The Founders

The Founders PDF Author: Jimmy Soni
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501197258
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER National Bestseller * New York Times Editors’ Choice * Financial Times “Books to Read in 2022” A SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS FINALIST “A gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible” (The Wall Street Journal)—including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared. Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. 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. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired. Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, they faced 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. In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal’s turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success. Described as “an intensely magnetic chronicle” (The New York Times) and “engrossing” (Business Insider), The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness—the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life. This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever.

The Founders

The Founders PDF Author: Jimmy Soni
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501197258
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 484

Get Book Here

Book Description
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER National Bestseller * New York Times Editors’ Choice * Financial Times “Books to Read in 2022” A SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS FINALIST “A gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible” (The Wall Street Journal)—including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared. Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. 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. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired. Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, they faced 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. In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal’s turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success. Described as “an intensely magnetic chronicle” (The New York Times) and “engrossing” (Business Insider), The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness—the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life. This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever.

The PayPal Wars

The PayPal Wars PDF Author: Eric M. Jackson
Publisher: WND Books
ISBN: 0977898431
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
When Peter Thiel and Max Levchin launched an online payment website in 1999, they hoped their service could improve the lives of millions around the globe. But when their start-up, PayPal, survived the dot.com crash only to find itself besieged by unimaginable challenges, that dream threatened to become a nightmare. PayPal's history as told by former insider Eric Jackson is an engrossing study of human struggle and perseverance against overwhelming odds. The entrepreneurs that Thiel and Levchin recruited to overhaul world currency markets first had to face some of the greatest trials ever thrown at a Silicon Valley company before they could make internet history. Revised and updated, this narrative is an adventure in capitalism. Reveals how PayPal went from bleeding $10 million per month to becoming a financial powerhouse. Sheds light on eBay's current woes, and PayPal's pending showdown with Google. -- Publisher.

PayPal Mafia

PayPal Mafia PDF Author: Moaml Mohmmed
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781076102461
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description
From the industry and technology hub, the cradle of giants, a gang of young entrepreneurs and, as they call themselves "mafia paypal", are founding giants of the era, electric car giant Tesla, the market leader of SpaceX, "And behind all these companies, members of this mafia, what is the story of these entrepreneurs? How could they establish this empire?

The Contrarian

The Contrarian PDF Author: Max Chafkin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 152661958X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business and politics Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater global impact than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. From the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, Thiel has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of contemporary life. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious. In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, such as funding the lawsuit that bankrupted the blog Gawker to strenuously backing far-right political candidates, including Donald Trump for president. Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy.

The Startup of You (Revised and Updated)

The Startup of You (Revised and Updated) PDF Author: Reid Hoffman
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 0307888924
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The groundbreaking #1 New York Times bestseller that taught a generation how to transform their careers—now in a revised and updated edition “A profound book about self-determination and self-realization.”—Senator Cory Booker “The Startup of You is crammed with insights and strategies to help each of us create the work life we want.”—Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project In this invaluable book, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ben Casnocha show how to accelerate your career in today’s competitive world. The key is to manage your career as if it were a startup business: a living, breathing, growing startup of you. Why? Startups—and the entrepreneurs who run them—are nimble. They invest in themselves. They build their professional networks. They take intelligent risks. They make uncertainty and volatility work to their advantage. These are the very same skills professionals need to get ahead today. This book isn’t about cover letters or résumés. Instead, you will learn the best practices of the most successful startups and how to apply these entrepreneurial strategies to your career. Whether you work for a giant multinational corporation, stitch together multiple gigs in a portfolio career, or are launching your own venture, you need to know how to • adapt your career plans as pandemics rage and technologies upend industries • develop a competitive advantage so that you stand out from others at work • strengthen your professional network by building powerful alliances and maintaining a diverse mix of relationships • engineer serendipity that produces life-changing career opportunities • take proactive risks to become more resilient to industry tsunamis • tap your network for information and intelligence that help you make smarter decisions The career landscape has changed dramatically in the decade since Hoffman and Casnocha first published this guide. In an urgent update to the frameworks that have helped hundreds of thousands of people transform their careers, this new edition of The Startup of You will teach you how to achieve your boldest professional ambitions.

The Know-It-Alls

The Know-It-Alls PDF Author: Noam Cohen
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620972115
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Included in Backchannel’s (WIRED.com) “Top Tech Books of 2017” An “important” book on the “pervasive influence of Silicon Valley on our economy, culture and politics.” —New York Times How the titans of tech's embrace of economic disruption and a rampant libertarian ideology is fracturing America and making it a meaner place In The Know-It-Alls former New York Times technology columnist Noam Cohen chronicles the rise of Silicon Valley as a political and intellectual force in American life. Beginning nearly a century ago and showcasing the role of Stanford University as the incubator of this new class of super geeks, Cohen shows how smart guys like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg fell in love with a radically individualistic ideal and then mainstreamed it. With these very rich men leading the way, unions, libraries, public schools, common courtesy, and even government itself have been pushed aside to make way for supposedly efficient market-based encounters via the Internet. Donald Trump’s election victory was an inadvertent triumph of the "disruption" that Silicon Valley has been pushing: Facebook and Twitter, eager to entertain their users, turned a blind eye to the fake news and the hateful ideas proliferating there. The Rust Belt states that shifted to Trump are the ones being left behind by a "meritocratic" Silicon Valley ideology that promotes an economy where, in the words of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, each of us is our own start-up. A society that belittles civility, empathy, and collaboration can easily be led astray. The Know-It-Alls explains how these self-proclaimed geniuses failed this most important test of democracy.

