Founders
"A definitive look at the origin of PayPal and its founding team--including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared. They have defined the modern world. This experience defined them"
Stats for nerds
6recommend
8mentions
7people
2022–2025years
88% recommend13% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- list of (most of) the books mentioned in this thread so far. I tried reading every comment but used chatGPT instead.
1. The Big Rich - Texas oil boom.
2. Barbarians at the Gate - Private equity origins.
3. Masters of Doom - John Carmack and Id Software.
4. Einstein by Walter Isaacson - Einstein's discoveries.
5. Houdini!!! - The escape artist and magician.
6. The Double Helix - DNA discovery.
7. Stress Test by Tim Geithner - Financial crisis.
8. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - Concentration camp survival.
9. The Chariots of Apollo - NASA's space program.
10. Across the Airless Wilds by Earl Swift - Development of the moon buggy.
11. Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox - Apollo missions.
12. The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr - Food supply chains.
13. The Prize by Daniel Yergin - Oil industry evolution.
14. Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson - Ambitious wreck divers.
15. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - Manhattan Project.
16. American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - Robert Oppenheimer.
17. Conquistador by Buddy Levy - Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs.
18. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - Water infrastructure in the American West.
19. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - The invention of flight.
20. Walt Disney by Neal Gabler - Vision and innovation in entertainment.
21. Tuxedo Park by Jennet Conant - Invention of radar.
22. Insisting on the Impossible - Edwin Land and instant photography.
23. The Logic of Failure - Understanding and avoiding failure.
24. The Big Short by Michael Lewis - 2008 financial crisis.
25. The Box by Marc Levinson - Shipping container revolution.
26. Latitude by Nicholas Crane - Cartography innovations.
27. When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance - Space startups.
28. The Founders by Jimmy Soni - PayPal's early days.
29. The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester - Precision engineering.
30. The Little Engine That Could - Children's classic.
31. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - Success mechanics.
32. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight - Founding of Nike.
33. Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin - Building LIGO.
34. Freedom’s Forge - WWII industry mobilization.
35. Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes - Electrification by Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse.
36. The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough - Panama Canal construction.
37. Annapurna by Maurice Herzog - Climbing a Himalayan peak.
38. Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - Data General engineers.
39. Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary - Development of Windows NT.
40. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand - WWII survival.
41. The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder - Defining the meter.
42. The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll - Tracking a hacker.
43. The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel - Srinivasa Ramanujan.
44. The Power Broker by Robert Caro - Robert Moses and New York infrastructure.
45. How Big Things Get Done - Large-scale project execution.
46. Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik - Xerox PARC.
47. Built by Roma Agrawal - Civil engineering insights.
48. The Will to Keep Winning by Daigo Umehara - Competitive gaming.
49. Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold - Low-temperature physics.
50. Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins - Apollo 11.
- One of my favorite genres!
Any book by Steven Levy is great, he is the master! He wrote multiple books about Apple, and also about Google, Facebook,…
Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Nick Bilton
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris
The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni
That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea by Marc Randolph (Netflix Cofounder)
I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards
- That’s not true. It was mostly over their servers. Elon Musk’s startup was running Windows while Peter Thiel and Max Levchin’s was running Linux. Musk wanted to migrate everything to Windows due to the more mature (at the time) APIs and Levchin was adamant on staying with Linux. He was also busy trying to fight fraud, which was becoming an existential threat to the company, and had no time for migrating to a different platform.
Ultimately, Levchin gathered several other key people in the company, and went to the investors threatening to quit (and destroy the company) unless they brought back Thiel as CEO. The board sided with Levchin, Theil returned and Musk was out of day-to-day operations.
If you’re interested in the PayPal story, I highly recommend Jimmy Soni’s book, The Founders. https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Paypal-Entrepreneurs-Shaped-...
- I’d say that if you’re constantly refreshing Hacker News, you’re a good candidate for ebooks on HN-like subjects. I made a conscious decision to switch to that from HN and Reddit, and I’d say I’ve cut my usage of both by about 75%. Which was a good outcome for me, because it switched me from learning many topics shallowly, to learning a few from ebooks deeply (example, Soni’s The Founders book on PayPal’s history).
- I don't think this is the end game.
If you haven't read The Founders by Jimmy Soni, I'd recommend it. Musk has had a fascination with "X" for a long long long time.
This is just his latest attempt to make a platform that does everything. It's what he wanted PayPal to be.
He's not going to sell Twitter as "X.com" because X is his grand plan.
- As someone who is more interested in building the product than marketing it, I found the following recent reads helpful in achieving a balance:
1. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore - making your product work for the masses
2. The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen - achieving escape velocity, getting viral referral traffic
3. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss - it might seem a bit gimmicky but negotiation always comes off gimmicky
Motivational stories:
4. The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson
5. The Founders by Jimmy Soni
6. The Upstarts by Brad Stone
7. Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton
8. That Will Never Work by Marc Randolph
9. Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's by Ray Kroc
Can't skip:
10. Zero To One by Peter Thiel
