#95: Jimmy Soni - The Founders - The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs who Shaped Silicon Valley

In this episode, I unlock the untold stories behind PayPal's meteoric rise and the entrepreneurs who made it possible.

The author Jimmy Soni explores the captivating story of PayPal and the entrepreneurs who helped shape Silicon Valley.

From Elon Musk to Peter Thiel and many others whose stories have never been told, hear about the scrappy online payments start-up that faced fierce competition and internal strife on its journey to becoming one of the world's foremost companies.

⭐ EPISODE Links:
Jimmy Soni
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📚 Book Mentions:
Jimmy Soni, The Founders
Sebastian Mallaby, The Power Law

🗣️ We are talking about: 
• The Inspiration for writing this book
• Dissecting Jimmy’s Writing Process
• The Origin Story of the Paypal-Mafia
• The Role of Chess and The Secret Code Hidden in the Book
• Storytelling Lesson for Entrepreneurs
• And much, much more

📖 Memorable quotes:
(20:55) “I do my books while working full-time. All my books are morning and weekend exercises.”
(24:46) “I interviewed almost 300 people for this book.”
(35:45) One executive said: "Calling Paypal a Mafia is an insult to the Mafia. They are far more organized than we were back then."
(51:04) “David Sacks said: … as easy as email”
(56:50) “The most important question for business owners: Who in the team is obsessed with how the end-user thinks and uses the product?”
(01:34:30) People forget that startups are stories.

⏰  Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro from the Recording the Day after Thanksgiving 2022
(05:55) What inspired Jimmy Soni to write the Founders?
(10:00) The Entrepreneurs who Shaped Silicon Valley
(16:15) Peter Thiel: How to Learn the Right Lessons in Entrepreneurship
(19:24) How long does it take to write a book like the Founders?
(22:15) Writing Books as a Side Hustle to writing as a profession 
(23:00) Exploring the Challenges of Writing Biographies of Historical and Modern Figures
(25:23) Uncovering the Truth: Strategies for Sorting Through Conflicting Narratives in Interviews
(27:30) The Writing Scorecard: Number of Words per Day
(28:40) Uncovering the Journey from Idea to Publication: A Look at Jimmy Soni's Writing Process
(30:30) Max Levchin and Tetris
(32:17) The Origin Story of the Term “Paypal-Mafia”
(39:00) From Beaming Money to Venmo: 20 Years of Product Development
(43:00) David Sacks Halts the Progress of Groundbreaking Beaming Technology and the Birth of Digital Payment Solutions
(49:40) How Paypal Found Product Market Fit
(53:42) The Switch challenges from finding a solution to focusing on scaling up the solution.
(58:00) The Role Chess Plays in Jimmy Soni’s Book and Paypal’s History
(01:02:27) The Secret Code Hidden in the Book: Crack the Code and Get a Signed Copy
(01:03:00) The Bad Bishop Situation
(01:06:00) Bitcoin, the Paypal Mafia, and the New World Currency Tagline
(01:15:00) Elon Musk's challenges in finding the right decisions during his early twenties.
(01:20:27) Discover Jimmy's book's three most inspiring moments as he personally selects them.
(01:29:30) How important are social skills in building tech companies?
(01:32:00) Some Words on the Importance of Storytelling for Entrepreneurs
(01:35:00) Sketching a Future of Jimmy So

Transcript

00:00:00:03 - 00:00:14:08

Christian Soschner

Do you remember the piece of paper? It is the company that was the training ground of the world's best entrepreneurs who defined our reality as we know it today.

00:00:14:10 - 00:00:33:06

Jimmy Soni

I'm going to paraphrase it, but he basically said PayPal was if you if you are at a company that's very successful and easy, then you learn the wrong side, which is that making Internet companies is easy. If you're at a company and it's hard and it fails, then you learn the wrong lesson, which is you can't be successful.

00:00:33:08 - 00:00:51:06

Jimmy Soni

He said that what we learned in PayPal is that it was hard and we were successful, so we sort of learned the right lessons, which is it's not easy to do this, but you can actually have a success. There were generations of people who lost everything and sort of believe the Internet was never going to come back. Right.

00:00:51:08 - 00:00:56:11

Jimmy Soni

And many of them, by the way, are equally as smart, equally as talented. It was just a matter of timing and circumstance.

00:00:56:13 - 00:01:35:00

Christian Soschner

In this episode, I unlock the untold stories behind PayPal's meteoric rise and the entrepreneurs who made it possible. The writer Tumi Soni, explores the captivating story of PayPal and the entrepreneurs who helped shape Silicon Valley. We are talking about the inspiration for writing this book, dissecting Jimmy's writing process, the origin story of the PayPal Mafia, the role of chess and the secret code hidden in the book, Storytelling Lessons for Entrepreneurs and much, much more.

00:01:35:01 - 00:02:11:03

Christian Soschner

From Elon Musk to Peter Thiel and many others whose stories have never been told here about the scrappy online payments startup that faced fierce competition and internal strife on its journey to becoming one of the world's foremost companies of large meaning. Author Jimmy Soni prints this intensely magnetic chronicle to life with unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material and hundreds of interviews.

00:02:11:05 - 00:02:54:14

Christian Soschner

Discover how PayPal's founders, who are now considered the technology industry's most powerful network, drove 21st century innovation and entrepreneurship as they formed, funded and advised some of the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, Space X, Yelp, Palantir and LinkedIn. From the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, this national bestseller has received critical acclaim for its captivating exploration of people's origins and the influential individuals behind its success.

00:02:54:16 - 00:03:06:10

Christian Soschner

I hope you enjoyed this episode the same way as I did. Jimmy, it's very, very good to see you after Thanksgiving. How was the celebration yesterday?

00:03:06:12 - 00:03:30:21

Jimmy Soni

It was good. A lot of food. Too much food, which is good. So for one day you're allowed to do that and then, you know, just time with family and friends. It was nice. Yeah, it was really nice. It's sort of it's funny that it's like I think it's a uniquely American holiday. Right. And so you have this situation where, like, you might not always be in sync with other people who are around the world, but it's it's nice.

00:03:30:23 - 00:03:47:17

Christian Soschner

I think the modern social media tools make sure that everybody gets aware of celebrations all over the world. I read on LinkedIn yesterday a lot of Thanksgiving messages. And just like because I remember Canada is not on the same day, isn't it? I think Canada is a month early or something like that.

00:03:47:20 - 00:03:52:08

Jimmy Soni

Yeah, Canada has a different, different day, remember?

00:03:52:10 - 00:04:13:06

Christian Soschner

Yeah, that may need a minute, but let's let's let's jump right to the topic before we get into a lengthy conversation about holidays and Thanksgiving, which obviously is special for. Let me first thank you for this book. It's really awesome. It's absolutely fantastic. I had only one problem, one severe problem with this book. So let's touch it that first.

00:04:13:08 - 00:04:37:19

Christian Soschner

Yeah. You described the story of the founders of paper back in the nineties and also in the nineties and now 48 years old. In the nineties I did research in exactly this area, Internet, how the internet will transform business and back then it was really difficult to get information to get access to people. We didn't have the internet in a way.

00:04:37:19 - 00:05:09:15

Christian Soschner

We have it now. So what I read about people, about Amazon, about eBay was basically more or less background stories from secondary literature. And I didn't have a chance to talk to people like Elon Musk, Levchin, Thiel and all the others. And the only problem I had referring to book it was walking down memory lane for me. So it really slowed down the process because as I read about it, I got to my notes from back then and checked it back and then I read your notes.

00:05:09:15 - 00:05:17:19

Christian Soschner

Actually, it's really awesome. So unfortunately I couldn't finish the book. I met page 155 because it was ready for me. A slow reading process.

00:05:17:23 - 00:05:35:16

Jimmy Soni

Right, Right. That's funny. Well, I appreciate the slow read, too. You know, spoiler alert, the company is successful at the end. It survived. It didn't it didn't die like a lot of dcoms from that era. So, you know, I hate to ruin the ending, but.

00:05:35:22 - 00:05:56:09

Christian Soschner

This is this is the ad for that unfortunately unfortunate thing with real life that we know the ending 20 years later and people evolved after that. The the the the the first question I have to you is how did you get the idea how competitive gets the inspiration from to write this book.

00:05:56:11 - 00:06:18:03

Jimmy Soni

Yeah it's a great it's a great place to start because you know, I'm not a tech journalist. I don't it's not like I don't cover these people every day, right? And I write histories. And so I had written this book called A Mind at Play, which was a biography of Claude Shannon, who is an information theorist. He created the field of information there.

00:06:18:03 - 00:06:41:21

Jimmy Soni

He was an electrical engineer and a mathematician, and he worked at a place called Bell Laboratories. Bell Labs and Bell Labs in the 20th century. You know, it's this extra ordinary collection of people, and we live with the sort of fruits of the output, right? So touch tone. They invented touchtone dialing, invented a laser. You know, they invented satellite communications.

00:06:41:21 - 00:07:04:16

Jimmy Soni

They invented most of what is considered a community of modern communication networks. And Shannon was working there with a bunch of other really talented people. And I started to think about what is what are other Bell Labs like clusters of talent, you know, the sort of this the interesting thing about books are generally written about these like individuals, like lone people who are very accomplished.

00:07:04:16 - 00:07:29:03

Jimmy Soni

Right? So you do a biography of Steve Jobs, you do a biography of Michael Jordan, right. But to me, the kind of interesting question with with these clusters is why is it that one place can attract all of this talent like that just doesn't seem likely, like the odds are against it. Right. And then you sort of start to ask yourself, like nature nurture questions, like were they there because they were talented or did the place make them talented right.

00:07:29:03 - 00:07:54:16

Jimmy Soni

And so I thought about other concentrations of talent. There's a few. One is Xerox PARC, another is Fairchild Semiconductor. And then you fast forward in the history in the most recent example, I think, or one of them is PayPal. And I just didn't find a book that explained the story of how all of these people came to one place at one time.

00:07:54:18 - 00:08:16:03

Jimmy Soni

And that seemed very peculiar to me because we're talking about, you know, Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel and Max Legend. And I just like nobody seemed like it was like this thing or is like, why didn't anybody do this like this? This doesn't make any sense. You know, like, all these are big companies. Their origin stories have been written Amazon, Apple, Facebook, etc..

00:08:16:05 - 00:08:34:24

Jimmy Soni

And I just, you know, I sort of said to myself, you know, there's an interesting not the whole story, not like the 22 year history of PayPal, but this early period was very for the reasons you describe it, like the Internet was coming into its own. People were you know, we were just taking our first steps into e-commerce.

00:08:35:00 - 00:09:01:05

Jimmy Soni

You know, there were over Internet millionaires from 1985 to 1999. And then you go through the dot com bubble bursting. And I just my thesis was basically like, I think this is an interesting group of people at an interesting moment in history. Let's like, why isn't anybody honest? And then I just started that's that's where it began was kind of just asking the question you know, there's a book I would want to read, like I would want to try to understand how this happened.

00:09:01:07 - 00:09:22:11

Christian Soschner

I absolutely I couldn't agree more in the nineties. I think what what caught my eye in the book was that principle. Back then, people had similar ideas in Europe and also in San Francisco. The interesting thing for me was that back in the nineties always felt as a European Europe is waning. We are right on the tech track.

00:09:22:17 - 00:10:00:17

Christian Soschner

1989 changed a lot in Europe. We were coming close. A lot of countries joined the European Union and in the mobile industry I think Europe was at the first or at least at the second place. Then after the dot com bubble burst, nothing happened anymore and it was over and Silicon Valley just took off. And I sort ahead when I read from your book is do you think that it was this people that basically laid the foundation of the success stories in Silicon Valley 20 years ago?

00:10:00:19 - 00:10:31:00

Jimmy Soni

You know, we should it's a good it's a good question. And I think I'm going to give like a kind of two part answer. The first part, and this is really important, is, you know, there was Silicon Valley before there was the Internet, right? And so there was like there was a new meaning, meaning like apple, you know, when it in the era it was made that was still considered a Silicon Valley company, but it was not an Internet company.

00:10:31:06 - 00:10:52:02

Jimmy Soni

And I think those two things can often get confused, like there's a Silicon Valley of pre Facebook, the Silicon Valley, pre Twitter. Right. In fact, one of the things about Elon Musk that people don't know is that he was actually involved in even the pre pre Internet like the 1995 1996 Internet. His first company was called Zap two.

