Out of Paypal's ranks have come three billionaires and dozens of multi-millionaires, including household names like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman. Paypal's alumni have built, funded and advised almost all of the billion-dollar-plus companies to emerge from Silicon Valley in the past two decades.

Today, every online video you watch and every internet purchase you make bears PayPal's fingerprints - its inventions made the modern internet possible and are embedded in our social networks, our banks and our intelligence agencies.

This book tells the gripping story of how a scrappy start-up became one of the most successful businesses of all time, worth over $70 billion today. Full of fascinating characters and anecdotes about Silicon Valley's biggest titans, The Founders also shows how the so-called PayPal Mafia continue to shape our future today.

 

Jimmy Soni is an author and editor who has worked for the New York Observer, the Washington Examiner and HuffPost, among others. With Rob Goodman he is the author of Rome's Last Citizen and A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, which was nominated for a National Book Award. He lives in New York.