trial also includes access to Audible's Plus catalog of podcasts, audiobooks, guided wellness programs, and Audible Originals. You can listen all you want, no credits needed. Now, everyone on the Book Thinkers Instagram knows that I love physical paper books. There's nothing better than having a book in your hand, scribbling notes everywhere in the margins. I kind of tear those things up. But I've been completing an additional 20 to 30 books every single year using Audible by listening when I'm in the car, doing chores around the house, or while I'm on my morning walks or runs. You could take advantage of this free trial by clicking the link in today's show notes or going to www.bookthinkers.com/audibletrial. You will not regret it. Now back to today's episode.

It's a moment that could have changed everything, right?

It could have, yeah.

So the very quick version of it is Elon, after the sale of his first startup, Zip2, he is newly wealthy. Before this, he was not, he didn't have any money, and he's newly wealthy. One of the things that he does he purchases a McLaren F1, which it's a sports car, but that undersells what it is. It is the sports car to end all sports cars. If you go back, and I did, if you go back and you read the writing that was done about the McLaren when it first debuted, I don't think any other car in history has ever been written about in this way. There was one person who said, roughly, he said, imagine if you gave The best person in the world who created something, unlimited amounts of money to create that thing. That is what the McLaren is. They were basically given unlimited resources to design the world's most perfect sports car, and they did it. And so there's all of these unconventional things that they do with the car, but they kind of go back and they do everything, the seats, I mean, literally every part of the car is thought through first principles and then built to be the world's fastest production car. I'm underselling what an important— people literally called it an event in car history is how important the debut of the McLaren was. There are not many McLarens made. He purchases one. It's a pretty expensive vehicle. And he admitted to me and has admitted in other places, it's not the easiest vehicle to drive, because in order to make a car fast, you actually have to remove all the things from the car that we take for granted, traction control, stability systems, all these things that actually make driving a car a reasonably easy experience today. You don't do that if you're trying to build a very, very fast vehicle. So he purchases it. He's still learning how to drive it, learning the finer points of driving it. And he picks up Peter Thiel for a visit to a venture capitalist. So they're driving from Palo Alto to Menlo Park. And Peter's in the car, and the way they joke about it now, but Peter looked at him and was like, tell me what this thing can do. And Elon was, I think, explaining the car and explaining what it was all about. And Elon's like, watch this. And he accelerates pretty rapidly. The details of what happened next are a little murky, and I actually tried to track down the police report. I couldn't find it. But according to both of them, as well as other published accounts, they had hit an embankment, The car spun in the air and then crashed into the ground. It was totally destroyed. And it was a really frightening moment because they were going at a pretty fast speed, the car is crushed. And again, this is not a car that's designed to take the kids to soccer practice. This is designed to be a very fast vehicle. And so they somehow managed to not be injured at all. They actually go to the meeting after the car is towed away. They both end up going to the meeting. They don't say anything about it. And it's this incredible moment. And I think the final line in that section I gave to Peter because he said, I'd achieved liftoff with Elon, just not in a rocket, which I thought was pretty funny. But it was one of those crazy moments. And again, there's a layer even behind it because it's one thing if he just bought some random sports car, but even today, Elon has tweeted publicly saying that the McLaren is the best car ever made. Car enthusiasts tend to agree with him. I found one of the world's leading experts on the McLaren, and he gave me a 3-hour seminar about the McLaren and then sent me a bunch of sources. So I feel pretty well-versed in the McLaren, which is not anything I expected to have knowledge in when I started this thing 6 years ago.

Well, it's a great example of how the book is entertaining and how everything could have changed. And then the two of them show up to a meeting, like an executive meeting or something, and don't even mention the car crash to anybody there.

Yeah. And it's funny too, because the car has an interesting afterlife, because he holds onto it, sells it, it gets in some kind of— it has a fire or something years after the next owner. It's fine now. There's some new owner of it and it appears to be in fine condition and it actually still drives and it goes to these— there's these McLaren reunions and the car is sometimes shipped overseas to participate in these McLaren reunions. Yeah.

I love the experience of reading a book where the author has done their research. And so the extended McLaren McLaren piece of what happened to the car after that, it's just icing on the cake. It makes the story feel even better. You go off on these little tangents and like, you know, the Xfinity— I mean, the Confinity and X.com teams occupying sort of adjoining offices in the same building in Palo Alto, and everybody's taking smoke breaks together. It's like, that's the— when you could step into the story and feel like you're there, I think that's what makes it so entertaining in the first place.

