#825 Studying Elon Musk & The Founders Of Paypal w/ Jimmy Soni

Jimmy Soni is the author a brand new book called "The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley" In this conversation we talk about Paypal and the individuals who made that company, and why PayPal is so important to Silicon Valley. Jimmy also shares some stories about Elon Musk that have never been told publicly before. ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Jimmy Soni is the author of a brand new book called The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley. I've read the book and I highly suggest going out and reading it or listening to it on audiobook. In this conversation, we talk about PayPal, about the people who made up that company, what their impact on Silicon Valley has been, and what you at home can learn from these individuals. I really enjoyed this conversation with Jimmy, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is BlockFi. BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Those products include a high-yield

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Start stacking tax efficient satoshis today and visit choice app.io/pomp. All right, let's get into this episode. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Jimmy, how are you, my friend?

• 2:48Speaker 02

  It's great to be here. I'm doing well.

• 2:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's first start before we get into some of the details of the book. PayPal obviously is this great story. Everyone knows that it became this big company. My first takeaway in reading the book, shit show all the way to success, which part of me is like, oh, wow, they really had product market fit and like it didn't almost matter. They could make a bunch of mistakes and it still was successful. Another part of me is like, these people were just so incredible that like even with the mistakes, they could figure it out. And then the other part of me is like, no, dude, just a complete shit show. Like this thing was just a hot ball of mess, like going down a mountain. What's your take in terms of like, how are they still able to be successful, even though they had all the problems?

• 3:29Speaker 02

  I would, I would sort of say like D, all of the above, right? Like, like it was, and I think by the way, you know, the people who lived this story would say the same thing. They said the same thing to me. Like Elon's line about it is it wasn't a hard company to create. It was a hard company to keep alive. Right? And so you do have this quality. The way I describe it, it's basically like a four and a half year journey of near failure to near failure. And so it is, it's a total shit show. It's also a huge success and an early success for some of the people that, you know, come to define technology. An entrepreneurship in the 21st century.

• 4:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk about the process for putting this together because there's obviously people have written stories about PayPal before. There's plenty of books that have been written about some of the people in this story. But you, from what I understand, spent years going and finding this information, going and talking to these people. At one point, there's this anecdote of like, I think Elon like takes you into his attic and is like pulling stuff out and being like, look at this. Like, like you did a lot of work for this. Explain what the process was just to get the information, actually write the book.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, it's sort of, it should come with like a like, don't try this at home type of disclaimer, like no one should live like this. Like, it's a very peculiar kind of living. And I have to be honest, like almost everyone who I interviewed would say something like, like, man, you're really spending a lot of time on something that happened 20 years ago. Right. It was this sort of like, it's an old story. Why are you so interested? But you're right. I spent about a half decade on it and I did 270 odd interviews. And there were kind of, there were a few things that motivated the length of that time and like the intensity of the work. One is, you know, it's really easy to caricature, particularly the most famous people in this story. Like they get, stories get told about them that turn out not to be true.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  And it's because you didn't hear it from them directly. So somebody might say something about David Sacks or they might say something about Max Levchin, but it wasn't Max Levchin or David Sacks saying the thing. The other part of it was I wanted to tell the story, not just of the people you know, but of all of the people in the company that you don't know. Right. So there's hundreds of people that bring this company to life, just as there, just as there are hundreds of people that bring any company of that sort of scale to life. And I felt like I wanted to give like them their day in the sun, right? Like there are important people in this story you have never heard of, and you will only hear about them for the first time in this book. And I had that as like an ambition, you know, it was Elon who told me, don't, he actually said to me, he's like, don't, I get enough press.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Like, go find the other stories, like give these people who are the unsung heroes, some of the limelight. And so that was, that was why it took as long as it did. I think the other, the other part. Part about it is, you know, if you spend time with something, like if you really dive deep, you get to the little nooks and crannies and nuggets, right? So for example, I went through thousands of emails that were shared with me and I found an email in which Elon's mom critiques the product design for X.com and PayPal and like has this like sort of list of like, here are the things you need to do before I can use this product. Love, mom. Right? You don't find that if you're, if you're doing this for three or four months.

