PayPal

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.

3 books · 2 people behind it