Well, I appreciate that. It also shows how I know you read the book because that whole extended McLaren thing is in a footnote at the bottom of that section. So you could very easily overlook it and move on to other things. But I felt like once I had crashed the car as a writer, I was like, well, I don't want people to think that the car like didn't survive and I don't want them to wonder about the car. So I should, in a footnote, I was like, let me tell what happened to the car in its afterlife. And it had a fine afterlife.

Yes. Yes, it did. No, I did. I read everything because books, well, number one, I love to read every word of a book. I love to read Forwards and introductions. There was no index in this book. I don't always read indexes, but yeah, I love reading an entire book because I feel like it amplifies the experience.

Yeah. And it's so interesting you say that because authors will spend time on parts of the book or they'll put thought into parts of the book that other people might overlook if they don't read it. Right? So one of my habits as a reader is I will read the acknowledgments before Before I read the book, because I, I, because I write books. And so I want to understand, because in acknowledgments, acknowledgments are where authors let their hair down. It's actually like where they tell you what they're really thinking. They don't have to sound smart. They don't sound formal. They don't have to like, honestly, like, it's like the acknowledgments are basically like, usually you have no gas left in the tank when you write them. And you're just like, all right, let me thank all the people I need to thank. And, but in my case, like I actually spent a lot of time with my acknowledgments, really thinking them through. So I'm glad that somebody's reading all the stuff that's in the margins or in the footnotes or in the endnotes or whatever. You mentioned the index thing. I did not include an index, and I got— one reviewer criticized me for this. They said it was an unforgivable thing that I didn't include an index. I can explain why I didn't include it. Another author had explained and advised me that part of what happens when you include an index is people just flip to the famous names in your story, they take the quotes from those famous names, they take them out of context, And they publish those online and they might generate traffic and headlines, but people have taken your thing and chunked it up for parts. And I didn't want that to happen. So there will likely be an index in the paperback because I just think it's better for people who are trying to use this book for research. But I didn't include an index in the hardcover version deliberately. That was a deliberate choice on my part because I did not want people flipping to Hoffman, comma, Read, and like, taking his quotes, just putting those in, you know, some listicle and calling it a day. Like, if, if I'm going to take the time to add context, like, I think readers should be forced to go through the whole book to find the good stuff.

I do too. Make them do the work.

Right.

One of the things that you mentioned, I think it was all the way back actually in the introduction, is that many major tech companies today have one founder that you can highlight, like Zuckerberg equals Facebook, or Bezos equals Amazon, that type of thing. Jobs equals Apple. But with PayPal, there are dozens or hundreds of people that are important to the story. And so you don't just want somebody to purchase the book because Elon Musk is detailed, and you don't want them just to jump into the book and go to the sections where Elon is highlighted. Although there are some interesting things, like you talked about when Payne first goes in to meet Elon, his first impression is Elon sitting in a room full of books with iconic biographies written about famous entrepreneurs all around him, and he's studying them. Like, those things are fun to read about, but there are a lot of other important people in the story, so you don't want people just to read the Elon stuff.

Yeah, and it's, it's a critical part of this whole thing, which is some of the biggest innovations in this story and in the success of PayPal come from people you've never heard of. But the temptation is to write about the people you have heard of Because they're the people that, let's say, the audience or some part of the audience wants. But it's not actually accurate to credit those people and those people alone with the success of a company. A company is a big entity. PayPal, when it goes public, is 200+ people in Palo Alto. It's several hundred more in Omaha. And to ignore them is actually to tell an inaccurate version of history. Was I able to speak with every single person that created the company? No. But I interviewed people in human resources, I interviewed people in recruiting, I interviewed people on the engineering team, on the business development team, I interviewed board members, I interviewed people who interned there for a summer. I wanted to try to capture as many perspectives as I could without the reader feeling like they were going to have to slog through 900 pages to understand what the book was, to understand what the story was. And so a big part of it, a big part of this book is dispelling the myth that it's like the genius of one founder that creates a product or a company. In PayPal's case, what's really interesting is you have a lot of smart people in the room, a lot of IQ points. And it is really, even today, it is one of— I have a couple of people who are part— not a couple, the employees I interviewed have purchased the book. Some of them have read it. They've posted about it, not because I asked them to, just because they did. And a few of them, one of the things they remark is they remark, this is still the best team I've ever worked on. They don't say, Oh, it was so cool to work with one person. They say, this is the best team I ever worked on. One of the phrases that a lot of the people use is, I still bleed PayPal blue. And the idea is they felt so proud, not of one individual or a famous face, they felt proud to be a part of the PayPal team. And so I wanted to capture that team dynamic. And I hope I did. I think I did. But that is a big part of this story, is actually challenging this idea that You put one face on the COVID and that's the whole thing. I actually, this is like, I haven't really talked about this, but I didn't want faces on the COVID I actually tried to have a cover with no faces. The publisher said no. And then I think, you know, with good reason, but I thought, why do that? And then, you know, they have their reasons and we found a compromise. But that to me is actually really, really important. It's not one person. It's not a cult of personality. I wanted to mix things together. Now, that said, the earliest history of this company does involve Musk, Elon, Thiel, Peter Hoffman, that you have to have those people because that's the right way to tell the story. But the right way to tell the next 3 years of that history includes dozens of other people. So I went and found all of them. Sometimes they were in the United States, sometimes I interviewed a couple of people who were in Singapore, person who's in India, one person who's in Germany. I flew all over to find these people. And to me, it actually paints a much more accurate portrait of what this team was and what the secret sauce was. And it was special. I had a thesis that it was special, but it turns out it actually was.

