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

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 siege. Its founders took on multi-billion dollar financial firms, a critical press and skeptical public, hostile regulators, and even foreign fraudsters. [10:14] From Henry Ford’s autobiography: That is why I never employ an expert in full bloom. If ever I wanted to kill opposition by unfair means I would endow the opposition with experts. They would have so much good advice that I could be sure they would do little work. [11:11] Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy (Founders #89) Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson (Founders #115) Overnight Success: Federal Express and Frederick Smith, Its Renegade Creator by Vance Trimble (Founders #151)  [12:03] A wall in the engineering office had two banners. One was titled The World Domination Index. The World Domina