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Founders: #233 Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin (PayPal)

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What I learned from reading The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni. ---- Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com ---- [0:50] Your life will be shaped by the things that you create and the people you make them with. [2:45] A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Founders #95) [3:17] Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Founders #1 and #30) [4:48] It is hard to find a lukewarm opinion about PayPal's founders. [5:29] To skip PayPal's creation is to neglect the most interesting stuff about its founders. It is to miss the defining experiences of their early professional lives —one that defined so much of what came later. [6:39] There's just so many times I put down the book and I'm like, “That is really, really smart, what they just did there.” [6:59] It perfectly captures when they [Musk, Thiel, Sacks, Hoffman, Levchin, Rabois] were just hustlers trying to figure it out. [8:31] For the next several years, the company’s survival was an open question. They were sued, defrauded, copied, mocked— from the outset. PayPal was a startup under

[00:00:00] And finally, to Venice, to whom this book is dedicated. The idea for this project started when you were a one-year-old, and it was completed when you were six. The intervening five years have been among the happiest of my life, in large measure because you made them so. You, too, indulged my stories about Max Levchin and Elon Musk, and you offered wisdom of your own kind in my moments of doubt about the project. You are unlikely to remember most of what happened these last five years. I will never forget them. Authors of books like this should usually refrain from burdening…

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