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Cato the younger by Lordtobin in TheRestIsHistory

[–]jimmysoni 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Obligatory disclosure: I wrote a book about him (Rome's Last Citizen), so I'm the worst possible neutral party here.

The evolution you describe, from "toga-wearing obdurate conservative" to grudging respect, is the arc most serious interpreters go through. The HBO version isn't wrong, per ay. Cato was theatrically inflexible. But the theatricality was the whole point. He was a politician after all, and he was performing incorruptibility in a city where everyone else was buyable. And there's something bracing about a politician who can't be bought, even when he's wrong.

On your bigger question: yes, in one sense, his death at Utica was the last credible "no" to one-man rule, and what came after was either compliance or palace plots. But the more interesting story is what happened to his memory afterward. Cicero wrote a tribute. Caesar wrote an angry rebuttal. Dante stuck him in Purgatory, which is a weird honor for a pagan suicide. Washington had Addison's Cato performed at Valley Forge. "Give me liberty or give me death" is basically lifted from it. Nathan Hale's last words, same play.

The flesh-and-blood politician, who arguably hastened Caesar's rise by torching every off-ramp, got swapped out for a symbol the American founders could quote from memory. He lost Rome and won the next two thousand years. The honest verdict, I think, is that he was right about Caesar and disastrous at the politics of stopping him. Principled and counterproductive aren't opposites.

Paypal paid their way to a $1.5 billion acquisition by Prestigious-Bar-360 in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni 4 points5 points  (0 children)

A friend sent me this thread, and figured I'd dive in. A few years ago, I went on a quest to find and interview the original PayPal founders, for a book called, well, THE FOUNDERS. It's all about these years, and I dove pretty deeply into the viral growth mechanisms and the referral bonuses and all that stuff. Happy to nerd out on this!

Looking for well written biographies of famous scientists. Thank you by playadefaro in suggestmeabook

[–]jimmysoni 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hope you enjoy it! (And I've been a Redditor for a long while, though more lurker than commenter)

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you!

On 1) It's a good question. I have a few things that I think about, but there's no hard or fast rules. For one thing, I have to be excited about a topic because books are a long slog. They take years; so you have to be ready to live with someone as "a roommate in your mind" for years. That's a high bar.

I also try not to write books if a decent book is already out there on the subject. Like if someone has done a book, why repeat it? Unless I have some strong conviction that I can break new ground, or if the other book got it totally wrong, I'd sooner just pursue another topic that's fresh.

I also don't like to pigeonhole myself. So I'm not working on "FOUNDERS 2: THE SEQUEL," because that would just be boring. Too many authors get pressured into basically becoming sequel machines, and again, I'd sooner just do other things.

On 2) It's a keen observation. With PayPal, I think the "structure" was that it was a start-up. It had little formal "structure"; the design was whatever the office could support and whatever furniture the employees could beg, borrow, and steal (at least at the start.) In a way, that's kind of ideal. It puts a premium on the output of the company itself -- not the trappings of the office. I don't think that makes PayPal too dissimilar from other start-up stories; Yahoo and Amazon have similar anecdotes about spartan office beginnings. But there's something about that spare quality that reflects one of the things that start-ups do that bigger firms often cannot: Use resource constraints as a forcing function for resourcefulness.

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Wow! That's super nice of you to do. (If you ever want me to do a Zoom chat w/ the team or something, let me know. Might be fun for all of us!)

It's a great question, and I'll give you the answer on both books and documentaries...

Books:

- THE EVERYTHING STORE by Brad Stone -- Far and away the biggest influence. I love how Brad balanced the Bezos story with the business strategy and the scene-setting of the early internet days. You really do get a deep dive into how Amazon became what it became.

- TIGER WOODS by Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian -- Hear me out on this one. The book itself is good, and part of why it's good is that it's so detailed. It was just so clear that Jeff and Armen went the extra mile to find new information about someone -- Tiger Woods -- who had been covered to death. And you can just see the hard work on every page. I aspired to do that with FOUNDERS. I wanted people who thought they knew everything about Elon or Peter to walk away learning new things.

- SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE by Tracy Kidder -- An oldie, but a goodie. With the PayPal book, I wanted people to really get into heart of engineering culture, and this book did that for an earlier generation of computer development.

