Nick HutchisonFounder and CEO, BookThinkers

PayPal is not just Elon Musk!

14 Nov 2022 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:28

In this interview, Nick Hutchison and the guest discuss a recent book about PayPal’s early history that challenges the common narrative that a single founder—often highlighted as Elon Musk—drives a tech company’s success. They argue that PayPal’s rise was the result of dozens, even hundreds, of contributors across many functions—engineering, human resources, recruiting, business development, board members, and interns—spread across locations in Palo Alto and Omaha. The author of the book sought to capture a wide range of perspectives through interviews with people from these varied roles, aiming to dispel the myth of a lone genius and present a more accurate, collective view of the company’s development while keeping the narrative concise.

One of the things that you mentioned 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. 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.
Yeah, 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 Because they're the people that, let's say, like the audience or some part of the audience wants. But it's not actually accurate to like 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. Wanted to try 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 story was. And so 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.
The earliest history of this company does involve, you know, like Musk, Elon, Thiel, Peter Hoffman, you know, that you have to have those people. That's the right way to tell the story.