The Diversity Myth

The Diversity Myth PDF Author: David O. Sacks
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This is a powerful exploration of the debilitating impact that politically-correct "multiculturalism" has had upon higher education and academic freedom in the United States. In the name of diversity, many leading academic and cultural institutions are working to silence dissent and stifle intellectual life. This book exposes the real impact of multiculturalism on the institution most closely identified with the politically correct decline of higher education--Stanford University. Authored by two Stanford graduates, this book is a compelling insider's tour of a world of speech codes, "dumbed-down" admissions standards and curricula, campus witch hunts, and anti-Western zealotry that masquerades as legitimate scholarly inquiry. Sacks and Thiel use numerous primary sources--the Stanford Daily, class readings, official university publications--to reveal a pattern of politicized classes, housing, budget priorities, and more. They trace the connections between such disparate trends as political correctness, the gender wars, Generation X nihilism, and culture wars, showing how these have played a role in shaping multiculturalism at institutions like Stanford. The authors convincingly show that multiculturalism is not about learning more; it is actually about learning less. They end their comprehensive study by detailing the changes necessary to reverse the tragic disintegration of American universities and restore true academic excellence.

Brotopia

Brotopia PDF Author: Emily Chang
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525540172
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Instant National Bestseller A PBS NewsHour-New York Times Book Club Pick "Excellent." —San Francisco Chronicle Silicon Valley is a modern utopia where anyone can change the world. Unless you're a woman. It's time to break up the boys' club. Incisive, powerful, and a fierce rallying cry, Emily Chang shows us how to fix Silicon Valley’s toxic culture--to bring down Brotopia, once and for all. Silicon Valley is not a fantasyland of unicorns, virtual reality rainbows, and 3D-printed lollipops for women in tech. Instead, it’s a "Brotopia," where men hold the cards and make the rules. While millions of dollars may seem to grow on trees in this land of innovation, tech’s aggressive, misogynistic, work-at-all costs culture has shut women out of the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world. Brotopia reveals how Silicon Valley got so sexist despite its utopian ideals, why bro culture endures even as its companies claim the moral high ground, and how women are speaking out and fighting back. Drawing on her deep network of Silicon Valley insiders, Chang opens the boardroom doors of male-dominated venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, the subject of Ellen Pao's high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit, and Sequoia, where a partner once famously said they "won't lower their standards" just to hire women. Exposing the flawed logic in common excuses for why tech has long suffered the “pipeline” problem and invests in the delusion of meritocracy, Brotopia also shows how bias coded into AI, internet troll culture, and the reliance on pattern recognition harms not just women in tech but us all, and at unprecedented scale.

Viral Loop

Viral Loop PDF Author: Adam Penenberg
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1848945248
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
You read a book, you recommend it to a friend. That friend tells another friend. And another... until the book becomes this year's word-of-mouth sensation. This is the first to analyze the power of the 'pass-it-on' phenomenon, introducing us to the architects of the mightily efficient, money-spinning model known as the Viral Loop - the secret behind some of the most successful businesses in recent history. Outfits such as Google, eBay, Flickr and Facebook all employ the model at their core; all have seen their stock valuations skyrocket within years of forming. The genius lies in the model's reliance on replication: what's the point of using Facebook if none of your friends can see your profile, or using Flickr if you can't share your photos? Where's the joy in posting a video on YouTube if no one watches it? In creating a viral product that people want, need and desire, growth can, and will, take care of itself. Find out why the Loop will catch us all up, sooner rather than later...

The Platform Delusion

The Platform Delusion PDF Author: Jonathan A. Knee
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593189442
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
An investment banker and professor explains what really drives success in the tech economy Many think that they understand the secrets to the success of the biggest tech companies: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. It's the platform economy, or network effects, or some other magical power that makes their ultimate world domination inevitable. Investment banker and professor Jonathan Knee argues that the truth is much more complicated--but entrepreneurs and investors can understand what makes the giants work, and learn the keys to lasting success in the digital economy. Knee explains what really makes the biggest tech companies work: a surprisingly disparate portfolio of structural advantages buttressed by shrewd acquisitions, strong management, lax regulation, and often, encouraging the myth that they are invincible to discourage competitors. By offering fresh insights into the true sources of strength and very real vulnerabilities of these companies, The Platform Delusion shows how investors, existing businesses, and startups might value them, compete with them, and imitate them. The Platform Delusion demystifies the success of the biggest digital companies in sectors from retail to media to software to hardware, offering readers what those companies don't want everyone else to know. Knee's insights are invaluable for entrepreneurs and investors in digital businesses seeking to understand what drives resilience and profitability for the long term.