• 6:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's absolutely incredible to kind of see the anecdotes, the detail, etc. I want to throw out names of kind of the people that most folks that are watching this will know. And you just tell me either things you learned about them or, or kind of takeaways that maybe they wouldn't have. So let's first start with Peter Thiel, who I think a lot of people may not know kind of his backstory or the hedge fund or some of the other things that he was doing. But what was kind of your understanding going into it? Were there any surprises or things that you took away around Peter?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  You know, I would say that the, I wasn't like a technology writer or expert coming into this. So I was a little bit of a blank slate in some ways, which was a great thing, actually, because I had to like Google what certain terms meant. And it actually improved my understanding because the only way to explain something to somebody who's reading it is to like make sense of it for yourself and then like kind of explain it to yourself. The thing that I, the takeaway on Peter is this, and other people have said this, but I saw it in vivid detail. He spots and encourages talented people, young people, in a way that I think very few of his peers can do. I heard this and saw this time and again, you know, he identifies Max Levchin as a talented young technologist that he wants to invest in and then work with.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  But on down the line, Roloff Botha, he names Roloff Botha as PayPal's CFO when Roloff is 25. And his board tells him like, that's a terrible idea. We're about to take the company public. He'll get eaten alive. But Peter says, no, Roloff's brilliant and he's going to be the one to take this company public. There's a lawyer named Rebecca Eisenberg. He sees the talent in her. On and on and on. This happens over and over again. And there have been, you know, Tyler, the economist Tyler Cowen wrote a little bit about this, but I think that quality of talent spotting is something I didn't know going in that I learned on the way out.

• 8:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, let's talk about Max. Obviously, one of the, from at least the story, one of the most just like insanely intelligent people that everyone who meets them is just like, oh my God, this guy's smart. What was your takeaway there?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  I mean, you captured it. Like, he's, he's got a quasi, probably, in some cases, a photographic memory. And maybe, you know, let's, let's maybe be generous, a quasi-photographic memory, but it's scary. I mean, his mind is one of those sort of once-in-a-generation minds. And if you think about the roster of people, that's saying something, because it's Reid Hoffman, Elon, Peter, David Sacks, and Max Levchin. Max is an engineer's engineer. He's like a, like a puzzle solver. And he will, he persists into adulthood with this, like, childlike love of puzzles, mixed with just IQ points off the charts.

• 9:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's a crazy story that I think didn't make it into the book about Max and puzzles. Tell us that story real quick.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a great story. And, and, you know, I think that Max and his friends in this cohort are the only people to go to Las Vegas for a bachelor party and spend the day solving an elaborate sequence of puzzles. So, along the way of doing the research for this book, Rolloff, both that had shared with me, that he's like, "You should dig into how we celebrated Max's bachelor party." And I said, "All right, look, I'm not, like, writing a tawdry book." And he's like, "No, no, no. There's an organization called Shinteki. And what Shinteki does is it organizes these, like, crazy, like, kind of like, treasure hunts, or like, puzzle hunts, where you'll go from challenge to challenge and solve these puzzles." So, the person who

• 10:03Speaker 02

  runs Shinteki was kind enough to send me the rundown for Max's, like, puzzle-solving adventure. And it was unbelievable. They went to several different sites in Las Vegas. They had to dive to the bottom of a lake to find a tin can. Inside the tin can were quarters. The quarters had to be organized in a certain sequence. At one point, they get to a spot, and there's, like, a big, gigantic chessboard. They have to play chess against an opponent who's dressed up as the Grim Reaper. Like, this is like, a day-long affair, right? But this is, like, the highest and best kind of joy for Max Levchin.

