"The reason I titled my book The Founders and featured individuals on the front, back, and inside covers who weren't the so-called "named founders" is that I wanted to capture the founding period of a company. It's important to recognize that any employee, regardless of their number, can be as vital as the founding members. If you're employee ten, your contribution can be as significant as that of employee number one."
Welcome back to the BetterWealth show! We've had several conversations and keep forgetting to hit record because our discussions are incredibly engaging. But now we're finally recording.
Recognizing the Unspoken Contributors
Having completed a book that could potentially be amongst the most impactful of our time, I appreciate the acknowledgement. If you're not familiar with the so-called "PayPal Mafia," or names like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, or the person behind LinkedIn, you'll learn something new today. It's fascinating to delve into the story, the motivations behind the writing, and the insights derived from this journey.
"You can be just as vital if you're employee ten as if you're employee one." — Jimmy Soni
Jimmy, welcome to the show. I hope my audiences support your work and get your book. For listeners and viewers, we'll make sure to provide the links to get the book and leave a review.
The Creation of The Founders
Thanks for having me. After an introduction like that, it's hard to know what to say next! But I'm genuinely appreciative. You have lived within contexts similar to what I wrote—albeit from an outsider's perspective—and your acknowledgment means a lot more because you understand what people like Elon Musk, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and others have faced.
I want to take you back to high school, where I probed into Peter Thiel’s book, Zero to One. It was an awakening moment. Unlike other influentially discussed books, this one struck a chord in me, inspiring a dream not driven by monetary success but the pursuit of business endeavors that significantly matter. Your journey, especially involving the influence of individuals like Musk, was quite inspiring to uncover.
It's astounding, Jimmy—how did you manage to get up-close and personal with these figures? Can you share why you decided to write this book and how you managed to spend time with someone like Elon Musk?
Getting Inside the Story
Your questions are fair, and indeed, invigorating to dig into. Reflecting on this year-plus book journey that took about six years to conceptualize—it began rather spontaneously. I scoured Amazon seeking a book about this story, not finding one that fit the bill, then wondered what if I could string interviews and anecdotes together to narrate this saga.
Enjoying the privilege of speaking with these influential personalities, I was aided by some warm introductions which eased access. More so, discussing a period long past—1998 to late 2002—made them more open to introspection.
Discussing ancient history, as Elon humorously called it, felt like eons away from their present lives. It seemed safer to recall experiences pivotal to their beginnings, unreplicated and often unscripted elsewhere.
The Enthusiasm of Unconventional Roots
Even though generations define entrepreneurship via personalities like Elon, Peter, or Max, consider the other pivotal figures, especially those steering away from limelight—who largely enriched the narrative. It's important to demolish narrow perceptions because entrepreneurial success isn't confined to named figures but constitutes equally the unknowns.
"It's important to demolish narrow perceptions because entrepreneurial success isn't confined to named figures but constitutes equally the unknowns." — Jimmy Soni
I faced some criticism regarding the cover representation, postulations which I believe misconstrue the narrative essence. We must enable a culture where the internal contributing forces are equally acknowledged.
Reflections on Time and Urgency
Something pervasive amongst these titans is the restlessness and urgency tied to their creative pursuits, often sensed as a critique of the passage of time. To them, the cost of belated execution was critical. Their urgency wasn't only a response to the competitive climate but also built into their character.
Finally, every day remains a workday for someone like Musk, who's continuously exploring endeavors reflecting a life lived purposefully over merely finding balance.
A Remarkable Interview Tactic
Recollecting one of the more engaging sessions with Elon, I initiated the conversation by asking about Greg Kouri, someone close from his Zip2 days, rather than prodding into elements already diligently covered. Diving into unexplored territory sparks refreshing dialogues and connections that might just unveil unforeseen gems.
In preparing for these interviews, I'd often venture into the prevailing misconceptions or oft-treaded paths to instead explore under-discussed territories.
The exploration into PayPal isn't merely chronological but a tapestry of interactions, inspirations, and principles that echo widely across entrepreneurial pursuits.