00:10:52:05 - 00:11:19:09

Jimmy Soni

Even before PayPal, he had had a success. And so there was this there's a whole history of Silicon Valley that predates the period I'm writing about. The thing that happened right after the dot com bubble bursting is that this group of people were part of the generation that had two things going for them. One is that they had actually seen the Internet be successful because PayPal didn't fail.

00:11:19:11 - 00:11:45:00

Jimmy Soni

Right? So like, what happened is, like you had all these Internet companies that fail in 1999 and 2000. I mean, famous failures, buying Super Bowl ads and like finished eight months later. Right. These people had the experience of building Internet companies and really hard. But we can actually do it. We can actually make it something amazing and and it can be financially successful and we can return money to our investors.

00:11:45:02 - 00:12:02:21

Jimmy Soni

So that was sort of thing one. The second thing they had is that they had a group of people they knew who they could. They were going to build the next generation of Internet companies. And we're already starting. I found this email when I was like digging around actually is a great story. I didn't include this in the book, but it is a great story.

00:12:02:21 - 00:12:08:02

Jimmy Soni

So I somebody had shared with me like five gigabytes of email from that era and I was like.

00:12:08:02 - 00:12:10:12

Christian Soschner

I got five gigabytes. Really?

00:12:10:14 - 00:12:12:20

Jimmy Soni

Yeah. This is you look, look. Yeah.

00:12:12:22 - 00:12:26:03

Christian Soschner

So good to talk to you about. But when we go back to emails in the nineties, it was no video, it was no attachments basically. Nope, attachments, only text. So you, you went through five gigabyte of cash. Yeah.

00:12:26:05 - 00:12:46:21

Jimmy Soni

Yeah. And there were, you know, there were word attachments, a number of PDFs and there were Excel spreadsheets. So it's not that there weren't attachments, there were some images because but basically what happened is this person had this this big file and it was like the old outlook files. I tried to like find a computer program from the 1980s to even, like, interpret this thing.

00:12:46:23 - 00:13:02:13

Jimmy Soni

But I went through all these emails. I mean, a lot of and this is basically my life for several years was just waking up every day going through hundreds of emails. It was really both fun from the perspective of being somebody who writes history and also very tedious for anybody who doesn't do this kind of work. Right? You're sort of in the most boring process.

00:13:02:15 - 00:13:22:10

Jimmy Soni

But one of the things I found is I found this old email from Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman was writing to somebody and explaining like, why you should invest in LinkedIn. Like, this is when LinkedIn is still just like an idea. And he offers these like few bullets about what LinkedIn could be right? Like, here's what LinkedIn might be.

00:13:22:12 - 00:13:44:19

Jimmy Soni

And it was the most extraordinary thing because you think to yourself, okay, today is regarded you know like he's Reid Hoffman is masters of scale. He is, you know, all of the things. And at the time he was somebody that had seen a successful Internet company, had a little bit of of money and breathing room, but not like the kind of money that these people do today.

00:13:44:21 - 00:14:06:11

Jimmy Soni

But was soliciting investments from the only other people he knew who had those two things. A little bit of capital and the belief that the Internet can be successful. And so that's like a big part of this is that they had their immediate network, their immediate coworkers, who they had just worked with, that people believed in the possibilities of the Internet and had the money to provide a little bit of seed capital.

00:14:06:13 - 00:14:35:09

Jimmy Soni

And so the seed capital for a lot of big companies comes out of the PayPal alumni, but it comes like right away, like 20,000, 3000, 40,005. So the most famous example of this is Peter Thiel with the first half a million dollars of outside money into Facebook. That is that is a sort of famous story. You know, he talks about how it was an easy investment because the only thing that they needed to buy was more server capacity because the demand for the product was so high.

00:14:35:11 - 00:14:56:07

Jimmy Soni

And there's all these stories around it now. It's sort of become Silicon Valley legend. The important thing for me is kind of of that moment is a kind of boring thing, which is Peter Thiel is not a part of the generation of investors who saw all their money go up in flames in 1999 and 22 one because they made that, you know, whatever.

00:14:56:13 - 00:15:16:20

Jimmy Soni

And so that is they have this hope, they have this sort of belief and they have a little bit of capital to invest. I think it's a stretch to say that they are the reason that we have the technologies we do today. But it's not it's fair to say that they are a big part of what becomes known as Web 2.0.

00:15:17:01 - 00:15:39:21

Jimmy Soni

So out of the ashes of sort of the early Internet comes like this series of technologies and other things that emerge in Web 2.0. And this group really were at the ground floor of that effort. Right. And some of the household brand companies that still exist today, Yelp, LinkedIn, you know, all of the Tesla, they all emerged from this particular group.

00:15:39:23 - 00:15:51:07

Jimmy Soni

And so I think that's probably the most accurate answer I can give, which is to say there was a Silicon Valley before the Internet, but this group did a lot to supercharge the creation of companies after 2002.

00:15:51:09 - 00:16:18:16

Christian Soschner

I absolutely believe that. I mean, I was surprised that Europe lost it in the crash in 2000 and Silicon Valley. Didn't They moved forward. And they believe the driving force is, of course, about the people like Elon Musk, who I would say, Ed, tremendous value to entrepreneurship in the United States. And for some reason Europe need it. And I think one or two tickets long took up to two years to recover from from the crashes.

00:16:18:18 - 00:16:44:09

Jimmy Soni

I think that's right. I think, you know, there's look, I'm not any kind of expert on the reasons for that. But I would I would say that what I learned in doing my PayPal research, there's a great line that Peter says, you know, he says, hey, pal, I'm going to paraphrase it. But he basically says PayPal was if you if you are at a company that's very successful and easy, then you learn the wrong side, which is that making Internet companies is easy.

00:16:44:11 - 00:17:03:07

Jimmy Soni

If you're at a company and it's hard and it fails, then you learn the wrong lesson, which is you can't be successful. He said that what we learned in PayPal is that we it was hard and we were successful. So we sort of learned the right lessons, which is it's not easy to do this, but you can actually have a success.

00:17:03:09 - 00:17:21:01

Jimmy Soni

There were generations of people who lost everything and sort of believe the Internet was never going to come back. Right. And many of them, by the way, are equally as smart, equally as talented. It was just a matter of timing and circumstance in terms of Europe. You know, my friend, the way we connected is you had interviewed my friend Sebastian MALLABY.

00:17:21:03 - 00:17:40:20

Jimmy Soni

And, you know, one of the things he identified is that there's always been like venture capital, which is more mature in the United States in that era. Right. And a part of venture capital is certainly taking bets like they operate on the power law. Right. So you sort of need like one big win and many, many others can can end up being either small successes or not successful.

00:17:40:22 - 00:17:58:23

Jimmy Soni

And I think that culture was in place even before the Internet. And so but but at the same time, now, today, I think that thesis about Europe is being proven wrong. I think the more you read, the more like a lot of a lot of venture capital money has moved to Europe. There are more kind of unicorns or unicorns in waiting.

00:17:58:23 - 00:18:01:13

Jimmy Soni

Right. And so I think that's changing, too.

00:18:01:15 - 00:18:20:01

Christian Soschner

Yeah. No, I think Europe has a lot of technology that needs capital to move forward. And before the crash in 2020, I think Europe was much cheaper than the United States, where it was a lot of a lot of talent. But let's stay with me for your book and with PayPal before we drift off into discussing the European crisis.

00:18:20:01 - 00:18:26:01

Christian Soschner

How I'm curious how how long how much time did you invest in writing this book?

00:18:26:03 - 00:18:43:15

Jimmy Soni

Yeah, this was six years, basically from start evolving from start to finish. Yeah, it's the joke. One of the board members, after it was all done and it came out, he said, he's like he joked with me, he said, You spend more time writing the book than I spent creating the company. And I was like, That's pretty good.

00:18:43:17 - 00:19:05:12

Jimmy Soni

But no, you know, so think about it. So people ask me like, How can you spend that much time on a book? You know, it's all sort of relative. Like Robert Caro, who's one of my favorite writers, spends ten years on a book. Right? So like, my like, I think of it, it's like, oh, I'm not quite at the Robert Caro level, but I think what what's tricky is, you know, there's a way to write this book very quickly.

00:19:05:14 - 00:19:24:06

Jimmy Soni

But the problem is when you're given five gigabytes of email and you have the opportunity to write it with a level of detail, you know, you sort of I would have felt I would have felt bad if I only went through a few of those emails and I tried to like cobble together as opposed to like really trying to go for detail.

00:19:24:11 - 00:19:43:01

Jimmy Soni

And you'll notice, like the book is very detailed, hopefully readable and very detailed. And it's because, like I would wake up every day and and just try to learn a little bit more or try to understand a little bit more. And I think that the challenge with a lot of writing about Silicon Valley, I mean, there's a bunch of challenges we can get into what the challenges are.

00:19:43:03 - 00:20:09:02

Jimmy Soni

But, you know, it's there are narratives about Silicon Valley that if someone had done research, they would find out are not true, right? So like the common narrative, though, the one that was done in the movie about Mark Zuckerberg, but using Facebook to find a girlfriend, I guess, again, completely false. Right. But it's it's because whoever wrote the book wasn't interested in doing, like, really rigorous, like detailed, footnoted and noted research.

00:20:09:06 - 00:20:27:21

Jimmy Soni

And that's fine. That's like a style of writing. It's closer to, you know, novels than it is to nonfiction, Right? But I was going for something where I wanted to let the facts drive the story because I thought the facts are crazy. Like, I thought the facts and the people were crazy enough to carry the narrative. I didn't need to just like, make stuff up.

00:20:27:23 - 00:20:45:24

Jimmy Soni

The problem is that in trying to get to the facts, it just takes a lot of time. You can imagine like Peter Charles door doesn't just swing open for anybody who emails them. Elon Musk isn't going to sit down with anybody who emails them. And so I had to take time and a lot of like patient effort to go through and like learn everything I could.

00:20:46:03 - 00:21:03:09

Jimmy Soni

That was kind of one part of it, was that the second reason it took that long is because there was a pandemic in the middle and I had a young kid and like life happens right? And then the third reason is I do all my books while working full time. So all my books are kind of like morning and weekend exercises.

00:21:03:11 - 00:21:21:23

Jimmy Soni

And so I was working the entire time. So, like, it maybe would have come down a little bit. But the truth is that what what's powerful about spending like I look, I know people are like, oh, I could never spend six years on something like this. And it's like, well, it's not that hard really. Like, it's it's, it's, it's boring.

00:21:21:23 - 00:21:43:21

Jimmy Soni

And most people fall off because I think they think it's boring. But the truth is, you know, you wake up and you kind of improve your understanding about the topic every day. And so what would happen is like every day I would learn something new and it just added to my understanding. And then that's how long it took for me to feel like, okay, this book is readable but also really rigorous.

00:21:43:23 - 00:22:00:16

Jimmy Soni

And I feel like I've gone to the max of what I can do in terms of people that interview things like that. No, I actually I didn't. I interviewed a lot of people, several hundred, but I did not interview everybody who weren't there. Some people didn't write back. Sometimes timing didn't work out. But I tried to get to the key characters.

00:22:00:18 - 00:22:07:03

Jimmy Soni

That's the reason you asked for a you know, the sort of why of the six years that was what was involved in those six years.

00:22:07:05 - 00:22:17:14

Christian Soschner

Now, I absolutely understand that. Let's talk a little bit about your background. You said that you are not a full time writer today. I understand that, right? So you have a normal childhood like everybody else.

00:22:17:16 - 00:22:37:20

Jimmy Soni

Well, it's the normal job is speechwriting and ghostwriting. So it's writing. I just write for other people, Right. And so I do that during the day and then I do the books kind of on the side. And obviously, like there's a little bit of, you know, it mixes a bit, but the nice thing is like my, my main work is writing and my side, her side hustles are writing.

00:22:37:20 - 00:22:55:11

Jimmy Soni

And so this was just kind of, you know, I've done books before, so it wasn't this was my first book, but this was the first book where I was dealing with subjects who were alive. And that is a different beast, especially when they're powerful and wealthy and, you know, have a big public profile that was that was a little different for me.

00:22:55:11 - 00:23:01:16

Jimmy Soni

It's not like my other books. I always joke, my friends like it's so much easier to write about dead people. Like, it's so much easier.