• 10:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, that is an incredible story. That, it's not just, like, solving puzzles mentally, but like, the physical exertion needed to go and get some of those clues is, is all time. What about Elon himself? It sounds like you spent quite a bit of time with, with him. What was your takeaway? As you did work on the book.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, he was, I was talking about a very narrow sliver of his life, right? So it wasn't like a lot of conversations, but it was really detail-rich conversations around X.com, which was the predecessor company that, you know, his half of the predecessor company that became PayPal. And we spent a lot of time just talking about like what it was like in those late 1990s, like go-go internet years. You were talking earlier about adoption curves, right? And this was like, that was the era where this was in the water. I think that the takeaway I have about him, and I'm not, certainly not the first, and I don't think we'll be the last to have this observation, is there's a, there's a depth of conviction about the things that he takes on that I think is unrivaled in American business right now.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Like, he has, he is a true believer in the things he does, and he believes that he has, he believes deeply in the mission of his companies. And that can sound like a really like, like sort of a blasé observation. It's different when you see the force of his personality when he describes something. It's amazing. And, and you know, others have described it, but there is this sort of look in his eye that he is getting to Mars, right? Like, and, and, and there's a depth of belief there that just blows you away.

• 12:05Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's this unknown story that you have about Elon Musk and how he almost died. And obviously, the world would look very, very different. The colonization of Mars, space travel, EV, so many different industries would not be where they are today without Elon Musk. What's the story as to how he almost died?

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's, actually, it's funny, there's two stories of, of near death.

• 12:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, one is in the book, and it's, it's reasonably well-known. Though I was able to get both Peter and Elon to talk about it in a bit more depth. They drive together in a McLaren F1 that Elon has purchased after this successful sale of his first company. And they're in a pretty, a pretty vicious car crash. The car kind of like jumps up in the air, or it spins around, it's totaled. And they, they both survive. And even people who drove by who stopped to help, one of, one of the people, I guess, who drove by to stop to help said something like, "I wasn't sure if I should stop because I wasn't sure I was going to be ready to see what condition your bodies were in," right? So there's that moment of near death, and that's early 2000.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  A year later, this isn't in the book, and it's, it's been lightly covered in other places. Elon contracts meningitis and malaria. And he doesn't just contract malaria. Like, part of what I did was I went deep into like the different kinds of malaria and like what they are. I really, like I said, five years, I nerded out on this. He contracts the most virulent form of malaria. It's the one that will basically kill you within a day if you don't get treatment. And he comes within hours of death. And in fact, the person who treats him at the hospital had treated other malaria patients who had had the same type of parasite. And both of the patients that that doctor treated before Elon had died. And so there's this period in 2001 where for six months, you know, he gets sick.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  They are figuring out what it is. At first, they diagnosed it as meningitis, then it turns out to be malaria, but he comes within hours of death. And what I had was this kind of, like, the executives in the company sharing their observations about this, the back and forth, who's delivering him flowers? Have we checked in? How's he doing? All of that. It is a very, very close shave. And he, you know, he obviously survives, but history could have been very different if it had gone the other way.

• 14:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, that is an absolutely crazy story. And I don't think one that many people understand just how close it sounds like he actually was to dying.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. To be fair, when he tells it, he'll always, he always ends with a line like, "That's my lesson for taking a vacation. Vacations can kill you."

• 14:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely incredible. What about somebody like a Reid Hoffman, in terms of what you really took away from him?

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, he is, I learned, I learned a lot about how he got to the company and the role that he played there. And it's so interesting because he's sort of this like, like, he's like a, you know, in basketball, they have like the sixth man, like you can toss him and they play different roles. They're not like a specific kind of player. He's sort of a diplomatic sixth man in a way, right? Like, Peter would often just say, like, "There's some mess of a problem with the government," or "There's a mess of a problem with eBay," or "Some kind of crazy thing happening with some other rival company or somebody." And they would sort of dispatch Reid to fix it. And to, on the more serious front, the reason is, many employees describe- The profound degree of empathy that he has for for just people, for humanity.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Right. And it was important that someone in that role have the ability to like, talk to a government regulator and not just like absolutely eviscerate them and you know, walk out of the room like you had to actually have a give and take if you're PayPal and you're growing and you've got millions of users, you know, the Secret Service is going to be interested. The Federal Trade Commission is going to be interested and you need someone like Reed to do some of that interfacing. He's not the only one. There are others. They have a really, really capable attorney, series of attorneys at PayPal. But early on, especially when they're a small team, it's Reed who's basically like sent to deal with fires. I think at one point, somebody had referred to him as like the firefighter in chief.