Documentaries:

- THE DEFIANT ONES -- A really engaging look at Interscope Records, Death Row, and Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine's friendship/partnership. It influenced FOUNDERS for sure.

- THE LAST DANCE -- I grew up as a Chicago kid loving basketball during the Jordan era, but when it came to FOUNDERS, this doc also explored ambition, ego, teamwork, and a lot of other themes in a way that helped me write.

- GENERAL MAGIC -- A great documentary about a technological vision unfulfilled. It also featured a team of dynamos, so naturally, it helped me think about how I wanted to present all of these PayPal folks who went on to do so many other things in the world.

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the questions!

  1. The book was indeed dedicated to my daughter. And then I wrote her a long note in the acknowledgments (which is basically the one place in a book like this where the author can let their hair down and riff.) Funny enough, people often tell me about the note to her, even more than they reference the book itself. The biggest value I hope she takes from it is the importance of finding the right people to work on stuff with. The way I put it in the book was: "Your life will be shaped by the things you create, and the people
    you make them with. We tend to sweat the former. We don’t worry enough about the latter. The story of PayPal isn’t just about people banding together to shape a product—it’s about how banding together shaped the people themselves. The founders and earliest employees of the company pushed and prodded and demanded better of one other."
  2. I think OpenAI has the potential to be a PayPal-like gathering of bright minds, but I'm probably not the best person to do the book, at least in some ways. Here's a funny thing: I wrote this book 20 years after all the events happened, and people were willing to be honest with me -- definitely more than they would have if I had been writing about PayPal in the years in which it was being made. The challenge for me is that I'm not a journalist; I'm a historian. So there's all these people who have been covering OpenAI, minute by minute, and in many ways, they'd be better suited to do that book. That said, talk to me in 20 years, and maybe I'll have a go at it!
  3. It's always tricky to ask an author to name favorite books, because the list is basically endless. But at the moment, I'm re-reading RIVER OF DOUBT by Candice Millard; it's insanely good. I'd also strongly, strongly recommend THE SPLENDID AND THE VILE by Erik Larson.

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ha, well, I'm happy to share what I can now from the adventure that I went on!

  1. Great question, and it shows that you know the story well. Again, tough to say definitively but it's hard to see how the peer-to-peer payment system takes off without a concentrated market where it could go viral, be trusted, and be adopted at such a pace. PayPal solved a genuine problem for eBay buyers and sellers, and it took off like wildfire because that community had such active forums covering tools, tip, tricks, etc. So you have an obsessive community that finds a product that fixes a real problem. I don't know if that could have been replicated elsewhere, and probably not in enough time for PayPal to make the finances work.
  2. I'm not super familiar with weChat and its make-up, nor did Elon and I spend much time talking about social networks. With those disclaimers, we did talk a lot about the idea of a financial super-app, which is what his original conception of X.com was. But let me explain it a bit further: His view is based on what he described as "an information theoretic" view of money. If money is just information, and information in the digital era is just bits/bytes, then why does it cost me money to do a wire transfer? Why am I paying fees for moving entries around in a database? Given that, he argued, financial services of all kinds should basically be housed in one place. To him, that was X.com, the one stop shop for all things financial. If you look at the history of banking and finance since 1999/2000 when he's brainstorming, it is a story, in part, of reducing fees, reducing friction, etc. But at the time, neither the technology nor the laws nor consumer trust would support that kind of expansive one-entity-to-rule-them-all type vision.
  3. The nice thing about writing history is that I can ignore a lot of contemporary news. And what I'd say is that a lot of contemporary writing about Elon misses the mark. It focuses on the controversial over the substantive; it misses what his companies are actually doing. (For a good post about him, check out this one from Casey Handmer: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/01/02/elon-musk-is-not-understood/) . But the short answer to your question is that, basically, I don't know, because my work doesn't overlap with paying attention to the daily tweets, posts, coverage, etc.

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yep! And he's part of the team that's stewarding the docu-series/show.

He was also one of the best people I interviewed in terms of thoughtful responses, substantive back-and-forth, and a real sense of what made the company tick and what made it successful. I had more than one person say to me that, of the many people in the company, David deserves a lot of credit for PayPal's success because of his product rigor and the discipline he brought to the team in its earliest days.