00:23:01:18 - 00:23:04:22

Christian Soschner

What's what's the what's the difference? What's the difference?

00:23:04:24 - 00:23:27:03

Jimmy Soni

Lawyers, I mean, you know, but, you know, it's you know, I think there's sort of two things. One is if you are writing about somebody who's alive, they have the ability to comment on the quality of your work. If you're writing about somebody who's dead, they can't tweet about your book. And so it's there. It's like a fundamental difference, right?

00:23:27:03 - 00:23:52:17

Jimmy Soni

Which is just like I was always writing from a place of, okay, what would happen? Not if I said something that was factually accurate and made the person a little uncomfortable. That's fine. That's the job. Right? But if I got a fact wrong, that's really bad. Like, that's not good. And and it's not good because L.A. is 120 million Twitter followers.

00:23:52:19 - 00:23:53:16

Christian Soschner

Yeah, well, on Twitter.

00:23:53:20 - 00:24:12:24

Jimmy Soni

You know, one tweet and you're like suddenly a different person. You know, it's like very rare. It's like almost like a godlike power. Like one tweet can change your life. You know? And so, you know, you have a situation where you're like, oh, I have to be very careful. But then the other thing is like, you know, you have to be careful anyway.

00:24:12:24 - 00:24:31:22

Jimmy Soni

But I that's the difference. The difference is, you know, that the people who are going to read the book were also interview subjects for the book and that like, gets triggered. You know, it's just hard. It just like you're always thinking in the back of your head like, okay, how do I, like, find, you know, how do I make sure that what I'm saying here is the truth?

00:24:31:24 - 00:24:40:06

Christian Soschner

So it was basically a back and forth. You interviewed two people, then you wrote a section, then you had to send the section to your interview post.

00:24:40:08 - 00:25:13:00

Jimmy Soni

No, I never I never sent material to the people I interviewed. That was that's kind of the agreement because the problem is if you interview I interviewed almost 300 people to this book. So I can't I can't send the book out to 300 people and get beat. That's just not going to happen, number one. Number two, when you're writing about when you're writing about people who are busy and who are powerful, it's in some ways more respectful of their time to not ask for feedback.

00:25:13:02 - 00:25:33:05

Jimmy Soni

But also I would have felt weird because so think about it this way. Let me give you an example. In the middle of the story, Ellen is pushed out as CEO. He is he is pushed out by his colleagues. Now, you can imagine that like Ellen's version of that story and Max love John's version of that story are different because they're different people.

00:25:33:05 - 00:25:50:14

Jimmy Soni

They live differently. The goal of the author is not to bias one way or the other. The goal of an author for a book like this is to get the facts. And the facts can you can you can have disagreements. And there were, by the way, disagreements. And so then what you do is you try to present an honest portrait.

00:25:50:16 - 00:26:10:16

Jimmy Soni

But imagine that I sent that chapter to Max Levchin before the book was published. He was like, Well, I disagree with this, this and this. And then you set a deadline. He's like, Well, I disagree with this. Then you're caught in this impossible position of like, what are you going to do? And so what you what you you know, you never you try to avoid.

00:26:10:16 - 00:26:29:14

Jimmy Soni

What I did was I didn't I did check factual things sometimes with the interviewers. Like I would make sure like, for example, maybe it was something related to their families. I wanted to make sure because there's not like public sources or emails that I got that information correctly. A good example is I write about max luncheons, grandmother in the opening chapter.

00:26:29:16 - 00:26:46:13

Jimmy Soni

Well, like I don't know, his grandmother and like and she's passed away and I don't know anybody that knows her and it'd be weird. And so there were some facts or reason to go to him and say, Look, I'm checking this. Can you verify that this is accurate? This is her name, but this is etc., etc.. And so that was part of the process.

00:26:46:15 - 00:27:01:14

Jimmy Soni

But then there's this secondary part of it where you you try to respect that, Like they have to respect that you are going to do a good job with the facts and they have to live with it. In fact, in some ways they're in the worse position because like I can say whatever I want, right? They have to live with it.

00:27:01:14 - 00:27:24:02

Christian Soschner

So I think the book is very good. This is extremely well written. I like it. And it's easy to read. It's easy to read as long as people are not like me. Just checking them. Download sites, just write one page then can last for hours. Delving into the past, you said to you, you write full time. So you write during the day and your night hours you spend with writing your books.

00:27:24:04 - 00:27:25:11

Christian Soschner

How many words do you write?

00:27:25:11 - 00:27:59:23

Jimmy Soni

But they know it's a great question. No one's ever asked me what my books are generally in the morning. So from like very early in the morning to like eight or 9 a.m. and then weekends kind of all day, I would say on a given day when I was really in it with the book and like really like it was like pandemic, you couldn't do anything, you know, I was like sometimes doing like 2000, 3000 words a day because it just, you know, like kind of, you just get into a rhythm and then you, you keep doing it.

00:28:00:00 - 00:28:20:24

Jimmy Soni

Not all of those are publishable, but that was that was kind of my my limit at some point was 23,000 words a day. And I was like seven days a week. I mean, that was pretty, pretty intense. I don't I'm not you know, I don't do that all the time. But when you're when I'm in book mode, I'm kind of in a certain specific my friends, they're like, oh, like it's like Jimmy is like book world.

00:28:20:24 - 00:28:23:16

Jimmy Soni

So I guess like, becomes a different world.

00:28:23:18 - 00:28:37:13

Christian Soschner

How do you approach such such a project? I mean, when you have to get your sense from, from interested is going to be dissect the process back to the beginning. What is your work process? How do you get such such a big pro project?

00:28:37:15 - 00:29:09:04

Jimmy Soni

Yeah, so it's a great it's a great question because it's it's a long book. A lot of people interview, long process. So the place you start, at least the phase I start in the place that the writers that I know who, who I really admire, where they start is you start with your outline. So I had an editor who was pretty famous, who was like obsessive about like making sure that you got your outline right before you started writing because your outline is basically like a very, very, very refined to do list.

00:29:09:06 - 00:29:35:10

Jimmy Soni

And what's nice about a book like this is that I'm just writing chronologically, right? So I'm I'm not writing about random times. I'm writing about 1998 to 22, and there might be some stories in there for a couple of reasons, but generally it's my JD 899 She does do 2122 And so what you end up doing is you write a really good outline and I actually have like all my old outlines and you work on those new work on those and you work on those.

00:29:35:12 - 00:29:56:04

Jimmy Soni

And then when I felt like the outline was in a good place, that is when I started I used a software program called Scrivener, and I just created folders for the different years and I would basically just dump material and thoughts and interview quotes and ideas and whatnot into there. And then I would work in Google Docs and Google Sheets for the chapters.

00:29:56:04 - 00:30:19:04

Jimmy Soni

So I'd sort of like know for my outline. Okay, Chapter one is Max Levchin, University of Illinois. Chapter two is Peter Thiel, Stanford and him meeting Max. Chapter three is Ellen in college. Right? And so I sort of knew like, this is where I want to go, but it all starts from the outline, which is how you keep yourself from going totally, utterly crazy.

00:30:19:04 - 00:30:32:17

Christian Soschner

Yeah, it's I love that book. You mentioned Max Levchin. You wrote in I think it was the first chapter that he liked playing Tetris. And I learned states Tetris basically was invented in in Russia. Was it a really Russian program?

00:30:32:19 - 00:30:50:02

Jimmy Soni

It was a it was invented in Russia. It was something I learned along the course of doing it. And it was one of these like two things that he has a really good memory. Like one of the things that was great about interviewing him is he has a nearly photographic memory. Well, and he and particularly around things related to computers and computer engineering.

00:30:50:07 - 00:31:06:10

Jimmy Soni

And so he could remember, like every computer he used, he remembered every program he played. And one of the first things that he fell in love with was Tetris. I mean, I think like a lot of us, like, it's like I remember my parents when I was a kid, but it was called Stickman was the name of the game when it was originally created.

00:31:06:12 - 00:31:24:06

Jimmy Soni

And it was funny. You asked about fact checking. I had originally called it Tetris when I wrote like one of the drafts, and because it was a really personal detail and it was like from his childhood and there was nobody around to confirm it, I was doing my factoring and said, Oh, that you told me that you were playing terrorism.

00:31:24:09 - 00:31:34:03

Jimmy Soni

I was like, Oh, no, I should have said that it was called Stickman. Like it was this Russian game. So then I then I went and did the research to check it out to make sure he was lying to me, and then I was able to get out of that.

00:31:34:05 - 00:31:42:22

Christian Soschner

They are funny. We are. We are the same generation. Then. So 80, 70. So right now it is 48. I think you must be in his fifties, isn't he. So currently are these.

00:31:42:22 - 00:31:44:05

Jimmy Soni

Like late forties, early fifties.

00:31:44:05 - 00:32:05:22

Christian Soschner

Yeah. Yeah that, that's true. There are two things in your book that I would like to investigate a little bit further. I heard the first time that I heard the term paper Mafia was in a lecture my herschbach gave at the Aldine Summit Spring effect for spring this year and for paper Mafia. It's a little bit of funny term, is it, isn't it?

00:32:05:22 - 00:32:19:07

Christian Soschner

Roots to say that? You mean you have finance, you have paper, you have the most successful people, and then you call you cardamom Mafia. And then I read your book and you also used the term paper mafia. What's the origin of the term?

00:32:19:09 - 00:32:49:13

Jimmy Soni

Yeah. And you'll you'll get to it when you get to the end. But I can tell the story for your listeners. So in two. So so just take a step back. You have a group of several hundred very talented people at this company. The company PayPal goes public in the spring of 2002 and it is acquired by eBay in the summer, like a late summer of 2000 to a number of these people leave the company and pretty soon thereafter, not all of them.

00:32:49:13 - 00:33:10:08

Jimmy Soni

And in fact, a lot of them stay. And they they have a variety of reasons why they said. But people like Peter Thiel and David tax, Reed Hoffman, Max Levchin, they all leave pretty quickly after eBay acquires the company. And what happens is between 2002 and 2007, they start to plant the seeds of all of the next generation of Internet companies.

00:33:10:08 - 00:33:32:23

Jimmy Soni

So this is when LinkedIn comes into being. It's one space that comes into being Yelp, Palantir, a bunch of these other companies, Facebook, all that, all that stuff starts to happen. And by 2006, there's an article that calls them the PayPal diaspora. There's this article and I think it was like Forbes like a writer called them the PayPal diaspora.

00:33:33:00 - 00:34:03:01

Jimmy Soni

A year later, a writer. I think it was. Jeff O'Brien writing for Forbes, has this cover photo called the PayPal cover story called the PayPal Mafia. And I don't I don't quite know where that term came from, but I know that they did a photoshoot at Tosca Cafe, which is like Italian cafe in San Francisco. And they all they got a bunch of the people who are part of the company to dress up as mafiosos and do this.

00:34:03:01 - 00:34:24:17

Jimmy Soni

This cover story. Now, it's like a really funny kind of thing, right? Because they're sort of like Silicon Valley tech people, right? But that name stuck and that cover story from 2007 stuck. And so you'll see it actually look around the world. So whenever a company goes public from now around the world, they'll like refer to it like that company and mafia.

00:34:24:17 - 00:34:45:13

Jimmy Soni

So there was in in Canada, it was like the work brain mafia in India. It was like the Flipkart mafia. There was the Revolut mafia, the Monzo Mafia. There's a bunch of these in in East Africa. This company called Procopio got acquired or went public and they the founders talked about building the PayPal mafia of East Africa. Right.

00:34:45:15 - 00:35:06:09

Jimmy Soni

Three days ago, not even kidding. Three days ago, there was this story about Utah and about others. All this venture money going into the state of Utah in the United States. And the person was like, they're trying to recreate the PayPal home, obviously. Right. And so it became this kind of brand. Now, it's not like the weird thing about the name is that there's actually like some people who love it within the Alamo Group.

00:35:06:09 - 00:35:27:05

Jimmy Soni

Some people really don't like it, and most people just kind of roll their eyes because they're not nefarious. It's not as though all these people got together and sort of committing crimes, Right? They just got together, started building more tech companies and like investing in technology. And so that was kind of this like it was sort of a half joke thing that became probably more serious than these people ever thought it would.