• 16:09Anthony Pompliano?

  I love that. What about Amy Clement, who I think is a name that most people probably don't actually know, but was an integral part of this story. What was your takeaway from Amy?

• 16:18Speaker 02

  She is one of the most amazing people I met during this whole process. She joins Elon's half of the company X.com somewhat on a lark. She was actually mid-application to graduate school and she flies down and she meets this guy Elon. And one of the things that Elon does very well then and now is sell the vision for what X.com is going to be. Right? We are going to revolutionize finance. She's sold. She comes aboard and what she quickly realizes is you can't just have engineers writing code. You have to have someone thinking about how the company actually builds products and how that process works on the QA side, design, engineering, business development, everything. And I, you know, in my mind, I sort of think like, you

• 16:59Speaker 02

  know, internal combustion engines have oil and without oil, the engine sort of seizes up. Amy is the oil in that engine. There were so many people I interviewed who talked about the role that she played and often the role was just being someone who could like make sure that they were doing the best work possible. That is, you know, it's actually, I'm proud to tell her story. It's unfortunate that her story hasn't been told until now because she's a total rock star. After PayPal was acquired by eBay, she became one of eBay's like youngest ever executives or something, right? And today she runs a big fund like she's a person of real, like she's a formidable presence. And when you meet her, you can tell. This person knows how to cut to the quick.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  When she got, when she joined X.com, you know, this was a decision between sort of should I continue my application to grad school or join this Elon Musk guy and try to revolutionize finance?

• 17:49Anthony Pompliano?

  So I got two more people and then I've got a kind of bigger question about PayPal. Next one is David Sacks. What's, what was your takeaway from Sacks?

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, he's obviously a very public figure, probably in your, in your circles and in a pretty robust way because he's very active on Twitter and he obviously has podcasts and things. I was talking to David about the time in his life when he had left McKinsey and joined his friend Peter at this company that was then called Infinity. And David, similar to Amy, is the person that says, look, like, it's not enough to write code that's going to allow two Palm Pilots to be money. Like, we got to figure out how we're going to use this thing. And his focus is very rigorously on the users. And I had more than one person sort of testified to this, like they said, you know, the thing that David did really well was always keep us focused on how are users actually going to use this thing?

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Like, we can't just design whiz-bang technologies and then expect that we built, because we built it, it's going to be used. He's very resolutely focused on what are, how do, like, what are our customers going to use? What are the pain points? How do we improve this thing? I should also say, he's the person in the story who, like, I think comes closest to that kind of like Steve Jobs, like insane intense focus on the product. Meaning like every single detail, every single character, every part of the web form, every additional page, every point of friction. David is like a heat-seeking missile, like he'll go in and just, you know, he was really, really, that was his focus. And it was, it was impressive to hear about it, not just from him, but from colleagues who said, that shaped every product job I had after.

• 19:25Anthony Pompliano?

  What about Keith Raboy?