No, it was special. And we talked about some of the more entertaining pieces, and then on the other side of the spectrum, some of the more educational pieces had to do with the teamwork as well, because you detailed Thiel hiring friends and like preexisting friends allowed the speed of innovation to increase. But then it's funny because kind of later in the book, I noticed there was a point where Musk was talking about how speed forces improvisation.

Yeah.

And so you kind of understand the different team dynamics from different leadership perspectives. And there's a lot of educational stuff that you can apply to your own businesses. Like for Book Thinkers, it was originally started with a couple of my friends. And so I understand what can happen when a business is started with friends, yes, you can work fast in the beginning, but then sometimes you can butt heads with people who mean a lot to you outside of a work environment. And what does that look like for people that are now famous? Or what does that look like for people who are on the ground floor of these companies? And so, yeah, it is, it's really cool to read about. And by the way, time sort of flew by. There are dozens of different things that I wanted to jump into, but I think we gave everybody a pretty good, a pretty good peek into the book. So I hope they go out and get a copy so that they can experience more of these stories and understand a little bit more about what we're talking about today. Is there anything else that you wanted to mention before we jump off?

You know, you've done an incredible job of reading the book and of posting about it and of finding the things that matter. And I think like the thing, the only thing I want to end on is just like how grateful I am for readers like you. Like that, it's really weird, So, you know, you have to sort of imagine that like for 5 and a half years, I woke up most mornings and thought about this story, which is a really weird thing to spend 5 and a half years thinking about. Like, let's just be clear, it's really weird.

I get it.

And I'm like reading old 1999 press releases. And in some cases, when I was looking at their earlier companies, 1996, you know, era press releases, and I'm thinking to myself, like, who is going to care about this? You know, like, there were so many mornings where I was like, This is just the weirdest thing to be interested in. No one's going to care. This is like sort of mildly interesting to me. And what I'm encouraged by is that you have picked up on a bunch of the things that I, I like was like, I hope this lands. Like, I hope it works. Maybe this McLaren like thing will happen and people will get into it. And so it's encouraging to me that someone reads with the kind of care that you bring to books. And it's a real credit to you as a reader and the people you attract around you and the people who are watching these videos and following you, because authors— here's the thing, authors have invested so much time in any book you pull off the shelf. And we live and die by it. We actually— it becomes a part of our lives. And you put it out into the world and you're like, is anyone actually going to care as much as I care about this thing? And the answer is usually no. There's a reason. Right? But it's good when a reader like you comes around and you take it a level further and you're like, oh, here's the things that you can actually learn from this, apply to your life. Here's why I revisit it. Here are my highlights. That is actually why authors write, at least an author like me. I write for readers like you who care about books and who dive into them. And so I'm very grateful that you read the acknowledgments and read all the other assorted ephemera that's around the book because It means a lot to people like me.

Well, good. I'm happy that you mentioned that, and I'm happy that I can tell you how great the book was. I really loved it. There are so many other little tiny things like Thiel in 2000 going to the crypto conference and who might be in the audience. Funny story, people that know me, but I have a memento mori tattoo, obviously way before reading this book. So it was fun to see how they used that term and what it meant to them. There are all these little things. And one kind of footnote, maybe people talk about this, maybe they don't, but I sort of grew up at a time where I view entrepreneurship kind of like a sport, right? Like we look at these athletes and we want to learn where did they come from? What enabled them to be so successful?