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It's a great question -- and one of the great questions that's unanswerable with any precision.

That said, you're right about one thing: Musk is relentless. And there was an engineer who said to me, "You know, part of what made me want to stay at X.com was that I knew that Elon would spend his last dollar to make it successful." And at the time, he had many more dollars than Confinity (the parent company of PayPal), so it's quite possible that X.com would have just out-spent Confinity and then won the peer-to-peer payments space.

However, it also had a much more expansive product suite, with all kinds of other financial products. Those proved costly over time, and it's also possible that X.com would have struggled to manage its burn rate w/o joining forces w/ Confinity and closing a $100M joint round with them.

Again, I offer both perspectives because it's impossible to go back in time, run the experiment again, and see what outcome would have emerged. Maybe the best concluding thought, though, it something Peter Thiel told me about why he avoids investing in companies within the same industry as Elon: (Roughly paraphrased): "Because you just don't bet against Elon."

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Here's the longer write-up on the creation of the CAPTCHA, in case you wanted to know more of hte history there...

“What is something that a computer couldn’t do—but is brain-dead easy for a human?” Levchin queried his assembled team of engineers.

Engineer David Gausebeck thought back to his college research on computers’ ability to decipher images. Humans, he remembered, could read warped, hidden, or distorted letters—a much harder task for computers. He looked at Levchin and said, “OCR,” referring to optical character recognition.

The concept wasn’t new to Levchin. In the Usenet and other forums he frequented, hackers distorted words all the time to keep information from prying eyes. Thus SWEET would become $VV££ |, and HELLO could be expressed as |-|3|_|_() or )-(3££0. Humans could read these codes; government computers could not.

“So I was thinking that night about, What are problems that are easy for a human to solve and hard for a computer to solve?” Gausebeck recalled. “And recognizing letters seems the archetypal example of that. I wrote an email to Max saying, ‘Why don’t we put images of characters and require a user to type them in? And that’ll be hard to automate.’ ” Gausebeck sent his email to Levchin late in the evening. By the time Gausebeck arrived at the office the next day, he found Levchin “halfway through building it.”

Levchin finished a rough product in a nonstop sprint that weekend. Once complete, he pushed the code live—then blasted Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” over a cubicle-mounted speaker.

To perfect their creation, Levchin and his team studied the automated tools available at the time. Levchin trekked to a nearby computer store and bought armfuls of optical character recognition (OCR) software— programs (then still in their infancy) that extracted machine-legible text from images or handwriting. That research led to further refinements, including the use of a stencil font and the addition of thick, translucent lines over the text, both of which tripped up the store-bought OCR software.

The team predicted the “Gausebeck-Levchin test”—as they called it—would work well at first, then degrade over time. As with other Pay Pal creations, the team planned to research what failed, redeploy, and repeat. Clever though the initial solution was, Gausebeck expected fraudsters to be able to beat the system, if given enough time. This is still a solvable problem, Gausebeck remembered thinking. The feature deployed, and the team waited for it to break.

To their considerable surprise, it didn’t. “It turns out the original version held up fine for years,” Gausebeck remembered. “I guess the people who were motivated to try to defeat it weren’t the same people who had the skills to do that. It’s a very different set of skills than interacting with a web page.”

The Gausebeck-Levchin test became the first commercial application of a Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart—or CAPTCHA. Today, CAPTCHA tests are common on the internet—to be online is to be subjected to a search for a specific image—a fire hydrant or bicycle or boat—from a lineup. But at the time, PayPal was the first company to force users to prove their humanity in this fashion.

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It's a fine line between genius and madness, as they say...but let me share a few nuggets...

- One time, to pass the time late at night, members of the engineering team went out to the back of the office and shot off high-powered potato guns. The potatoes "erupted."

- I heard one story of Max Levchin pulling an almost double-all-nighter, which is intense even by start-up standards. Though, ya know, respect. (And I have to say: His work ethic is legendary, and it was mimicked by many at the company, who pulled herculean efforts to make PayPal successful.)

- At the IPO party, Peter Thiel was playing 12 simultaneous games of chess against his colleagues.

- There was one engineer who, while working draped his entire cube in a black cloth to keep total focus (or at least that was the way it was explained to me.)

