2. The History of PayPal with Jimmy Soni [FourWeekMBA Podcast‪]‬ FourWeekMBA

In this episode, Jimmy Soni (Author & speechwriter) and former managing editor of The Huffington Post tells us the story of one of the most interesting startups of the early Internet era. A company that wrote the rules of startup growth, and the business playbook that many startups would later on follow.Jimmy Soni is also known for A Mind at Play, his award-winning biography of Claude Shannon known as "the father of information theory."In this episode, we're covering the story behind PayPal, based on: The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley. Gennaro:Thanks for joining this conversation, Jimmy, it's a pleasure to me because you wrote an incredible book called The Founders where you actually tell the story of the PayPal founders, and also the people behind PayPal. Thanks a lot for joining this conversation.Jimmy:Well, thank you for having me and for the kind words, and also for taking the time to read the book. It's funny, the book is longer than I thought it would be. And I think some of my readers have said it's taken them a little while, so I appreciate you taking a look at an early copy and spending some time reading it.Gennaro:Yeah. Actually thank you. Because it was a pleasure, I'm really honored to have had the chance to look at the initial manuscript before the launch, it's incredible research. You've done an incredible job. The story, it's so incredible, and I want to start from here because of course I know because I already read the manuscript why you were drawn to tell the PayPal story, but let me ask you what drove you to actually cover a story of a company that yes, defined the internet business playbook but was a company that was launched more than 20 years ago. What prompted you to research the PayPal story? Jimmy:Yeah. I came at this in a little bit of an accidental way. As my projects tend to go. I had finished up a book on a mathematician and electrical engineer named Claude Shannon and Claude Shannon had worked at Bell Laboratories in the 20th century. And Bell Labs was just the most extraordinary collection of talented people. And they had invented the transistor, they had won multiple Nobel Prizes. They invented the laser, they invented touch-tone dialing.And I started to think about, and honestly just go down Wikipedia rabbit holes of, what are other places like this, not individual talents, but clusters, groups of talented people? And I looked at Fairchild Semiconductor, which is a famous example. I looked at Zeropark, another example, general magic stood out in history. And someone had done either great books or great documentaries on those three subjects. And so, I fast-forwarded in the history and the late 1990s in Silicon Valley, the place is on fire. There's so much happening, there's so much money, so much ambition.And in that particular environment, you find this company created called PayPal and PayPal turns out to be the finishing school for this whole generation of entrepreneurs. Some are obviously household names, people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman. But there's a whole cast of characters there that maybe don't make the front pages of the headlines, but learned a lot from their time there. And I went into it just not really knowing what I was doing in the sense that I just figured, "Okay. There's probably a book on this."And then when I discovered that there should have needed to be more work done, I just started contacting people. And before long, I discovered that there really was something that happened at PayPal in the late 1990s and early 2000s and that the story deserved to be told, but that's how I came to it.Gennaro:Wow.