00:35:27:09 - 00:35:47:02

Jimmy Soni

I think that if they knew what a thing it would become, they might not have participated in the photo shoot, you know, But that's what happened. And so that's the origin story of it is this story in Fortune magazine from 2007. And I treated it fairly. I looked at it. There's this great line that that a board member gave me.

00:35:47:03 - 00:36:11:14

Jimmy Soni

He said, Calling us a mafia is an insult. The mafia is a mafia. It's far more organized. We were. And so there's some people just you know what what that person was implying and later said was, we weren't that cool. And like, you know, and it's sort of like nobody really had like some like plan and like a lot of this was chance and circumstance.

00:36:11:14 - 00:36:18:01

Jimmy Soni

And so the Mafia thing has a little bit of, you know, there can be some disagreements there, but that's the origin story of it.

00:36:18:03 - 00:36:24:03

Christian Soschner

What was this you said? Chance and circumstance. Something was can you take a little bit deeper into that? Why? Why? Chance? And so.

00:36:24:03 - 00:36:43:24

Jimmy Soni

Yeah, well, I mean, think about the timing of of everything that happened in this, but I wouldn't call it like I think luck is the wrong word right Because actually a lot I mean, as you'll read in the book and as you probably already read, it was a lot of hard work that goes into this. So it's not it's not quite luck.

00:36:44:01 - 00:37:16:00

Jimmy Soni

But if you think about the timing of the company, you know, people get this created in late 1998 and 1999 and it takes off on eBay in late 1999. But eBay had already acquired a payment system. They just didn't integrate it very well. And so if if maybe PayPal had been created in 2000, there wouldn't have been room for PayPal to be successful on eBay because eBay would have done a better job of integrating this company that they acquired called Bill Point.

00:37:16:02 - 00:37:42:00

Jimmy Soni

If if people had come one year earlier, maybe they would have focused on a different corner of the payments market. If people had become one year later, they might not have been able to raise venture capital. They close $100 Million venture Capital round in March of 2000, a few weeks before the bottom falls out on the stock market and the bubble starts bursting, if you know.

00:37:42:00 - 00:38:07:18

Jimmy Soni

So there's all of these things that like the timing is very like, oh my, you know, things happen at the right moment, right? And I think that's like what I mean when I say that to, you know, to describe them as the PayPal mafia in 2007 suggested PayPal was well planned from 1998 to 2002. But it really like they faced so many challenges and they overcame them.

00:38:07:20 - 00:38:26:00

Jimmy Soni

And but the company went through many, many, many different iterations along the way. That's what I mean. That, like Chance and circumstance were a part of this. The the engineering talent, the availability of talent, the people they recruited, the fact that Max and Peter met at Stanford at this like little room. In fact, Peter went from investor to CEO.

00:38:26:04 - 00:38:43:12

Jimmy Soni

The fact that you were on was involved and was able to bring capital and heft and his talent to people. Like there's all these things that like you can't kind of say like, Oh, it was all designed to get to that Fortune magazine cover with the patent off, you they knew in 98, they knew nine years later they were all going to be in a photo shoot and they're going to call themselves the paid off.

00:38:43:12 - 00:38:46:20

Jimmy Soni

And it was all going to work out like nobody did that. I mean, that'd be crazy.

00:38:46:22 - 00:39:00:10

Christian Soschner

How do we get on? How do you have a story in Fortune? Write it. I didn't know. So when I read the book, I didn't know that the first product of PayPal was basically a year of beaming money.

00:39:00:12 - 00:39:18:19

Jimmy Soni

And actually and it's funny, it's actually that's that's a that's one product removed, you know. So the first company so just to take a step back because listeners who may have not have read the book or be familiar with the story, you know, we use PayPal today and if you don't use PayPal, maybe use Venmo or like one of their affiliated companies.

00:39:18:21 - 00:39:47:06

Jimmy Soni

And PayPal is really the union of two companies. The first company was created by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel in 1988. It was called Infinity. The other company was created in early 1999 by Elon Musk and it was called Dexcom. They both had payments products. They weren't originally either of them focused on email or digital payments. That was actually like one product of many for Dexcom, and it was a later iteration for for community convening.

00:39:47:06 - 00:40:07:12

Jimmy Soni

These first product was actually this series of like mobile encryption libraries. So they were trying to encrypt information on Palm Pilots and other early PDAs. So, you know, your younger listeners might think of it as something supposed to be in a museum, but you and I know we're closer to it than they are. I was early.

00:40:07:12 - 00:40:08:01

Christian Soschner

It was ever.

00:40:08:01 - 00:40:08:20

Jimmy Soni

Since.

00:40:08:22 - 00:40:16:22

Christian Soschner

I was desperate to get a pop. I looked back in the nineties, so I got the early iPhone. Basically we found that the different Internet access.

00:40:16:24 - 00:40:46:07

Jimmy Soni

It was the early iPhone without the phone part. Right. And were in way worse apps. But Max Levchin was really interested in the idea of encrypting information on these devices. Those mobile encryption of libraries evolved to encrypting money, and encrypting money evolved to, Hey, could we like, use the Palm Pilots to be money? Like send money from one person to another through the infrared port on the PalmPilot, which, by the way, like that technology, we laugh at it, but that's Venmo.

00:40:46:07 - 00:41:08:04

Jimmy Soni

It's it's basically Venmo. It's like mobile payments made easy for everyone. They were just 20 years, 20 plus years too early for that because not everybody had a PDA, very limited ceiling on a product success. But that was actually the first big breakout product that can affinity. Peter and Max's company created. Was it was it was called PayPal.

00:41:08:10 - 00:41:26:19

Jimmy Soni

And the idea was you would beam money across these infrared ports and that was their first first innovation. And their theory of the case or their use case was, if I'm at launch with you, Christian, and you pay for lunch and I need to give you $10, what if we just take out our mobile app and I give you $10?

00:41:26:19 - 00:41:46:11

Jimmy Soni

Right. And again, it sounds it sounds it sounded ludicrous back then to people. They actually called it like one of the ten worst business ideas of 1999 or something in the magazine. But today we do that with Venmo or we do that with Zelle or any of these other quick payment systems on phones.

00:41:46:13 - 00:42:11:20

Christian Soschner

Now, we had we didn't have the technology back then at it was part of research projects with Halbach's, University of Graz of South Carolina for the government to find out how will the Internet change the industries. So we had a lot of ideas in the nineties back then, but not the technology. And when you said beaming money, I mean, I think the first time I saw it was in actually in China.

00:42:11:22 - 00:42:12:14

Jimmy Soni

Oh really.

00:42:12:16 - 00:42:26:07

Christian Soschner

WeChat So people said stare into one page to build and the other one transferred money by by hour via WeChat. And therefore I, we have that in Europe right. Goes to 62,017.

00:42:26:09 - 00:42:45:10

Jimmy Soni

Yeah. Well you know Europe has actually been ahead on a bunch of like even further than the United States maybe I think China is its own sort of ecosystem. I think it's I don't understand it well enough to really know. But Europe has always actually been a payments innovator, you know, on these sorts of like the technology just noticed it and I've read about it a little bit.

00:42:45:12 - 00:42:52:21

Jimmy Soni

But yeah, so that's where the origin story starts is PalmPilot money bag. And that is where that the idea came from.

00:42:52:23 - 00:43:00:02

Christian Soschner

And I figured out to tried to think David Sax kid beaming was positive it succeeded because it's beaming right now.

00:43:00:02 - 00:43:21:07

Jimmy Soni

So yeah I would say you know the patient was on life support when David Sax killed it, but we should take a step back. It was actually it's a very interesting moment. I write a lot about it in the book. So one of the challenges that was explained to me by the people I interviewed and I actually should say that to your listeners, I'm not in tech.

00:43:21:09 - 00:43:55:10

Jimmy Soni

I spent a lot of time picking these people's brains and trying to understand technology through their eyes, meaning have Elon Musk explain to you, you know, that sort of thing. And so everything I say, I sort of my reference points are like interviews I've done or interviews I've listened to your research from emails, things like that. One of the things I heard from multiple people, particularly Max Legend, is that when you create a technology, even if it is not successful, you tend to fall in love a little bit with your technology because what happens is you feel you sunk cost fallacy.

00:43:55:10 - 00:44:26:00

Jimmy Soni

You feel like, Whoa, I've spent all of this time and engineering bandwidth and energy into building this Tom Ballard money beaming thing. It's going to work. We're going to make it work where it's going to be successful, right? What happened in the summer of 1990 at Infinity was that they had built this money beaming technology and also built a companion technology to make the transfers easier, which was emailing meaning I could, you know, emit Christian at Yahoo dot com, I could email you $10.

00:44:26:02 - 00:44:57:09

Jimmy Soni

We could also have our PalmPilot transaction. It very quickly became clearer that emailing money was like where where people were excited because it simplified the cumbersome process of digital payments. There were still no clear digital payments. Player Max Ocean had fallen in love with the Palm Pilot, encrypted money being on these small devices. And one of the things that happens in the company is there's this kind of existential argument and existential debate.

00:44:57:09 - 00:45:15:12

Jimmy Soni

In the summer of 2000 of 1989. David Sacks is a friend of Peter Tales from Stanford. And Peter's been trying to recruit David to come to the company. And one of the things that David says is like he basically comes in and he's like, this mobile money doing anything. It's so stupid. We have to kill. This is so dumb.

00:45:15:12 - 00:45:32:22

Jimmy Soni

And there's a ceiling on its success and there's been no network effects. And how anybody could use it, he says. But if your company will focus on emailing money, I will quit my job at McKinsey right now and come and join you and Peter kind of essentially makes that that's part of the bargain. We're going to focus on emailing money.

00:45:32:22 - 00:45:52:17

Jimmy Soni

But when David arrives that that memo had not been communicated widely and so David comes in and starts telling the team like we have to shift our focus to emailing money. He is one part of the reason why the company did that. It's I think it's inaccurate to say he's the sole reason because eventually Max says, Yeah, David's right.

00:45:52:17 - 00:46:18:15

Jimmy Soni

Like let's focus on this. The board says like, Well, look, look at your user growth on email versus your user growth. I'm very simple. It's very elegant. These things move quickly. They're very natural. Passed a certain point, but David is also the person in the room, and this is why I write a lot about him. You know, one of the other discovery sort of learnings I had during the process is actually people fall in love with the technology so much that they fall in love with it.

00:46:18:15 - 00:46:41:03

Jimmy Soni

They forget about the end user of the technology. And so you sort of create the perfect mousetrap, but you forget who's actually going to be using the mousetrap. David Somebody had this great line about David that I actually didn't end up including in the book. I maybe should have. But he said, you know, David was one of the only people that cared as much as he did about the end user, about PayPal's end user, as opposed to, like everything else.

00:46:41:05 - 00:47:01:23

Jimmy Soni

And he would often be the person in the room who, you know, sometimes forcefully would say. Well, how is the user actually going to use this? Or like, what do you use? We're actually going to do here. This extended to everything. I had a designer who worked on international currency conversion tell me that like David was ruthless about saying like, you can't make even currency conversion hard for people.

00:47:02:00 - 00:47:24:12

Jimmy Soni

You have to make it simple and then explain everything else somewhere else. And that role ended up being kind of called product, but that was not really a thing in 1998 1999. But David Sachs became effectively the head of product and VP of product and later the CEO of the company. And I his character, you know, he he is this clarifying voice like that's what he is.

00:47:24:12 - 00:47:38:20

Jimmy Soni

He is a clarifying power. And what he does is he will come to you. And he said he's like, I often got the reputation of being Dr. No. And I and I sort of like, what does that mean? He said, Well, think about it. You have a bunch of people who think that the thing they're creating that day is the most important thing.

00:47:38:22 - 00:47:57:10

Jimmy Soni

But he said, we are very limited in engineering bandwidth. And so I needed to be the person saying, no, we have to prioritize we have to have discipline. We have to actually like say like this is more important than this and I need you working on this. And so and so I just got a reputation within the company of like Dr. No, that's the back story.

00:47:57:12 - 00:48:19:10

Jimmy Soni

On the evolution from Palm Pilot money beginning to emailing money, and it wasn't automatic when when, when they first discover that they're having success on eBay. A bunch of people on the PayPal team, the competitive team that's running, are like, well, we don't want any part of as eBay. eBay's terrible. It's like a flea market, you know, people selling junk on the Internet.