Yeah.

And I view entrepreneurship in the same light. Like I'm a big fan of certain sports and I'm a big fan of entrepreneurship. And I want to understand the personalities behind these major companies. that have developed things that we take for granted today, like getting the little deposits in your bank account that you have to confirm and the CAPTCHA stuff. Like, it's also cool to me. I'm just a curious person, and a book like this allows me to go out there and exercise my creativity. So thank you for writing it.

Well, no, and I, you know, the sports analogy, it's really another apt thing that you picked up on. I was watching a lot of and rewatching The Last Dance a lot while I was writing this book. Now, I grew up in Chicago when the Bulls were at their peak. I collected Michael Jordan cards. I should have collected more. But I was seeing on— with The Last Dance, this amazing documentary that profiles the Bulls when they have the Michael Jordan era of the Bulls. But it's a lot of Michael Jordan, but you also see Phil Jackson and Steve Kerr and Dennis Rodman and Scottie Pippen, and the universe of people who are around them, and Bill Cartwright. It's all these people. So I had this view that actually this PayPal team is very much the same, because it's not— there are star players for sure, but there's a team of stars, and they're having to pass the ball. There are Phil Jackson-style personalities, and there are Dennis Rodman-style personalities, and there are Jerry Krause-type personalities. To me, sports, it actually does work. I would also say it works at the level of feeling like you have to bring your best. The thing that this team did, I think, is they encouraged people to bring their best work out. And there's a bunch of reasons why that happened, but that, like when in The Last Dance, they talk about how one of the things that Michael Jordan did is that you really couldn't even show up at practice and phone it in if he was there, because he would call you out. And maybe he did that and some of the coaching did that there. At PayPal, it was a part of the culture. I had multiple people say to me, I've never worked harder. I've also never done better work because you just couldn't There was no room for slackers. And what a powerful thing to live. And then I had the benefit and really the great gift of being able to learn about it and capture it.

Yeah. The story of the employee who had to leave the office early to go home and watch a TV show, and he comes back and there's a TV set up on his desk the next day.

Yeah.

That stuff was a lot of fun to read about. And listen, I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and for the last 20 years, Tom Brady has been my Michael Jordan. And the Man in the Arena documentary just came out. And so maybe that's how I made the connection because that documentary, each episode details other players that contributed to Brady's greatness. And so you get to see him from different standpoints. And I think that's what you did capture in this book. And by the way, it would make a cool TV show or make a cool movie or documentary in the future.

It's being worked on. Let's just say that.

Good.

It's being worked on because I think there's a lot there and I think those lessons It's actually, it's why I think athletes, there's a lot of athletes who are now involved in entrepreneurship, like venture capital, and there's a lot of what these people in those fields will draw from sports as well. And by the way, it's not at the basic level of winning or losing. I actually think it's about character. It's about improvement. It's about practice. It's about how to deal with defeat and difficulty, failure, injuries, all of which have analogies over to business and creating business. You have a product that fails. What do you do? You have a launch that goes awry, what do you do? Company almost goes under, what do you do? You have new members of the team join, what do you do? That's a merger. There's a merger in the middle of my story. And when Dennis Rodman arrives at the Bulls, no one knows if that's going to work out. How do you integrate Dennis Rodman into your organization? So I appreciate that you picked up on those parallels as well because it's definitely filtered in throughout because I was watching a whole lot of Last Dance.

I love it. Well, Jimmy, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. Like I said, I hope everybody goes out and picks up a copy of the book and I look forward to our next conversation. We're probably going to have to have a part 2 because I had like 50 questions written down and we only touched on like 4 of them.

Let's do it. I'm game. This is super fun. And you're, you're, you know, again, you just, you read so thoughtfully and I'm really, really grateful.

Amazing, man. Well, have a great rest of your day.

You too.

That is a wrap. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books. It would mean the world to us if you could write a review and share this episode with a few of your friends. I mean, these books truly have the power to change people's lives, and by reviewing or sharing our podcast, you're helping us make an impact. If you have any recommendations for future guests or any constructive feedback for us on how we can improve our show, please feel free to submit a form on our website, www.bookthinkers.com, or send us a direct message on Instagram @bookthinkers. With that, I am signing off, and I hope you have a wonderful day. Don't forget, go read something.