Antonio García Martínez is an American New York Times Best Selling author and tech entrepreneur. He is a former product manager for Facebook, the CEO-founder of AdGrok and a former quantitative analyst for Goldman Sachs.

Antonio García Martínez

Nir Eyal is an Israeli-born American author, lecturer and investor known for his bestselling book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.

Jake Knapp is the inventor of the Design Sprint and a New York Times bestselling author. He’s written two books, Sprint and Make Time, and has coached teams at places like Slack, LEGO, IDEO, and NASA on design strategy and time management.

Jake

Lena Dunham is an American actress, writer, director, and producer. She is known as the creator, writer, and star of the HBO television series Girls, for which she received several Emmy Award nominations and two Golden Globe Awards.

Lena

Leslie

Vera Mindy Chokalingam, known professionally as Mindy Kaling, is an American actress, comedian, and writer. She initially gained recognition for the NBC sitcom The Office, where she played the character Kelly Kapoor and served as a writer, executive producer, and director.

Mindy

James Clear is a personal development keynote speaker and New York Times bestselling author of Atomic Habits. His entertaining talks teach audiences about small habits, decision-making, and continuous improvement.

James

Adam M. Grant is an American psychologist and author who is currently a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania specializing in organizational psychology. He received academic tenure aged 28, making him the youngest tenured professor at the Wharton School.

Adam

Seth Godin is the author of 18 books. He's also the founder of the online workshops altMBA and The Marketing Seminar. Godin has founded several companies, including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. In 2018, he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame.

Seth

Peter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund. He was ranked No. 328 on the Forbes 400 in 2018, with a net worth of $2.5 billion.

Peter

Tim Ferriss has been listed as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and one of Fortune’s “40 under 40.” He is an early-stage technology investor/advisor and the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers. The Tim Ferriss Show podcast has now exceeded 400 million downloads.

John Carreyrou is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a nonfiction author. His first book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, chronicles Silicon Valley's biggest fraud.John Carreyrou is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a nonfiction author. His first book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, chronicles Silicon Valley's biggest fraud.

John

Joshua Waitzkin is an American chess player, martial arts competitor, and author. As a child, he was recognized as a prodigy, and won the U.S. Junior Chess championship in 1993 and 1994. The film "Searching for Bobby Fischer" is based on his early life.

Josh

Arianna Huffington is a Greek-American author, syndicated columnist, and businesswoman. She is the founder of The Huffington Post, the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, and the author of fifteen books.

Arianna

Dr. David Sinclair, a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, is one of the most well-known researchers in the field of rejuvenation. David is Australian-born and released his bestselling book, 'Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To', in 2019.

David

Taylor Jenkins Reid is the New York Times bestselling author of Carrie Soto Is Back, Malibu Rising, Daisy Jones & The Six, and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, as well as four other novels. She lives in Los Angeles. You can follow her on Instagram @tjenkinsreid.Taylor Jenkins Reid is the New York Times bestselling author of Carrie Soto Is Back, Malibu Rising, Daisy Jones & The Six, and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, as well as four other novels. She lives in Los Angeles. You can follow her on Instagram @tjenkinsreid.

T.R.

Jimmy

A definitive, deeply reported look at the origin of PayPal and its founding team, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, and others whose stories have never before been told.  They have defined the modern world.  This experience defined them. 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, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Airbnb, among many others.  They defined 21st-century innovation and entrepreneurship—and still shape that template today.  Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired. Yet for all their influence, the story of how they first connected and cut their start-up teeth has gone untold.  Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payment company called PayPal.  It would grow to become one of the world’s foremost companies, but that success was anything but certain.  From the outset, the team faced industry skeptics, bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni pulls back the curtain on PayPal’s turbulent early days.  With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, Soni 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 countless individuals whose stories never made the front pages nor earned banner headlines—but whose contributions were vital to PayPal’s success. The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness, one that casts a long and powerful shadow over modern life.  Jimmy Soni’s narrative offers deep insight into how this once-in-a-generation assemblage of talent came to work together and how that collaboration changed our world forever. 

Elon Musk is an engineer and technology entrepreneur. He is the founder, CEO, and chief engineer/designer of SpaceX; CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; co-founder of Neuralink; and co-founder and initial co-chairman of OpenAI.

Elon

Reid Garrett Hoffman CBE is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. Hoffman was the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is currently a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners.

Reid

Keith Rabois is an American technology entrepreneur, executive and investor. He is widely known for his early-stage startup investments and his executive roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide and Square.

Keith

Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchin is a Ukrainian-born American software engineer. In 1998, soon after graduating from college, he co-founded the company that eventually became PayPal.

Walter Isaacson is an American historian, journalist, and writer. He is the University Professor of History at Tulane University.

Walter

David Oliver Sacks is an entrepreneur, and investor in internet technology firms. He is general partner of Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund he co-founded in late 2017. Previously, Sacks was the founding COO and product leader of PayPal and founder/CEO of Yammer.

The Founders

In their second collaboration, biographers Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman present the life story of Claude Shannon—one of the foremost intellects of the twentieth century and the architect of the Information Age, whose insights stand behind every computer built, email sent, video streamed, and webpage loaded.  In this elegantly written and exhaustively researched biography, Soni and Goodman reveal for the first time Shannon’s full story.  With unique access to Shannon’s family and friends, A Mind at Play brings this singular innovator and always playful genius to life. 

Paul Graham is an English-born American computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author, and essayist. He is best known for his work on Lisp, his former startup Viaweb, co-founding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his blog, and Hacker News.

Paul

Bryan Johnson is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the founder and CEO of Kernel, a company developing advanced neural interfaces, and OS Fund, a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage science and technology companies.

Jimmy Soni

Best author’s book

The Founders

Written books

A Mind at Play

The Founders

Similar authors

Antonio García Martínez

Nir Eyal

Jake Knapp

Lena Dunham

Leslie Berlin

Mindy Kaling

James Clear

Adam Grant

Seth Godin

Peter Thiel

Tim Ferriss

John Carreyrou

Josh Waitzkin

Arianna Huffington

David Sinclair

T.R. Reid