In The Founders, award-winning author Jimmy Soni narrates how à once-in-a-generation collaboration turned a scrappy start-up into one of the most successful businesses of all time. Facing bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s, their success was anything but certain. But they would go on to change our world forever.

Informed by hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, The Founders explores how the seeds of so much of what drives the internet today were planted two decades ago.

A fasamating page turner. Deeply reported and bracngly wratten, this book rs an indispensable guide to modern innovation and entrepreneurship.

A start up hustte story for the ages, revealing why [the PayPal founders'] wild entrepreneurial ride did so much to build Silcon Valley's supersized present.’

A a qa et ON. 3, arthor of The Code Silicon Valley and the Re aking of America

‘Short of getting into a time machine, it's hard to imagine how you'd get closer to capturing PayPal's rise — and understanding the lives of its creators. A brilliant book chock full of wisdom and lessons for business and life.’

Out of PayPal's ranks have come household names like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Reid Hoffman. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and Linkedin, among many others. Yet For all their influence, the incredible story of where they started has gone largely untold.