商品描述
* Instant Bestseller * New York Times Editors' Choice * "A gripping account of PayPal's origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible" (The Wall Street Journal)--including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared. "Deeply reported and bracingly written, this book is an indispensable guide to modern innovation and entrepreneurship." --Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Code Breaker Today, PayPal's founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry's most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they're as controversial as they are admired.
Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media's rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world's foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. Their success was anything but certain.
In
The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal's turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today--fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer--were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal's success.
Described as "an intensely magnetic chronicle" (
The New York Times) and "engrossing" (
Business Insider),
The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness--the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life. This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever.
商品描述(中文翻譯)
* 即時暢銷書 * 《紐約時報》編輯選擇 *
「這是對PayPal起源的引人入勝的敘述，以及對那些使其迅速崛起的極客和反叛者的生動描繪」（《華爾街日報》）——包括Elon Musk、Amy Rowe Klement、Peter Thiel、Julie Anderson、Max Levchin、Reid Hoffman，以及許多其他從未分享過故事的人。
「這本書深入報導且文筆清晰，是現代創新和創業不可或缺的指南。」——Walter Isaacson，《紐約時報》暢銷書《Code Breaker》的作者
今天，PayPal的創始人和最早的員工被視為科技產業中最強大的網絡。自從離開PayPal以來，他們成立、資助並建議了我們這個時代的領先公司，包括Tesla、Facebook、YouTube、SpaceX、Yelp、Palantir和LinkedIn等。作為一個團體，他們推動了二十一世紀的創新和創業。他們的名字激起熱情；他們既具爭議性又受到崇敬。
然而，儘管他們影響深遠，他們最初的故事卻鮮為人知。在點燃商業太空競賽或推動社交媒體崛起之前，他們是名不見經傳的創始人，創建了一個名為PayPal的艱苦在線支付初創公司。在建立這家成為全球頂尖公司的過程中，他們面臨了激烈的競爭、內部衝突、廣泛的在線詐騙出現，以及2000年代毀滅性的網路泡沫破裂。他們的成功絕非理所當然。
在《創始人：PayPal的故事及塑造矽谷的企業家》中，獲獎作家和傳記作家Jimmy Soni探討了PayPal動盪的早期日子。通過數百次訪談和對數千頁內部資料的前所未有的訪問，他展示了塑造我們今天世界的許多事物的種子——快速擴張的數位初創公司、無現金貨幣概念、移動支付——是如何在二十年前播下的。他還揭示了無數被排除在頭版特寫和標題之外，但對PayPal的成功至關重要的個體故事。
被形容為「一部極具吸引力的編年史」（《紐約時報》）和「引人入勝」（《商業內幕》）的《創始人》是一個關於迭代和創造力的故事——其產品對現代生活產生了深遠而強大的影響。這個敘述展示了這一稀有人才集結如何共同工作，以及他們的合作如何永遠改變了我們的世界。
作者簡介
Jimmy Soni is an award-winning author. His previous book, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, won the 2017 Neumann Prize, awarded by the British Society for the History of Mathematics for the best book on the history of mathematics for a general audience, and the 2019 Middleton Prize by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His newest book is The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, and recently he completed with the late Jane Walentas, Jane's Carousel, which captured one woman's remarkable twenty-five-year journey to restore a beloved carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his daughter, Venice.
作者簡介(中文翻譯)
吉米·索尼（Jimmy Soni）是一位獲獎作家。他的前一本書《心靈的遊戲：克勞德·香農如何創造資訊時代》（A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age）獲得了2017年由英國數學史學會頒發的諾伊曼獎（Neumann Prize），該獎項旨在表彰針對一般讀者的數學史最佳著作，以及2019年由電氣與電子工程師學會頒發的米德爾頓獎（Middleton Prize）。他最新的著作是《創始人：PayPal的故事與塑造矽谷的企業家們》（The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley），最近他與已故的珍·瓦倫塔斯（Jane Walentas）共同完成了《珍的旋轉木馬》（Jane's Carousel），該書記錄了一位女性在布魯克林大橋公園恢復一個心愛的旋轉木馬的非凡二十五年旅程。他與女兒文尼斯（Venice）住在紐約布魯克林。