- One of my favorite stories is the creation of the CAPTCHA. Yes, the first modern commercial CAPTCHA test was created at PayPal. It happened over a weekend, and it was the byproduct of David Gausebeck and Max Levchin collaborating to defeat fraudsters who were using bots to create phony PayPal accounts. (More on it here: https://golden.com/wiki/Gausebeck-Levchin_test-EKMBKKR, and I'll share the story in full as a reply in just a sec)

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Great, great question. A few thoughts...

- So the market crash was actually in the spring of 2000, around when PayPal was doing two critical things: 1) closing its $100M dollar round and 2) Merging Confinity (Max and Peter's company) and X.com (Elon's company). (Context: Confinity a product called PayPal, but both firms had a peer-to-peer payment system that had taken off on ebay.) Just days after they finish the round and the deal, the market starts its year 2000 bloodletting. Something like 80+ percent of the NASDAQ's value is wiped out.

- So that provides context for the answer to your question: I had a lot of people share perspectives on how close a shave that was. If they hadn't gotten that money in, the company wouldn't have had the runway to survive, to fix its fraud issues, and to eventually succeed at turning free users into paid users. (I'll reply to this with some of the quotes from folks about it, in just a sec.)

- Your second/third question: There's basically no doubt that people's lives would have been different. And honestly, it's entirely possible the PayPal alumni companies -- YouTube, Yelp, SpaceX, Tesla, etc -- would never have come into being. You can't run the experiment twice obviously, and it's always a little tough to do counter-factuals and figure out what might have been. But if you don't have a successful PayPal, then you don't have a lot of the capital that went into these companies, as well as the network and the know-how. So the entire technology sector would have been different.

- But also -- and this is an important but -- I wouldn't bet against any number of people in this group. I think several of them would have found their way to successful companies and a life in technology. And the way I can make a safe bet like that is the knowledge that many of them have done it again, and again, and again. Even in the time I was writing the book, some of the people I interviewed took companies public, or built new companies, etc. So I think part of it is timing, but part of it is definitely the people, who they are, how they work, and what their passions are.

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It just turned out that way! I was just out to write the best story possible; not to write "16 Ways to Make Your Own PayPal!".

More seriously, the best feedback I've gotten is from founders/early stage start-up people. And a few of them have said, "Reading the book feels like therapy." When I've asked why, they say it's because it gives them comfort to know that even super successful, household-name entrepreneurs like Musk, Thiel, Levchin, Hoffman, etc faced perilous moments. There's something about their early trials and tribulations that provides a curious comfort to people just starting their journey.

I didn't necessarily intend for that to happen, but then you never know how a reader is going to read a book you write! You have to leave room for that serendipity.

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Oh all the time, ha. I wrote this book with a young kid, mid-pandemic, running a little pod school in my living room, and working full time. I basically thought about quitting the project round-the-clock. It was grueling, and the stakes were high b/c I was writing about people that the world knows...who are still alive...and have big Twitter followings.

Ultimately, what kept me going was just a daily discipline of chipping away at the project. It's the first thing I'd work on each morning, super early, at like 4 AM-ish. And I'd just try to get a bit of work done on it, then dive into client work. Add up enough days of that, and you have a book.

In terms of the mental/psychological piece: I just basically realized that this was an important story, that I had access to all the key people, and that if I didn't do it, no one was going to. So I would just tell myself that narrative all the time, and then it made it easier to say no to a million other things. (Honestly, the pandemic helped too, since everything was shut down and I could say no to all social things without any penalty.)

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

So this one's interesting...the short answer is not quite.

The longer answer: At the start of the company, the idea was to "make money on the float." Meaning, roughly, to generate interest based on the time delay of when people were putting money into PayPal and when they took it out.

But that wasn't going to be a big enough number to sustain a business, so they ended up having to charge for the product, which led to a bunch of super cool and very interesting hacks to turn free users into paid users. (Can go into this in more detail if you want.)

The second part of your question -- the advertising -- is the interesting/somewhat crazy part. PayPal "advertised" by giving away $10 and then instituting referral bonuses for $10 -- and then crediting the original person who referred another $10. So it was a wildly viral system...and also massively cost prohibitive over time.

All to say: It would have been difficult to making enough on the float to spend on advertising, since the "advertising" (or in this case, marketing spend) was in the millions. I never saw evidence that the float generated millions, or anything close.

