Updates

  1. Person pages list letters, writing, profiles and links as sortable tables with filters, and show each person's companies as links; Fund letters show each letter's description in its own column.
  2. Experts show a checked job title and a short description of each person; 30 more people have photographs.
  3. Every company, fund, university and publication the experts work for has a page listing the people there.
  4. Fund letters show each letter's thesis and filter by it; 225 person pages list the essays, columns and newsletter issues the person wrote.
  5. Person pages list every essay and newsletter issue a person wrote, and their own books as a table in List view.
  6. Recommends shows the five largest kinds of book and the rest under More; browse pictures load sooner.
  7. Podcasts and talks link the original episode, filter by Audio and video or Press, and list each publisher once.
  8. Pages are wider, Recommends has List and Grid, and a filter clicked again turns off.
  9. Book cards sit in a ruled grid with Open Library and Goodreads links and each book's one-line note.
  10. Funds is now Investors; each investor's styles are buttons that filter the table.
  11. Podcasts and talks on a person's page filter by year and publisher and show as a list or a grid of pictures.
  12. Quotes show only people's own words: 472 summaries written by list sites are gone.
  13. Country pages open from Browse again, and every link on the shelf lands on a page.
  14. Subject and person pages show their sections as tabs, and each book appears once on a person's page.
  15. Book cards show the quote, who said it and the source; grids show five cards to a row.
  16. On a phone, a menu holds the sections, search, Updates, Feedback and dark mode.
  17. Feedback takes a screenshot of the page with no browser prompt, opens a screenshot full size when you click it, and clears itself once sent.
  18. Book cards are centred, search names the topic each book sits in, and any text cut short shows whole on hover.
  19. Search groups its results by kind: people, companies, geographies, subjects, topics, books, funds, fund letters and papers.
  20. The Books table lists who recommended each book by name, and the browser tab names the section you are in.
  21. Feedback can take a screenshot of the page, or one you paste or choose, and opens in the corner beside Updates.
  22. Each rail button reopens its section where you left it, and Browse, Table and People show on every book and subject page.
  23. Filters grey out choices that hold nothing instead of hiding them, and Books › People filters by authors or recommenders.
  24. Feedback takes a subject line and up to three screenshots.
  25. Biographies are grouped by the person they are about: 41 new pages, from Abraham Lincoln to Lee Kuan Yew.
  26. Sport splits into 23 sports, and Religion into one topic per faith.
  27. Book lists show as cards: the cover, one recommendation quote and every recommender by name.
  28. Seventeen subjects that had two or three pages under different names now have one page each.
  29. Every page lists its Experts as authors and recommenders, with a link to them on the Experts tab.
  30. Economics, Financial history, Financial panics and Accounting are subjects of their own, with one page per financial crisis.
  31. Book, person and subject pages open inside the app, so the tabs stay in view.
  32. 996 more book covers, and photographs or logos for 227 more people and companies.
  33. Books › Browse shows every subject as cards, and the rail holds Fund letters, Papers, Experts, Books and Funds.
  34. Every topic over 150 books splits into narrower topics, each with a page of its own.

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PayPal

Insurance, payments and financial servicespayments

PayPal came from the 2000 merger of Elon Musk's X.com and Peter Thiel's Confinity, listed in 2002 and sold to eBay for $1.5 billion months later. It bought its first users with $10 referral bonuses, then had to build fraud detection quickly when losses on stolen cards threatened the company, and that risk-scoring work became the durable asset. Readers get the construction of a two-sided payment network on top of somebody else's marketplace, plus the origin of the founder network that later produced Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube and Palantir. Jimmy Soni wrote the full history from hundreds of interviews, Eric Jackson gives the contemporary insider account from marketing, and Adam Fisher's oral history includes the participants in their own words.

Books 3Experts 1Recommenders 7People 4
The PayPal WarsThe PayPal Wars
T3 The PayPal Wars
Eric M. Jackson · 2004
Open LibraryGoodreads

Insider account by an early PayPal marketing hire; partisan but first-hand.

Recommended by: Sahil Lavingia

Valley of Genius
T3 Valley of Genius
Adam Fisher · 2018
Open LibraryGoodreads

Oral history; Thiel and the PayPal cohort speak in their own words.

The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the EnThe Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
T3 The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
Jimmy Soni · 2022
Open LibraryGoodreads

PayPal from Confinity and X.com through the merger to the 2002 sale to eBay.

Recommended by: David Sacks, Elon Musk, Keith Rabois and 3 others

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