The Silicon Valley we know today started with Fairchild Semiconductor, founded in 1957. Core members Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce left to start Intel, while Eugene Kleiner founded Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm that invested in companies like Google. Other members also played key roles in Silicon Valley.
Established in 1998, PayPal is compared to Fairchild. The “PayPal Mafia” members went on to create Tesla, SpaceX (Elon Musk), LinkedIn (Reid Hoffman), Palantir (Peter Thiel), YouTube (Steve Chen), Yelp (Jeremy Stoppelman), and more. They continue to have a huge impact in Silicon Valley.
Jimmy Soni’s book “The Designers of Wealth” delves into how PayPal started and succeeded. Based on hundreds of interviews and extensive internal documents, it vividly brings back that era. Like David Fincher’s 2010 movie “The Social Network,” the stories of Silicon Valley founders are tense, powerful, and captivating.
PayPal was born in 2000 from a merger between Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, and X.com, founded by Elon Musk. They secured eBay as a customer and improved online payment convenience. The book describes how employees remember the company as a place full of extreme creativity and competitive heat, with piles of Tylenol in one corner and an employee scolding her husband behind a partition.
You can see the early days of Thiel and Musk. While Musk is known for his eccentricity now, he was considered dignified and generous back then. Musk was ousted as CEO of PayPal while on his honeymoon but still said goodbye gracefully to employees. He even praised Thiel, who led the coup that removed him, leading to an investment in SpaceX later on.
But the book focuses not on individual geniuses but on the atmosphere that emerges when creative and passionate individuals come together. Just like Bell Labs’ heyday creating transistors, information theory, Unix, C language, etc., PayPal had a unique atmosphere at the time.
The author coined the term “Synius,” combining scene and genius to describe how creativity and innovation develop through collaboration and interaction within a specific environment or group. The book vividly portrays the magical era of PayPal.
Reporter Keunho Lim, [email protected]