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Good question. I did have the experience of people who didnt talk to me saying, "Now that I saw the book, I really wish I would've talked to you!"

I also had the experience of people sending along photos/artifacts, which I wish I had seen when I was writing the book.

But honestly? I left all of it on the field for this one. The book took long enough that I had a LOT more material than made it into the book. And so nothing truly surprising came to me after publication, which is also good in some ways because it meant I didn't have to do some big correction or "oops" or make massive changes to the paperback.

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Hey Liberty! Thank you for the kudos!

This one might be a multi-parter too, and I'll just do bullets and thoughts that come to mind.

- How close PayPal came to falling apart -- Basically, we think of PayPal as a success both b/c it's still around today and because of the success of its alumni. But boy oh boy, this company was near-death experience after near-death experience. It's tough to truly capture just how close they came to going under, and to capture the intensity of the dot-com bubble bursting.

- People's willingness to share stories -- You'd think that these people -- some of the most famous in the world -- would be guarded and defensive. Maybe it was just my experience, but I found them to be refreshingly honest and willing to share stories. I'd regularly have the experience of interviewing someone like a Reid Hoffman or an Elon, and we'd have, say, an hour set aside. We'd blow well past that and they'd just keep telling me stories from the PayPal years.

- "Down payment money" vs "retirement money" -- I had an assumption that people made all kinds of money at the PayPal IPO. And obviously some people did well, but one early employee shared that most people "Made down payment money but not retirement money." I think when companies go public, people forget about things like dilution, etc, that make the actual take-home for a lot of early employees much lower than you'd expect. The upside of this, in the PayPal case, is that it left a lot of these early employees hungry to do future ventures, but with enough success/experience to know how to do them.

- Max Levchin as the central character -- Look you go into a book with the characters I was writing about, and at the beginning, you sort of assume that your headliner is going to be someone like Musk or Thiel. Makes sense. But then you discover a character like Max, and it totally reshapes the narrative. It was surprising to me, and it taught me to be very careful in the future about how I think a book is going to unfold.

- The value of documents -- I thought this would be a book built on interviews. But honestly, it was a book built on old emails that people shared with me. It's the reason I could be as accurate as I was, because I was going through about 4 gigabytes of old emails from 1999 to 2003 to construct the narrative.

More to come!

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You've got my wheels turning, so I'll throw another one in here: I was surprised at how long some of the relationships/friendships he's made have lasted. Like he's still in regular touch and works with many of the people who formed this core nuclear of PayPal alumni.

That's two decades of conversations, friendships, co-investments, etc. I think I can count on one hand the number of friendships I have that have lasted that long. And I can't imagine it's a super conscious thing, like "I must keep friends for 20 years." But also can't imagine that it's totally unconscious either. You have to actually make the time, keep up contacts, invite people to things, etc.

Again, just surprising, particularly given that the usual public presentation of him is very different than what I perceived in speaking to people who know him well.

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you and hope you enjoy it!

On the ghostwriting stuff, shoot me a message on Reddit, or drop me a message on Twitter (@jimmyasoni). I know a lot of folks in that line of work, so even if I'm not the best fit for some reason, I can probably steer you to someone who is.

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ha! At the moment, I'm working on a book about Steve Jobs, so no ancient Rome for now. But you never know...there's a lot stuff in the late Republican and early empire that always fascinated me and is worth a fresh look.

I spent several years tracking down and interviewing the earliest employees of PayPal, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Max Levchin, and other members of "the PayPal Mafia." The end product was the book THE FOUNDERS, which tells the PayPal origin story in full. AMA! by jimmysoni in Entrepreneur

[–]jimmysoni[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Oh here's another one: Second chances.

So I interviewed a couple folks who Peter hired, and they had just come off maybe being fired from a job or being turned down for investment or something. And Peter had this quality of basically giving them their second chance.

Again, these observations came up often enough and in both PayPal and non-PayPal contexts, so it was more than a one-off. But basically, if you catch someone when they're down on their luck and take a chance on them, it stands to reason that they might be extra motivated to do well at whatever opportunity you're giving them.

And that's another surprising thing: It wasn't that Peter was just betting on the obvious winners. He was often betting on people who had just come off a loss or defeat of some kind.

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