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, he's a, he's a really interesting character. Again, you know, we, he joins the PayPal story a little later. And the, the place that he and I spent a lot of time focused on was this interesting kind of series of legal battles and like antitrust battles that PayPal has to fight. But it's not even that PayPal is being accused of antitrust, they're Using antitrust as a weapon. So I'll give context for listeners. In the 1990s, one of the kind of shadows on the technology industry is that Microsoft is being sued for antitrust by the DOJ. And it's this, it casts a pall over a lot of companies. People are thinking about like, well, what hygiene do we need for our documents? We have to be really careful not to use the word dominant, you know, all of these things.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  And it was because of browser bundling. That's what Microsoft kind of, that was one of the criticisms. So PayPal is fighting, you know, they're a tiny little guerrilla force fighting this big behemoth eBay and other behemoths as well. And so what they do is they use like these legal stratagems to essentially get eBay to not shut them down. And one of the things that they do is they like not so thinly veiled threat on like, well eBay, if you decide to do X, that could really be an antitrust violation. You don't want any part of that, right? Keith was one of the people who helped to do that. I would sort of describe it, there were people at PayPal who were carrots, like in dealing with some of the people they were dealing with, and then there were sticks.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  And one of the sticks was a legal strategy devised by this team with Keith as one of the key players, to make sure that eBay didn't go too far. Now, I'll just like cop to the, I interviewed the eBay attorney on the other side of this too. And he was funny. He was a great guy. He said, you know, look, yeah, they made the threats, but he was like, I was a federal prosecutor. People have threatened to shoot me. You're not going to scare me with antitrust, right? But to the PayPal team's credit, it definitely influenced, but I think they thought that it was like a big part of eBay's concern about PayPal and it wasn't as much. What this attorney explained to me is like, the real concern was that PayPal was just very aggressive at building trust with our users. And they just liked the PayPal product more than some of the other products and services that we had.

• 21:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's pretty incredible. What's your take? Let's say that the PayPal story never happens, or at some point it fails. Do these individuals become as kind of dominant, if you will, in Silicon Valley? How important was PayPal to their, you know, kind of foundation of success that they went on in their careers? Or like, what does the technology industry look like without these folks?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  You know, it's a great question, and I haven't heard it phrased quite that way. So you're asking sort of like a nature nurture question, right? Like, did this place pre-select for people who are going to be successful? Yes, I think it did. Like, you had to be able to hang at this place, play at this level, commit at the level that they did to the success of the company? Like, there was no doubt about that, right? Like, you couldn't really be a straggler or like kind of have a half-hearted commitment to the success of the company. Remember, the story I described happens all over, over a period of just four years. Most of the real, like, kind of intense action is a two, two and a half year process. So that is true, like it pre-selected for very intelligent people. What I will say is, you know, Peter explained to me, he said, you know, we had this virtue at PayPal.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  Like, when we emerged, we thought doing technology companies was hard but doable, right? It wasn't like it was easy and we were successful. And it wasn't like it was hard and we failed miserably, so everybody lost hope. It was very, very hard, but we were moderately successful. That's one piece of it. So I think that did influence this generation of technologists from this company. The second thing was actually a funny comment someone made to me. He said, you know, we all made down payment money, but we didn't make retirement money. So we had to keep doing things, right? And the most natural thing to do was do other things. Build YouTube, build LinkedIn, build Tesla, build Palantir, build SpaceX, right? Build all of the companies that have come out of this cohort. It was because they had success, but not like, just like be able to coast for the rest of your life success.

• 23:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's incredible to think of how big PayPal obviously has come now. And down payment money versus retirement money being a huge driver. And just so many smart people around the table. It's a pretty incredible story and you did a great job telling it. Joe, John, what questions you guys got?

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Jimmy, thanks for joining us. My question would just be around some of the turbulent times, right? Like, I think everyone has a general understanding of how successful not only PayPal was, but some of the companies that have spun out of it have been. But like, are there any good stories from the difficult times, right? Building PayPal that you can think of or you look back on?