00:48:19:10 - 00:48:33:16

Jimmy Soni

We don't want that. And it's David and other voices who say, no, this is a product market fit. Like this is actually we we've achieved something here and we need to continue to fuel this fire.

00:48:33:18 - 00:48:59:13

Christian Soschner

Yeah, I think product market fit and making things easy for the customer is one of the most important key success factors in US based companies. If you look at, for example, Steve Jobs think the difference between iPhone and European smart or mobile phones back then was it's just easy for the user. So the innovation and the platform for me was when I switched to the next version of the iPhone.

00:48:59:13 - 00:49:18:00

Christian Soschner

I can take my whole profile with me to the next phone. It's so easy. And the European phones, every time I got a new one, it was 2003, four or five or in the nineties. I had to relearn everything. So it took one day to just set up the phone so that I can use it the way I wanted to use it.

00:49:18:06 - 00:49:36:19

Christian Soschner

I think this product market fit should be at the top of every company and probably David Sachs is one of those that the people that created the success it paid people with just demanding it from from that the conditions to just think from the customer's perspective, not from your perspective.

00:49:36:21 - 00:50:02:10

Jimmy Soni

It's a process and it's not a 100% accurate. And I would argue that it's actually and it's funny that you mentioned Steve Jobs, because I have I have often thought that the sort of personality type that David is closest to is Steve Jobs. What he is trying to do is reduce friction and reduce irritation. And and there were at the time, you know, this is early web, this is dial up Internet days.

00:50:02:12 - 00:50:25:14

Jimmy Soni

So irritation was a big deal. If somebody had a slight delay, that was a problem. And you're trying to compete for users, you're running out of money. You know, you're trying to grow this company and irritation and friction are a big thing. And David was sort of this person who was just like constantly, relentlessly at war with anything extraneous that would interfere with the user experience.

00:50:25:16 - 00:50:46:04

Jimmy Soni

And I think, like, this sounds very simple, right? What I just said sounds very simple. People like, Oh, that sounds self-evident, but imagine being on a team and having to tell your colleagues like everything you've done for the last nine months is like needs to be discarded. And I need you to shift your focus entirely to something else.

00:50:46:06 - 00:51:07:11

Jimmy Soni

You know, that's a hard thing to do like that. That's not actually easy. And by the way, you get resistance, but not just emotional resistance. You get sort of intellectual resistance. There was this great thing, I think, that Max loved and shared with me. He was still maintaining the PalmPilot app like a year and a half into the success of the Emailing money product, right?

00:51:07:13 - 00:51:20:03

Jimmy Soni

And at one point, like, it was like late at night and he was in the office and Peter Thiel arrived at the office. There's remarks. What are you working on? He's like, Oh, I'm just doing bug fixes for the product. And Peter, like, lost it. He was like, Wait, you're the CTO of the company and we have the successful product.

00:51:20:03 - 00:51:39:01

Jimmy Soni

You need to stop this mobile thing that can't happen anymore because your time is limited too. And so I think that's a big part of understanding it. You know, people have this impression that like, Oh, you just create an emailing money product and it's super successful and everybody uses it and network effects and virality. No, these are decisions and this is leadership.

00:51:39:01 - 00:51:53:02

Jimmy Soni

And it is somebody it is somebody like David Sacks saying he had this line that his team would repeat to me. It's funny, I interviewed all these members of his product and each of them separately would say to me, they would always say it has to be as easy as email, as easy as email, and this is email.

00:51:53:06 - 00:52:18:01

Jimmy Soni

And then they put up a sign around the office with David Sachs's face that said As easy as email. And this was a big part of the culture was people understood that that part of David's role was saying, Have we made this as easy for the user as possible, easy as email? And I think that's very important. These are not just technologies that like spring into life and like everything is beautiful and perfect.

00:52:18:03 - 00:52:38:13

Jimmy Soni

You know, they are they are very rough pieces of stone and they're kind of like politics from all these different angles. And David was one of the people that, again, not my that's not my assessment. It's his colleagues assessment is he was sometimes difficult to work with, but he cared so much about the end user and the end user experience.

00:52:38:15 - 00:53:10:10

Christian Soschner

You know, difficult to work over. I work for scientists since 2006, and a lot of the scientists are at research organizations. So I've been interest organizations. And the thing is, research at the research organization sparks curiosity, and scientists are trained into finding new things. So basically they do one small study, then they find something new, they pivot to the next small study, and then they find something new again and the next thing.

00:53:10:12 - 00:53:32:10

Christian Soschner

But when they want to translate scientific results into products, they have to shift the mindset from being creative. And they think this is it sounded to me like what Max Levchin was doing at PayPal. So he was focusing his attention on creating something new. But when you want to turn it into a company, you have to do one.

00:53:32:10 - 00:53:42:22

Christian Soschner

Things focus on one thing only and focus on the right thing. That's the customer needs. And this is happening really difficult for scientists because they are trained differently.

00:53:42:24 - 00:54:07:05

Jimmy Soni

Right? Right. I think the thing that's interesting about David and Max and it's good. That's interesting you identify them because that's in the book as well, You know, they work really well together. The amazing thing about PayPal is that as intense as these debates, some of these existential debates often were, you know, and even 20 years later, I didn't hear from people like, oh, man, I hated working.

00:54:07:07 - 00:54:33:18

Jimmy Soni

You know, it was more I respected that somebody like Max was like trying to do something and that I respected as David was trying to do something. There was this there was it, by the way, it was a very intense culture. There was a fair amount of debate and argument and like a lot of hours. But it was also respectful in the kind of like it was intensely focused on getting to the right answer of of what the product should do.

00:54:33:23 - 00:55:01:00

Jimmy Soni

Not like I don't like, you know, person or I don't like this. You know, it's more sort of getting to the truth. It required a kind of intensity. I would say that the thing that surprised me, you know, I don't think even like anybody who was outside of the world of technology understands that any little decision for a Web services company or a website, if it's important, like actually is a fair amount of thought behind it.

00:55:01:00 - 00:55:32:20

Jimmy Soni

You know, and like debate and argument, we just don't think in those terms. Like the Web worked so fluidly. Now we sort of notice the mistakes, but we don't notice all the work that goes into preventing those mistakes. And I found that was like one of the most interesting things that David's team, this alumni from the product group at PayPal, they said to me, you know, so many of my product instincts for later work were shaped by my time with David, because what would happen is that you would go into him.

00:55:32:20 - 00:55:46:14

Jimmy Soni

And if you had like some thing that you had made you thought was beautiful, he would like give you very critical feedback and you to sort of be ready for that. And they said, you know, I carried that into my future work. So I think it's like one of the things that I was I was it surprised me.

00:55:46:14 - 00:55:59:00

Jimmy Soni

It was a really valuable series of things to investigate and learn was just like what that role is. What is product or product is partly not entirely, but partly thinking very concretely about the end user.

00:55:59:02 - 00:56:09:14

Christian Soschner

And making it easy for the end user and not, I would say, having the technicians on the back for the great work that is, but nobody uses it. So it's it's really.

00:56:09:16 - 00:56:10:16

Jimmy Soni

And nobody and.

00:56:10:21 - 00:56:20:08

Christian Soschner

Then staying also on a lever of respect for lever so that people can work together even when they have arguments. I think this is why we very difficult.

00:56:20:10 - 00:56:36:23

Jimmy Soni

Yeah, it's hugely difficult, but I think part of it is I sort of like to say that like the book, this book should not be read as a book of chemistry. It's alchemy, right? But like, actually, like it's not that you have like, oh, we just find you find yourself like, you know, a David and Anita on and off.

00:56:36:24 - 00:56:57:01

Jimmy Soni

But it's more that that actually what you want to understand is do you have like if you if you're a business owner, maybe the lesson from David's access to the question needs to be asking yourself is who on the team is like obsessed with how the end user thinks and uses our product right now? That's a powerful question to ask.

00:56:57:03 - 00:57:11:16

Christian Soschner

Now, you could spend a lot of time. I mean, focus is also a term that you mentioned. You can spend a lot of time working on the wrong thing and failing tremendously With a small shift. You can sometimes take out half the time 50%, the percent.

00:57:11:18 - 00:57:29:07

Jimmy Soni

Yeah. Or think about like, let's take it an example. It's not from PayPal. You know, famously one of the first things that Steve Jobs does when he returns to Apple the second time around is he kills basically all the all the products. There's like dozens of things they're working on. And he just sort of takes a blowtorch to them and says, we're not going to do any of those things.

00:57:29:07 - 00:57:46:20

Jimmy Soni

We need to focus. Right. And I think that's very hard to do it. It's hard at the interpersonal level because people feel an emotional commitment to their work. And when you come in and you see their work is no longer needed or valuable or like they're doing things that shouldn't be done, you that's a really hard thing to manage even if you have the right answer.

00:57:46:22 - 00:58:05:13

Christian Soschner

But this is I think this is the core of entrepreneurship, focusing on customer demand and making it as easy and simple as possible for the customer. And this makes a huge difference. And working out, you mentioned also the term friction. There was a lot of friction just came to my mind when I read for your book and it was quite interesting because I didn't expect it.

00:58:05:19 - 00:58:31:07

Christian Soschner

So I read from this a sort of cover paper I'd like to close this post, went through and tried to write in Black, and then I came to the table of contents and I needed a second look to find it because actually it's okay building blocks to pitch. Then you have to not as cool and eager and then you have divided the book into three sections, but one part, two part free.

00:58:31:09 - 00:58:51:22

Christian Soschner

And then if not, wait a minute to sit and defense and know that from an audit from SAS. So and just better writes the second part bad bishop I noted from chest and then the first part and I know that as well from chance and what do I have to do to get the wrong book? Is the chess book or something?

00:58:51:24 - 00:58:58:12

Christian Soschner

And why? Why, why chess? Why did you name the three parts after chess opening of the chess problems?

00:58:58:14 - 00:59:35:20

Jimmy Soni

Yeah, no, it's a great question. You're one of the there not many people who pick up on that because those are specific sequences in chess or that kind of moves. You can make or situations. You know, the story might be like the answer might be somewhat unsatisfying, but let me roll. But the basically, you know, one of the things I learned is, is much puzzle solving and game playing and kind of that whole ecosystem that was such a part of people's culture was like this competitiveness around problem solving and puzzles and chess and logic games, things like that.

00:59:35:22 - 00:59:54:23

Jimmy Soni

And so one of the players, you know, Peter Thiel's an exceptional chess player. He was the young, I think was ranked at one point like the youngest player under the age of 13 or 14 in America or something. And he had achieved whatever it is, like whatever status rankings those are. David Sachs A very good chess player, Max.

00:59:54:23 - 01:00:13:07

Jimmy Soni

Legions of very good chess broke on and on like a good chess player. Every good chess player. And I, I started thinking about like, what are like, like just, you know, design elements in the book and like, ways you could make a book a little bit more clever. And I realized I was already writing kind of part one, Part two, Part three.

01:00:13:09 - 01:00:39:18

Jimmy Soni

But then I thought about the goal in chess. That's like the opening, the middle game and the endgame, right? And so I picked three, three chess kind of sequences or moves that that, that sort of grasped on to the opening and Sicilian defense. Part of the Sicilian defense is that it's it's a move by a weaker party. So it's like you're sort of like it's like a more aggressive move from block.

01:00:39:18 - 01:00:58:17

Jimmy Soni

I guess that like if you're because you're in a weaker position because you're moving second. So a little bit of it. And like I got the sense like, okay, people was always in a weaker position, right? There were always like less money than their than their competitors. They're always fighting eBay. They're always fighting somebody. Like, all right, that sounds like it's about right.

01:00:58:17 - 01:01:22:16

Jimmy Soni

The the middle one. Bad bishop. The bad bishop happens when the bishop cannot make a move. Like you sort of have this very powerful piece. The bishop, but it stuck in place and kind of can't do what it needs to do. And there were two leadership transitions in the middle of the book that are very messy. And like the leaders, you know, their explanation would been like, I couldn't do the things I needed to do, you know, And so it was appropriate that that works metaphorically.

01:01:22:22 - 01:01:41:17

Jimmy Soni

And then the last one was doubled the rooks and doubled rooks. Is this situation in Treasury of two rooks. And it allows you to sort of finish the game by moving the rooks and having them advance and checkmate the king. And the way the story of papal ends is with an IPO rook number one, and with the acquisition by eBay, which is rook number two.