• 23:56Speaker 02

  You know, the company almost goes under a whole bunch of times. I would say the most, one of the more compelling stories, and it's Useful lesson, you know, I think for modern technologists too, is there was a time when fraud was going to be PayPal's undoing. Fraudsters had, you know, glommed on to this payment system, right, that was very lightweight, easy to sign up for. And you have fraudsters, like small scale fraudsters, like college students making beer money. But then also large scale fraudsters actually using like the tools of of the underlying commerce on PayPal to do really bad things. There was a time when so much money was being lost to fraud and credit card chargebacks and everything else. That the company really like faced existential risk.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  If we look at it today, fighting fraud is actually one of the company's signature achievements. Because it led them to actually develop a series of these unbelievable tools that, you know, rely on terms that came into use later, machine learning, AI, etc. It it it is the closest they come to failure is not being able to defeat fraudsters. Defeating fraudsters is also like the thing that makes the company successful. And I would actually argue. You know, emailing money as a technology was not that difficult to create. And Elon says this to me, others have said, you know, testified as much. The really difficult thing was fighting fraud, was making sure that you built a system, but then it wasn't just totally overtaken by bad actors.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  And that, to me, is like one of the more interesting unknown stories where it came so close, they had to fight so hard. And it was a mix of really inventive technologies and human fraud fighters. So it was really, for me, what was really cool is I got to talk to the fraud fighters and I would speak to them about like the different kinds of cases they had to face. What was it like to testify in court about issues like drug trafficking? When that's like the first time this is happening on the internet and there's no real body of case law for it. So I would say that, to me, stands out as like it just how how close you can come to failure. But then turning that near failure into the signature achievement of the company.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Gotcha.

• 25:59Anthony Pompliano?

  John.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  Jimmy, how did this all work? How did the communication between Peter, Elon, David, all these, all these very smart individuals kind of come together? And how did they make this vision work for PayPal?

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I, you know, Reid Hoffman lovingly described it as a hot mess for a while. So it wasn't, it wasn't like it was like one big happy family there, right? In fact, that's a, that's a direct phrase is he's like, it's a hot mess. You know, I think I would offer a couple of observations. It's a, it's a great question. You know, how did it work when you have this much wattage in the room? Right? I think a few things. The first is there was a fundamental respect for intelligence. Right? So I, I talked to two people, Max and Elon, who are on opposite sides of a very key issue in the company's history. Before they launched into their descriptions of that key issue, both of them said, look, I respect, I respect the other person so much. Right?

• 26:53Speaker 02

  So Elon was like, I respect Max a lot, like he moves as fast as I do. And Max had an equivalent level of respect for Elon and his intelligence and his ability to build technology. So I would say like one hallmark of the reason that it worked and didn't just spiral into dysfunction is a fundamental respect for intelligence. The second thing, a bunch of people identified, they're like, you know, the reason we didn't, like we kept, we were able to keep the internal fights to somewhat of a minimum is we just had so many external battles we were fighting. Right? So they were fighting Visa and Mastercard, the banks, they were fighting fraudsters, they were fighting eBay. And someone had said, they were like, you know, when you spend all that time like fighting outward battles, you don't get like as plugged into the internal battles. Not to say there weren't internal battles, but it was just maybe the volume knob was

• 27:37Speaker 02

  a little lower because the volume knob was so high on their external fights. The last thing I would say is that they, you know, it wasn't one team in some sense. It was like a bunch of different little teams. And so, you know, it's easy to tell the story as like the PayPal team. Part of what I hope I did in the book is show that like, well, there was an engineering team and there was a product team and a QA team and a fraud fighting team. And these teams all had different rhythms and ways of behaving. And so in a way, part of what worked is, you know, you want someone like David Sacks leading the product group. Given his particular disposition, the way he operates, the people he hired. And in a way, you really want someone like Max Levchin, not just because of what he knows, but of how he operates, like leading teams of engineers, right?

• 28:21Speaker 02

  And so there's this sort of, like, it's like a team of teams thing, but it's at a different level because you have really like superstar players in each of those positions. I think that's part of why they were able to emerge from all of this, like somewhat successful. And then the last piece, I kind of write about this a lot. It's like they got really lucky. Everybody described this to a person. They were like, look, we also just were lucky in our timing. We were aggressive and smart and all the rest. But we were also just very fortunate that eBay hadn't fixed payments. We managed to make our product work on eBay. We grew it from there and the network effects took hold.

• 28:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Jimmy, as you spend all this time writing this book, my last question for you is just, it really seems like you got a lot of fun, right? And I don't know why, just like I was reading it, I took that away of just like, wow, this is like an incredible kind of product of obvious work that went into it. When you think back, what was like the most fun moment? Or what was like the thing that you're like, literally all the hard work, the hours of conversations, all the digging through emails, like it was all worth it. There's this like one thing that sticks out to you. What would that one thing be?