01:01:41:19 - 01:01:59:07

Jimmy Soni

And so it was it was pure kind of like just metaphor. It wasn't anything specific, but it was also in some ways in homage to the culture. I wanted the book to be reflective of the culture. So I was like, okay, chess is a good way to do it. There's also a secret puzzle buried in the middle of the book.

01:01:59:07 - 01:02:06:01

Jimmy Soni

So like, that's the other thing I did was I buried a secret code in the book, was my other thing that, that I layered through.

01:02:06:03 - 01:02:08:13

Christian Soschner

Oh yeah, I didn't get stereotyping.

01:02:08:13 - 01:02:10:18

Jimmy Soni

Yeah.

01:02:10:20 - 01:02:14:06

Christian Soschner

I'm 55, so I have a little bit of gold.

01:02:14:08 - 01:02:16:09

Jimmy Soni

Yeah.

01:02:16:11 - 01:02:22:15

Christian Soschner

Sicilian defense also fits very nicely into into the paper Mafia narrative.

01:02:22:17 - 01:02:23:23

Jimmy Soni

And that's. That's right.

01:02:24:03 - 01:02:28:12

Christian Soschner

Now, now you make me curious. What's the. What's the boss? The secret puzzle in the book. So.

01:02:28:14 - 01:02:46:03

Jimmy Soni

Oh, well, I'm not going to reveal it. I'm hoping that people dig for it and then find it. And actually a few people have solved it, including Max Roach. And funny enough, I have two books that I sent him a copy and he is the first person to crack the code and wrote me back as soon as you subscribe, which is pretty funny really.

01:02:46:05 - 01:02:50:02

Christian Soschner

And it's the reprisal so that people can crack it.

01:02:50:04 - 01:02:59:02

Jimmy Soni

You know, I didn't think about that. But if somebody is listening and they crack the code, I will I will gladly send them a signed copy of the book.

01:02:59:04 - 01:02:59:19

Christian Soschner

Oh, okay.

01:02:59:22 - 01:03:15:07

Jimmy Soni

It's up to a certain number. But let's let's like put it out there. I shoot me a DM on Twitter or shoot me an email. And if you've cracked the code and you give me your address, I'll send you a signed copy of the book just because it's not an easy code to crack. And so for somebody to do it, I'm like, All right, you're invested.

01:03:15:07 - 01:03:17:00

Jimmy Soni

Let's let's, let's make it worth your while.

01:03:17:03 - 01:03:21:07

Christian Soschner

So I will I will put it in a clip afterwards and promote it and YouTube.

01:03:21:07 - 01:03:21:19

Jimmy Soni

Yeah, that's.

01:03:21:19 - 01:03:23:22

Christian Soschner

Right. Facebook maven never, ever.

01:03:23:23 - 01:03:33:24

Jimmy Soni

Having to give away like a hundred signed copies of the book if people crack it. But let's set I'll set a limit, a personal limit for anybody that solves it. Feel free to reach out to me.

01:03:34:01 - 01:03:42:05

Christian Soschner

The bad bishop also, I was always the bad bishop. So it's a it's a but it's a situation. So it's just too cold situation. And not just.

01:03:42:06 - 01:04:05:20

Jimmy Soni

Because and again, it's a metaphor. The word bad has all these sort of like connotations. It's more of a the company at different moments felt stuck in place. And I walk readers through all sides of it. Meaning how did the leaders feel? What were they facing and how did the people who were being led feel when the company slows down and startups don't really slow down?

01:04:05:22 - 01:04:24:09

Jimmy Soni

And so the company goes into slowdown in 2000 and it's because there's two leadership transitions and that's kind of what I was like, Oh, the bishop feels, you know, stuck in place, like you can't go anywhere. And it's not it becomes the bishop becomes not valuable as a piece on the board. And that was like what I was when I was reading about it.

01:04:24:12 - 01:04:27:12

Jimmy Soni

I was like, okay, this sort of fits with the whole motif.

01:04:27:14 - 01:04:54:06

Christian Soschner

There is also another thing that came to my mind when I read the first hundred 50 pages of the book. So paper, basically it's a group of people that were thinking very hard about improving the payment systems and even Musk, for example, with x dot com, he wanted to have, as far as he remembered from your book, a one stop shop, basically for solutions that you need in your financial life.

01:04:54:08 - 01:05:17:14

Christian Soschner

And also Peter Thiel spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve payments. Max Levchin With the Palm Pilots Vanity Unique product, which is quite good. I think he also sometimes read about cryptography so that this was a huge problem when people wanted to beam money from one PalmPilot to another Palm Pilot, how to make it safe and secure.

01:05:17:16 - 01:05:45:14

Christian Soschner

And then we had the dot com bubble burst, 2000. We had crash in 2007 eight, and the Forbes article came out, PayPal Mafia, and then all at the same time, I think in 2008, Bitcoin appeared a mysterious person or group like Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin to make transactions safer, more secure, more reliable, more trustworthy without having a system in between.

01:05:45:14 - 01:06:00:03

Christian Soschner

And when you look, for example, at the Twitter acquisition that happened recently by Elon Musk and also the aftermath of that, there is one Forbes that sticks in my mind. Is it possible that the PayPal mafia invented Bitcoin?

01:06:00:03 - 01:06:09:00

Jimmy Soni

Yeah, it's a great it's a great question. How do I how do I explain this?

01:06:09:00 - 01:06:11:23

Christian Soschner

It's it's speculative, I guess.

01:06:12:00 - 01:06:21:21

Jimmy Soni

I don't know. And here's the thing. I did not set out to find out the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. That was not my definition.

01:06:21:21 - 01:06:25:15

Christian Soschner

But so sorry. Did you think there was one part? It's just check.

01:06:25:17 - 01:06:26:11

Jimmy Soni

Yes, that's right.

01:06:26:11 - 01:06:38:20

Christian Soschner

There was a bit that you mentioned. Peter Thiel said that at the convention somewhere in 2001, two, three or sometimes it might have been that Satoshi Nakamoto was part of the convention.

01:06:38:22 - 01:07:05:08

Jimmy Soni

So here is the story. It's actually a great story. It's very you're a careful reader because people would have missed that in when when Max and Peter are getting started in this sort of universe. One of the things that is an early branding tagline for infinity and for the product people can finish, by the way, was the company PayPal was the product until a few years into it.

01:07:05:10 - 01:07:32:13

Jimmy Soni

One of their taglines was New World Currency, and the idea was, if you could make phones like have currency on them, then like why would anybody need paper money? Why would you need coins? It's expensive and cumbersome. And it became this like real thing in their minds. Like, what would could you use palm Pilots to eliminate currencies? They were also coming at the tail end of a bunch of financial crises.

01:07:32:15 - 01:08:15:20

Jimmy Soni

So people forget. But like in the mid and nineties, you know, the Asian financial crisis like collapses, different kind of like currency values around the world. And so you so they attend these conferences in Anguilla and this is like an island and it's called the international financial Cryptography Association the FCA and they present in 1999 and in 2000, and they're not like they're sort of met with some hostility, like because they're coming in and saying, Hey, we have this poll about things like dissolve currencies, but it's not like they're the first people to have the idea that, like maybe currencies could be more efficient.

01:08:15:22 - 01:08:38:19

Jimmy Soni

And so they're sort of like they're treated like, you know, like, like parvenus like they're sort of like treated like, oh, you're like you're an Arab. It's like, what are you doing here? You know, like, and that But but when they are there, it's the world's collection of like academics, cyber or cyber funds. So it's like all these people who were like, are in and around that universe.

01:08:38:21 - 01:08:53:19

Jimmy Soni

And Peter, you know, I think he's said the same in a few places, but he was joking about it when I asked him about Ethan. You know, like you sort of like if you lose your car is like the most likely place to look is like, you know, where were you last, where was your car order? And he said, you know something?

01:08:53:19 - 01:09:16:00

Jimmy Soni

That and he goes, If you are looking for security, Nakamoto like a likely place is like, be these conferences in Anguilla where all these people are working on digital currency go And so his one of his theories is like, we might have been in the room with Satoshi at that conference. Now, do I think some alumni from this group, do I think they have the skills to be Satoshi Nakamoto?

01:09:16:02 - 01:09:36:13

Jimmy Soni

For sure. There's a few people in this room with like outlier level intellect, Like this is the kind of project they would want to take on do. There's a bunch of people who think like Elon is Satoshi. I don't think that's the case for a variety of reasons, mostly because at the time that Bitcoin drops and sort of just whoever is it starts to send those emails.

01:09:36:15 - 01:09:54:03

Jimmy Soni

Elon is very engaged in space X and Tesla like it would, it would just wouldn't make sense. And there's a variety of other reasons, but I, I was intrigued by this like conference, right? So I sort of read up at Anguilla and I read up on the conference and you can still go see the papers that were presented back then.

01:09:54:08 - 01:10:20:10

Jimmy Soni

Right. And I will say like that seems to be a plausible theory. Now. I think the world like around the planet, people have all of these different theories of who's the Joshi is, and I just don't have enough knowledge to know what's true and what's false. Like it's not my particular I'm not I'm some detective on premise does is but from my perspective it provided context and the context is before PayPal arrives, people have been trying to make digital money transfer work.

01:10:20:11 - 01:10:43:24

Jimmy Soni

Digital currencies work. There were all these like digital cash, there were all these bankruptcies that are just happened. Right? This was very, very early crypto and into that world steps, these two people and this whole team eventually and you know what like to their credit like they didn't listen to the critics like the critics said like oh you're never going to get anywhere with this babbling.

01:10:44:01 - 01:11:04:05

Jimmy Soni

That sounds so foolish, right? Nobody's going to be money between Palm Pilots like that. So we've been trying this. You guys don't even know what you're doing. And they cracked one code on how to make the digital money transfer work. In spite of the criticism that they got this conference right. And so I think, you know, I think it's an interesting part of the story.

01:11:04:05 - 01:11:12:19

Jimmy Soni

But you're right, the joke she mentioned. But I don't think I would. I don't I mean, again, I don't know. But I don't think anybody from the alumni group here is the totally Nakamoto.

01:11:12:21 - 01:11:14:16

Christian Soschner

The PayPal Mafia invented Bitcoin.

01:11:14:16 - 01:11:18:01

Jimmy Soni

This guy.

01:11:18:03 - 01:11:19:07

Christian Soschner

Theory.

01:11:19:09 - 01:11:23:18

Jimmy Soni

You go. And if a conspiracy theory holds is all of the above, it's great.

01:11:23:18 - 01:11:27:00

Christian Soschner

But otherwise we should debate this conspiracy. And also.

01:11:27:02 - 01:11:31:19

Jimmy Soni

I think connected to the code, it's actually like the code will reveal who is the this.

01:11:31:21 - 01:11:38:19

Christian Soschner

Yeah, but I think Elon Musk later promoted more dogecoin, so maybe it might be. It was the cover for inventing bitcoin.

01:11:38:21 - 01:11:42:12

Jimmy Soni

Oh boy. I don't know. I that's a that's a very the challenge.

01:11:42:12 - 01:11:42:19

Christian Soschner

For us.

01:11:42:19 - 01:12:03:05

Jimmy Soni

Conspiracies is most conspiracies are too elaborate to pull off like it's like just enough. But yeah I think you know I will say that would be the part about it that's interesting is studying digital cash and studying some of these early. You look at that like the language around some of the early beans, flus, you know, all of these things.

01:12:03:05 - 01:12:14:21

Jimmy Soni

And they are very they track very closely with a lot of the the taglines of cryptocurrency and so sort of, you know, the sort of joke would be like everything old is new again, even cryptocurrencies, you know. Yeah.

01:12:15:01 - 01:12:40:21

Christian Soschner

And I think what what depresses me is I know the world in the nineties, so Europe mostly based on cash also credit cards were not widespread. And what impresses me is people like Elon Musk, like Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, but also artists like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos who have an idea and have the guts and the nerves to focus on bringing the idea to life.

01:12:40:21 - 01:12:53:01

Christian Soschner

And I was looking back from 2020 to seeing what that companies changed in the world and what they brought to is really interesting and amazing to see.

01:12:53:03 - 01:13:16:02

Jimmy Soni

And I think part of it is, you know, one way to tell the story is as a story of compromise, right So think about it this way. It's not as though there was some pure vision of a new world currency, and then people held fast to that vision even as they became successful on eBay. The truth is the team shifted very quickly to saying, We have a product market fit on eBay.