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Like in my line of work, like the closest you can get to feeling like Indiana Jones is when you find some like old document, right? Like, because that's really like secretly what people who write history want to be is like, we're not cool enough to like have a whip and go, you know, like find the Holy Grail. So we like write books about tech companies instead, right? But I would say that the, right, like the coolest moment, and it's threaded throughout the book. When the company starts to mature, they do what many maturing companies do when you want to share information. They launch a newsletter and it's called, at the time, the Weekly Expert, because the company is called X.com. Later it becomes called The Weekly Pal. And I found four years worth buried in this archive, like four years worth of issues

• 30:14Speaker 02

  of The Weekly Pal. And it had everything from like birthdays and like little slices of life, little jokes about Napster and stuff, to like people's reflections about how they felt after September 11th. Because people forget like this team lived through 9/11 together as well. And I would say like, I remember just like actually like jumping up and down and like running around the room with total ridiculous joy and finding this like 20 year old series of documents that gave me like a real window into not what are people telling me like 20 years later, but no, like what happened on the day, like what actually line by line actually happened. So I'll give you one story from it. At one point, the PayPal team managed to successfully

• 30:57Speaker 02

  beat Steve Jobs at reserving a theater for a screening of the X-Men movie, right? And it's this like epic moment, like PayPal toppled Apple, right? Like, but I could never have had those little moments if I hadn't found this like gigantic set of newsletters and just went through page by page and really like got an appreciation for the place that I don't think you can get by someone sharing like just highlights and memories.

• 31:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that that is, uh, that's incredible. Like when you actually get to almost see the documentation of ThoughtPrix, it's like a journal, right? I mean, it's basically what it ends up being. Yeah. So cool. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, I, and most people know this, Jimmy, I don't know if you know this, I almost never have authors come on and actually push books, but this one's fantastic. The founders, the story of PayPal and the entrepreneurs who shaped Silicon Valley, highly, highly, highly suggest. Not only is it an important story, not only a lot of important people, but also very well written, great work. It comes out, what, February 22nd, 2018?

• 31:54Speaker 02

  22nd, yeah, two weeks from today. Actually, it's funny, you're having me, so a week from today is the 20th anniversary of the PayPal IPO and a week later, the, the book drops.

• 32:04Anthony Pompliano?

  An indispensable guide to modern entrepreneurship and innovation. Highly suggested. I'll drop the, uh, Amazon link where you can go preorder. I'm assuming, uh, we will also soon get, uh, the audiobook, which I think you can preorder, right? Yeah, it looks like you can preorder already.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'll all, I mean, I think it all comes out on the, on the same day. Um, and I appreciate you, you know, I appreciate you taking the time to read it. It's a long one. Like it's definitely longer than I thought I was going to write it. Um, and so I appreciate you taking some time to actually go through it.

• 32:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I, I don't want to admit this. I'm actually reading it a second time already. Right, because here's why, here's why, here's my whole thing with a book like this is there's entertainment, obviously, right? It's like an interesting story, whatever. You can learn so much more, in my opinion, than like a regular management book by just reading through, like, hey, here's how this story happened. And it's because the clarity of thought and like the decisiveness of so many people in the story. I just got done reading Frank Slutman's Amp It Up, which is a fantastic book and is more of like management, you know, type book, but it's written from his perspective as to how he did certain things, right? So this is a similar book, it's just not them saying it. They basically told you and then you went and you wrote the book. So I definitely think I'll end up reading it numerous times. So thank you so much for putting

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Well, I appreciate that. You should call my mom and tell her so that it's okay that I didn't go to med school, because

• 33:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, listen, after, after hearing that Elon's mom was sending product feedback, I'm staying away from moms. That is so incredible. All right, my friend, listen, thank you so much for doing this.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Thank you, guys.

• 33:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And we'll definitely have to bring you back later.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  I really appreciate it, guys.

• 33:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, later.