01:13:16:02 - 01:13:53:05

Jimmy Soni

We need to cater to this auction, digital auction marketplace. You know, you could argue that that and some people did in my interviews with them that like actually it was sort of abandoning the original vision in some ways. But that's the work of startups. Is this delicate dance between your highest and best goals and the hard reality of what the market is looking for and what the market on eBay was looking for in late 1999 and in early 2000 was a seamless way to make digital payments, and no one had figured that out until this group and no one had really make it made it as user friendly.

01:13:53:05 - 01:13:54:13

Jimmy Soni

And this group did.

01:13:54:15 - 01:14:14:01

Christian Soschner

A lot of fantastic points in your book. 11. that also made me think and today I was at the hairdresser and the lady asked me, So what are you what are you currently reading? And I said, Of course, your book. So I'm going off promotion. And then she asked, What is it about? And I said, Well, you know, I'm 48 now.

01:14:14:01 - 01:14:37:21

Christian Soschner

And in the nineties I had this drug that should I get my degree, so should the finished university, should I get my master's degree? Should it be a Ph.D. or should I leave university, found companies and try something else? And always, if thought it was just me that had decided instead to read your book and bounce the story about Elon Musk?

01:14:37:21 - 01:14:55:00

Christian Soschner

And it sounded to me, or maybe it was just interpreting my reality into your book, that even my scholars and I did similar strategy back in the nineties. So it's basically was not such a given that he went straight into entrepreneurship. He also had opportunities at the university level. Did the interprets too much or was it really that way?

01:14:55:02 - 01:15:24:21

Jimmy Soni

No, you're you're interpretation is exactly right. I mean, I can't speak for your personal circumstances, but so to sort of take a step back, you know, part of the value of doing a book like this is that I was allowed to ask the people that I was interviewing about the earliest moments in their life. People by the time I'm writing about it, you know, these people are all 20 years removed from people like Elon is well into I think I first smoked him in 2019.

01:15:24:23 - 01:15:42:00

Jimmy Soni

Well, Tesla and SpaceX six years. So this is like ancient history, right? Actually, it's funny, I didn't put this in the book, but he joked with me like the first time we're speaking about it, it was like, man, like, you're like writing about like the Paleolithic era. Like, we got to like, human beings. Have any rule of the land.

01:15:42:00 - 01:16:09:15

Jimmy Soni

Yeah, we're just about ourselves, you know? So I in looking back, you sort of look back at their lives in college, like, how did these people become who they became? One of the decisions you know, because it's really tempting to look at somebody like that and say, well, you know, maybe you were always going to do this, but it's actually genuinely almost never the case that you know exactly what someone's going to do when they're in their late teen years or early twenties.

01:16:09:17 - 01:16:37:08

Jimmy Soni

That was true for Elon. He had transferred from a Canadian university to the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of Tasmania. During those later years. He's doing internships in Silicon Valley. And, you know, he's kind of faced with this like very classic choice. He applies for and is admitted to graduate school at Stanford. He is thinking about startups because like the first in a series of web companies have just gone public, Netscape has just gone public.

01:16:37:11 - 01:16:54:24

Jimmy Soni

People are becoming really successful. He knows technology and enjoys it. He knows how to write code. And then the last decision is like, Do I just get a real job? Like, do I just apply to get a real job? And I found, you know, people in his life who were going to helping him make this decision and they're like, figure out to do.

01:16:55:01 - 01:17:18:08

Jimmy Soni

And I was blown away. And the reason was one way is the same reason you were blown away, which is you think of him as a certain model of success, you know, competent, intelligent guy, drives really hard, knows exactly what is to be done. But when he was at that age, there far more indecision at that time in his life, like, do I get a real job?

01:17:18:09 - 01:17:36:18

Jimmy Soni

Do I go to grad school or create my own startup? And they all carry different kinds of risks. But it was fun taking apart and like trying to understand like, what is the thinking, who is influencing him, what time do these decisions happen? And so I got a real kick out of out of studying that part of his life.

01:17:36:18 - 01:17:55:13

Jimmy Soni

It also led me to like I discovered for about I can't apply to get a job at Netscape. He couldn't even get a response. So he went to the lobby and Netscape and just stood around trying to strike up a conversation and he was too shy. And so he like, laughed without having your. And I just thought it was so, so funny.

01:17:55:13 - 01:18:14:02

Jimmy Soni

You know, you think of this like person today who is like at the top of the world is like doing all these things he's doing, like struggling to get a job because he can't talk to anybody in the lobby of this building. And I don't know, I just found it. Sometimes when you're writing, you write, you think about your audience.

01:18:14:04 - 01:18:41:22

Jimmy Soni

And one of my audiences for this book, I think in my mind was somebody who's, let's say, between the age of 15 and 25, and they're kind of like facing the same decision that a lot of us face when we're in school and trying to figure out what our lives might look like. And I think there is something comforting about knowing that maybe one of the people that you would look up to didn't have it all figured out when he was in his late teens and twenties.

01:18:41:22 - 01:19:08:19

Jimmy Soni

He was smart and you done very well in school and like he had clearly demonstrated some promise and some talent, but it wasn't as though he or Max or Peter or anybody like had a clear plan. You know, And I think there's I wrote about it because I was like, people should know this. Like, they should know that this person I have was like deciding, like, do I defer my graduate?

01:19:08:19 - 01:19:27:21

Jimmy Soni

Do I drop out? What do I do? Like, how do I create a company? Who do I create it with? So that was the impetus behind writing so much about a story that in some ways it's like it's pretty PayPal, It's not quite PayPal, there's some links and connections, but I wrote about that because I was like, Wow, you know, it wasn't just like success.

01:19:27:21 - 01:19:32:05

Jimmy Soni

After Out of ten Success, It was actually this process of figuring out who he is.

01:19:32:07 - 01:19:54:02

Christian Soschner

And I think it's definitely helpful for people between 15 or 25, but also people are in the fifties to see that struggling is normal. So this is part of life and also to pick winners. Since the most accomplished entrepreneurs of our times also face the same situations like everybody else. And it's just up to how they decide what to do.

01:19:54:02 - 01:20:06:10

Christian Soschner

Keeping on hard work, focus to move forward. We can run now through our stories and chapters of your book, but I think about 20 hours and or 30 hours of writing.

01:20:06:13 - 01:20:07:02

Jimmy Soni

I spend.

01:20:07:02 - 01:20:08:09

Christian Soschner

Six years in research.

01:20:08:11 - 01:20:09:11

Jimmy Soni

Writing.

01:20:09:13 - 01:20:31:24

Christian Soschner

Maybe, maybe we can strip it down to the. Before we come to the final question with the three most inspiring moments of that book for you. So about the most, The free moments are stories inspired you the most? It's just it's just that because of lack of time, we can say.

01:20:32:02 - 01:21:05:22

Jimmy Soni

You and I would say I would say there are like 30 or 40 truthfully, but I'll try to come up with three. I would say one key story is there's this in in chapter 15, I write about this engineer whose name is Bob Frezza, and Bob Frezza was a young Stanford person who interned at the company. He kind of comes to his internship a little circuitous early and.

01:21:05:22 - 01:21:30:16

Jimmy Soni

Bob passes away when he is like 20 years old. I think he was like second or third year at Stanford, and his last job on Earth was working at Pebble and the team and the family develop a real connection. The team makes a memorial book for Bob's family. Bob was of the people behind one of the most important technologies that made people successful, which was fraud.

01:21:30:16 - 01:21:54:21

Jimmy Soni

Fighting was very young, very, very young. But he was kind of this extraordinary person, and I learned a lot about him in the course of doing all of this research. I was in touch with his family. I was I watched videos like there was some video from his high school graduation that I watched. I found this site that was dedicated to his friends when he passed away, put up like a memorial site, and they would all put memories of Bob.

01:21:54:21 - 01:22:20:23

Jimmy Soni

And Bob was this really full name is Robert Fraser Jr But they went by Bob. But Bob was this really extraordinary person. And I think one of the inspiring things from that is his age was not an impediment to his contribution to the company. Like it really. I mean, he really made a big and had a long lasting impact and he was maybe like one of the youngest or second youngest person on the team.

01:22:21:00 - 01:22:47:17

Jimmy Soni

So I think that's really important for people to remember. I would say the second inspiring moment or kind of thing from the book, you know, I had a lot of time interviewing the people who were at the top of the company, and many of them mentioned this member, John Malloy. And John is not you know, he's he's not famous and he would prefer not to be famous.

01:22:47:17 - 01:23:04:08

Jimmy Soni

I think he was actually a little bit sheepish and a little uncomfortable that I wasn't writing about him. When he finished the book at the end, he said to me, he's like, you put me like, he's like, I'm in this book way too much. Think I'll you know, you're important. John is this mentor figure for this group of people.

01:23:04:08 - 01:23:24:00

Jimmy Soni

And the reason he's in the book as much as he is is because Max and others said, you know, you really do need to tell the story of like how many times it was important that we had somebody like John McCain, older brother type figure, but really on the board. And it made me think about how many people within companies and company stories like don't ever actually get attention, but play very significant roles.

01:23:24:00 - 01:23:52:06

Jimmy Soni

Even if those roles are not like designing technology or refining the product. Just this of like almost like a godparent role in a company, right? So I think it was like, I don't know if it's inspiring, but it was it made me think about that. Like within companies, like who's playing that role? The last thing I would say is at the very end of chapter 14, you know, again, sort of spoiler alert Musk is kicked out of the company in the.

01:23:52:08 - 01:23:53:21

Christian Soschner

Nobody knew that. Nobody knew that.

01:23:53:22 - 01:24:17:05

Jimmy Soni

Right. In the four years that I'm writing about Elon's life, he gets kicked out of the company. He almost because of a car crash, he almost dies because of malaria and meningitis and he loses a child. And in spite of all of that, like, one of the things I just mentioned could like, break another human being, right? Could like, lead you to just be like, look, I have money.

01:24:17:05 - 01:24:40:17

Jimmy Soni

I'm going to go sit on a beach for the rest of my life, like I'm done right. After all of those experiences is is essentially in that whole period is when he starts space X and find that to be very inspiring because I think if any one of those things happened to me, I'm not sure I could recover from it.

01:24:40:17 - 01:25:13:03

Jimmy Soni

The truth is like, you know, that is those four things in sequence, like two near-death experiences being kicked out of the company you created and losing a child. Those are all difficult things stacked or like in that short of a time frame there, they're almost insurmountable. Insurmountable, overcomes all of them, you know, becomes an investor. And then later the leader of Tesla and start SpaceX X That's pretty amazing that that is not the part of his story that often gets covered today.

01:25:13:03 - 01:25:33:09

Jimmy Soni

People don't really pay attention to it. And I and by the way, I don't think he he doesn't sit around talking about it. He's not like that's not I drew that out from from him and then from the different pieces of the story that I put together. It's really incredible to think about somebody doing that because there's a part of being an entrepreneur that is just about endurance and about having more.

01:25:33:09 - 01:25:57:18

Jimmy Soni

And that's right. And I think that's actually like one of the things that people forget about his life is particularly in these years, it was very difficult. And, you know, this affects his release. In fact, his marriage, everything was affected by all of these things. And and I just think that's like something worth appreciating. Like, you know, we have humans have the most astounding ability to overcome it.

01:25:57:18 - 01:26:16:00

Jimmy Soni

It's like one of the things I love best about writing biographies in these kinds of stories is just understanding what the capacity human beings is. And I found that to be a particularly like crazy moment. Like months after some of these things happened, he is back at it trying to do it again.

01:26:16:02 - 01:26:40:17

Christian Soschner

And I think it's it's a good idea to point out these stories. They should be told more often that after all, lots of the big heroes of our days, after all, humans who make. Yes, the same experiences like all of us with maybe one difference. They don't continue dwelling on the problems they had in the past and the just learn to let go and move forward while people.

01:26:40:19 - 01:27:09:03

Jimmy Soni

Yeah, and welcome to the signature challenge of writing a book about the past, which is if you're interviewing people who do move forward, who don't, well, it's actually very it's like a weird experience in some areas because, because they thought it was so strange that anyone would care. Like I had so many people skeptical of the project, not because they didn't want talk about it like I like you on it, you would say.

01:27:09:03 - 01:27:23:13

Jimmy Soni

You said to me multiple times, This is an old story. Like, why would anybody know anybody going to care about this? Max Levchin said to me directly, It's like, you know, I don't know why anybody's going to get to care about this. And I kind of knew I was like, I don't think, you know, how much people can care about this.

01:27:23:13 - 01:27:47:08

Jimmy Soni

Like, I don't there's entire of entrepreneurs that I think look up to them now. But the problem is they're only in their late forties and early fifties, so they don't see themselves as like, you know, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Skywalker Right. They're still like fighting the Death Star. Right. And so that's the tough part is if you are always if Silicon Valley's always forward and future focused.

01:27:47:10 - 01:27:52:24

Jimmy Soni

And so I had to sort of like bring these people back to the past a bit. It was a fun exercise to do it.

01:27:53:01 - 01:28:16:05

Christian Soschner

And I think when four people you mentioned 15 to 25, it was also say 3040. It's really fantastic to reach these stories. Also, you mentioned Sebastian MALLABY, for example, reading the stories also in his book from the eighties nineties, How venture capital evolved, what the challenges were, why venture capital is venture capital as know it today is of tremendous value.

01:28:16:05 - 01:28:34:20

Christian Soschner

Also, this is this background stories to see that people struggle to they are humans. They are not just machines being born with a natural gifted talents to work 24/7 don't care about what's going on in life. They also experience a normal life. I think it's very helpful for a young generation.

01:28:34:22 - 01:28:49:22

Jimmy Soni

I think it's helpful for everybody. By the way, like I know plenty of the interesting thing about the story of Silicon Valley is it's told us a story of young people, but it's really not like a lot of people that make big contributions to people came with 20 years experience. You know, not everybody, but a lot of them.

01:28:49:24 - 01:29:13:15

Jimmy Soni

I think that the key you know what I hope people take from it is an appreciation for kind of like what does the what does the actual day to day of this kind of entrepreneurship look like and feel like, you know, how do these people think about the world? And then how much actually like how much fun it is, like how much comedy there is like in the middle of this whole crazy system.

01:29:13:15 - 01:29:22:17

Jimmy Soni

I think it's one of the things that surprised me most is that like actually these people have a very lively sense of humor because these are ridiculous situations and nobody's to be in.

01:29:22:17 - 01:29:45:03

Christian Soschner

Yeah, yeah, that's true. Jimi, Desiree, great talking to you. And if we could go on another $5 or $6. Let me ask you two final questions. I think 111 just popped up in my memory. You mentioned the second point, social skills. You mentioned that very often in your book, negotiation skills make a difference. Social skills make a difference.

01:29:45:05 - 01:29:50:00

Christian Soschner

What is your view on social skills in entrepreneurship? How important is it?

01:29:50:02 - 01:30:09:07

Jimmy Soni

Oh, it's a it's a really it's a good question. No one's asked me that before. I would say it depends very much on the role. You know, if you are the head of business development or if you are the CEO, social skills matter to a degree, right? Like you have to be able to interface with people, connect with partners, tell people your story.

01:30:09:09 - 01:30:26:20

Jimmy Soni

But if if you, you know, in a funny way, at this moment in his life today, you see sort of Max Levchin is is Max Lodge and he can fly around the world. You can go to Sun Valley, you can go to Finland and be an A. He was just in Finland at a on a panel. You know, he's become very good at those things.

01:30:26:20 - 01:30:41:20

Jimmy Soni

He can go on CNBC and tell his story and he is as polished at that moment is like he's not polished. And I don't think I think he'd be the first to say like, you know, he had certain social skills but not not others. So I think and he was the CTO of the company, he didn't need to do those things right.

01:30:41:20 - 01:31:03:14

Jimmy Soni

They hired there were other people around who did those that sort of work. So I think it very much depends on the role because there is a way in which like part of what someone told me is the startup. One of the things that makes particularly startup founders successful is being able to tell the story of what the company could be publicly, right?

01:31:03:14 - 01:31:22:19

Jimmy Soni

So what projecting an image of the future. This is what this what Steve Jobs did exceptionally well right. But I don't think that social skills are actually like all that required. In fact, I would argue Silicon Valley is one of the only places or sorry technology. Now, let's not just say Silicon Valley, but like I'd say like the world of technology.

01:31:22:23 - 01:31:42:17

Jimmy Soni

It's one of the few places where somebody who has no social skills can actually do really, really well right? Because code, you don't need to be nice to code. Code just needs to work. And so it is actually one of the few areas where you can be very introverted maybe a little nerdy and you can you can thrive.

01:31:42:19 - 01:32:01:02

Christian Soschner

Yeah. The notes of yesterday are the heroes of today. This is quite interesting to see. You mentioned storytelling. You mentioned in your book Musk was a gifted storyteller already back in the nineties. I think there was one part in the book where pointed at his storytelling skills. Yes, but what makes storytelling so exceptionally important?

01:32:01:04 - 01:32:30:20

Jimmy Soni

Oh, I mean, we could talk for 3 hours about this, but here's what I would say. So a startup is baked in. It's uncertain from the beginning, so you have to persuade people to part with their money If their investors, their time, if they are employees. Right. Or like like smaller amounts of money, if they are customers. And you're painting a vision of the future, right, you are actually telling story of what will happen eventually, Right?

01:32:30:21 - 01:32:50:23

Jimmy Soni

It's not like you can say like, Hey, we have this thing, you know, you can do that once the company is made. But at the beginning of a startup, you are trying frame a narrative about what something might be or how something might work, right? And even when the product is done, you still have to convince people this is a vision of the future that you really want to be a part of.

01:32:51:00 - 01:33:09:12

Jimmy Soni

When you are recruiting somebody, you have to tell them, I am going to you're not going to say, I'm going to make emailing money. Really cool. You're going to say, We're going to change finance forever, Right? And I think that's a place where and I'm not the first person to say this. Other people have identified it, but Elon has some real gifts as a storyteller, and real gifts are language.

01:33:09:12 - 01:33:33:14

Jimmy Soni

I would say he uses language in really interesting ways. He is very widely read. You know, he drops literary and biblical and historical metaphors into the things that he says. But he is very, very good at framing a narrative of what the future can be. And then kind of like, you know, fighting like hell to get there. And I think that that is an underrated quality.

01:33:33:16 - 01:33:51:15

Jimmy Soni

That sort of storytelling is not easy to do. And you have to do it well. If you're going to convince partners, you're going to create investors, potential employees. And it's a big part of what being a multiple will identify this. And, you know, you would interview with him and you would be sort of convinced that you were going to take on JPMorgan and win.

01:33:51:17 - 01:34:03:05

Jimmy Soni

And I mean, and even, by the way, even like through his peer group, like Max Levchin and others said, like he is one of these rare people where, like, he can convince you that he is doing God's work, like the most important work there.

01:34:03:09 - 01:34:19:10

Christian Soschner

So I don't think what's in your book or in Sebastian's book, Premature Truth, is something about storytelling. And I think it's also important not to take it too far, because sometimes people can stumble over storytelling as well.

01:34:19:12 - 01:34:46:15

Jimmy Soni

Yeah, And look, there's a there's a fine line between sort of storytelling and, you know, straight up like lying. But I think people people forget that startups are stories. It's actually like a story of something, you know, the classic hero's journey trope, right? But I think it actually it, it is it is a talent to be able to sketch a vision of the future and then convince people to build it.

01:34:46:17 - 01:35:01:08

Jimmy Soni

That's not that's not easy. That is like it really is actually the kind of thing where like we we don't think about how hard some of this stuff is, but to, to sketch a portrait of something that might be especially in the face of criticism, I think of that as something to be celebrated.

01:35:01:10 - 01:35:29:07

Christian Soschner

Yeah. Especially is mostly like people don't understand or are fighting against new stories. Sometimes at the beginning, initially it's very hard to move forward then and. Right. I think it's it's a very good point that you said sketching a vision of the future. Let's use the final minutes in our recording to sketch a vision of your future. What's what's, what's your future looking in your in your mind when you think about your next project?

01:35:29:07 - 01:35:31:21

Christian Soschner

What is your next project going to be?

01:35:31:23 - 01:36:00:23

Jimmy Soni

Yeah, you know, I have a somewhat unsatisfying, which is I don't know yet, but I'll give some clues into how I'm thinking about it. So I have this Google doc I keep, which is literally and literally the Google docs like books I books like book ideas, Master Doc or something. And what I do is I just sort of think about like books I want to buy that aren't written or I think about sort of stories that are a little undercooked to write that should like somebody should go back and really do a more rigorous job.

01:36:01:00 - 01:36:27:07

Jimmy Soni

And so I have this long list of just ideas I keep it's mostly like a sanity thing, Like I toss them in there. So I think about them and then I, I kind of gather momentum or I go meet with people or I read more and I see what's there. And so I haven't settled on what's next for me yet because my books are also like, as you can probably tell, like, I don't they're not fast it's not like it takes me like one year and then I'm done and I'm like on a track.

01:36:27:09 - 01:36:56:21

Jimmy Soni

It's more research and interviewing and so I have to be really careful with the things I choose that I sign up for them for like three or four years, five, six, whatever. I'm like on the hunt for a good sports story. Like, I spent some time recently with an NBA team that's got a great story and I like trying to think about like sports because I think sports is just I mean, I'm fascinated by I'm not a big sports watcher, but I sort of think of sports and the menopause and like the discipline and the endurance very like very much like a startup, you know.

01:36:56:23 - 01:37:17:11

Jimmy Soni

And so I've been thinking about sports stories, but I'm also like, I want to find something I really feel like, okay, this is something, you know, like this. It could really be something good. The founders has done well and people really like it and people like the characters in it. But you don't get that all the time. You know, you sort of have to find the right project and then they go crazy.

01:37:17:16 - 01:37:39:03

Jimmy Soni

And so I'm still in that search for the right project. There's some things happening in space travel that I really think are cool. I spent six months talking to an astronaut while he was in space, so he and I would communicate every Sunday. We would have a call sort of like this, like an hour long call for six months out of his 24 hour conversations from space that might become something and things like that.

01:37:39:03 - 01:37:55:04

Jimmy Soni

So I'm sort of looking for an angle into a story that, like somebody thought of part of what I try to do and I try to tell the story or try to tell a story that somebody else isn't going to do. I'm actually was really looking for like a little something, a little different. And so that's kind of where I'm at at the moment, is still searching for that different thing.

01:37:55:04 - 01:37:58:15

Jimmy Soni

So I welcome, like if people have ideas to send to my.

01:37:58:17 - 01:38:02:11

Christian Soschner

24 hour conversations from space, sounds like, yes, I think that's a.

01:38:02:13 - 01:38:03:24

Jimmy Soni

Yeah.

01:38:04:01 - 01:38:11:07

Christian Soschner

Jimi, is there anything at the end of the podcast you would like to talk about? Any question that I didn't ask and I should have asked?

01:38:11:07 - 01:38:28:07

Jimmy Soni

No. Look, I think you covered it and covered areas that almost no almost everybody misses. You're clearly a careful reader. And I just I just appreciate time and I appreciate you sharing this book with your audience. And, you know, and if anybody cracked the code, shoot me a DM or I'll send you a copy.

01:38:28:09 - 01:38:46:20

Christian Soschner

I will make that fake. So you keep saying promoted in my network. Jimmy, thank you very much for your time and for writing this book. It's fantastic. I love it. I have to am lucky I still have a halfway so I still have a few pages to go and finish it. I wish you good luck for your future, good luck with your family.

01:38:46:22 - 01:38:51:18

Christian Soschner

All the health success and I hope to hear soon about your next book.

01:38:51:20 - 01:38:55:10

Jimmy Soni

You Well, thank you, Chris. And I really appreciate all of that.

01:38:55:12 - 01:38:58:09

Christian Soschner

Have a great weekend. Bye bye. See you.

01:38:58:11 - 01:38:59:11

Jimmy Soni

Make.

01:38:59:13 - 01:39:32:16

Christian Soschner

It like this. Episodes then, please. Wherever you are, listen or watch this video or podcast episodes, please subscribe to the channel. It helps with the growth and the more subscribers, the podcast and the YouTube channel gets, the more attractive it becomes for speakers. So if you want to see more conversations, more interviews, please smash the like button or the subscribe button or both.

01:39:32:18 - 01:39:33:13

Christian Soschner

Have a great day.