Conclusion
As you embark on this exploration of The Founders, remember, innovative journeys don't solely sprout from origin stories but evolve over time, formed by ardent individuals often stepping beyond the limelight.
Grab your copy of the book today, and perhaps it will inspire the next generation of influential creator-founders.
— Get Involved: Leave your insights, and let's keep the dialogue advancing!
Full Transcript
The reason that I called the book the founders and put people on the front and back covers and on the inside covers who were not quote unquote named founders is because what I was talking about is the founding period of a company. That to me, like we need to we need to actually like have a principle where we say you can be just as vital. If your employee 10 as if your employee one. Man, welcome back to the Better Well show. I say welcome back because we've literally had like three conversations and before we record we just start talking and it's like so life giving and that we forget to record. And so we're finally recording dude. Finally the show. I got your book here. Congrats on writing what could be one of the most impactful books like written in the last 20 years. And what I mean by that is if you're not familiar with the PayPal mafia or this person like even musk or Peter teal or the person that founded LinkedIn, you're going to learn a little bit about that today. And I just find your story, the why behind you writing this book, the stories and principles that have come from this book. So fascinating that we're going to get to only a fraction of that. But Jimmy, welcome to the show and I'm hoping that my whole audience can support you, what you're doing get your book like will wherever you're listening to this or if you're watching this, we'll make sure to plug where they can get the book and leave a review. But man, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being on the show. Well, I really appreciate it. But after an intro like that, I feel like we should just stop. Because how do you how do you top that? But I really sincerely appreciate that. For any number of reasons, but it is also you have lived the experience that I was writing about from the outside in but in a different context. So to hear someone like you say that means about 10 X more because you know in your own domain what what people like Elon and Max Levchin and read Hoffman and others have faced. And so it's just it's it's great to it's great to talk to you again. Again, we've talked for so long. This is just the stuff that people will will listen to. But I really appreciate that. And I'm glad to be chatting with you about it. I want to just take you back. I was in high school. I had like I didn't know if I was going to get into college was always entrepreneurial. I didn't know that about myself. I read Peter Teal's book zero to one. And I'm telling you, there was something that clicked. And that was probably one of the most impactful books that I've read. And I don't actually share this a lot because, you know, seven habits, file effective people thinking grow rich. There are some other books that I speak more about. But that one book was like, man, I want to be like him someday. And I say that kind of jokingly. But I'm like, that would be such a dream is not just to make money and then go on vacation, but like to be in business and to and to really create something that matters. Obviously, we chatted before we started recording about like every like Elon Musk and and how he's influenced our generation, one of the top followed person on Twitter and just have literally created waves as we speak. And so it's so fascinating that not only did you get to write about these people, but you had to like spend time with them. I mean, yeah, how in the world did you pull that off? Share your story behind like why you decided to write this book. But like how in the world did you even get in front of Elon and spend time with him? Like there's so many questions, man. Yeah, no, it's these are all fair, by the way, they're all fair questions. And I'm not, you know, it's really funny. And I feel like I can I can let my hair down and be more candid with you than maybe it would be with like we were on, you know, CBS or something. No, I mean, no, Fence, yes. Just like I'm not fired. Yeah, exactly. Love you guys. No beef with you. So it's interesting because I, you know, as I look back on it, so I have this benefit now of like the books out, people seem to like it. But this was a year ago. This was like, I mean, it was like the tail end of a six year journey that started out somewhat on a lark. Like it started out with me, me basically like going on Amazon, seeing if there was a book about this story, not really finding anything that I thought fit the bill. And then basically saying to myself, like, what if I could just daisy chain meetings together and interviews together and tell this story. And I had done books. So it wasn't that I didn't have the skills to do it. But like you described, these are the busiest people in the world. Some of them have, I mean, some of them, like, you know, my meeting is sandwiched between like a meeting with a former prime minister or like a meeting with a, you know, some, some big other person, right? And it's not as though they are, they are still going, right? So as I'm writing about them, they are in the middle of big deals, big entrepreneurial ventures, et cetera. I found that though, that a funny thing happened. What what I did in most cases, to give a little bit of a window to the process is with the most with the busiest people or with the most call it like in demand people, it almost always helped to have some kind of warm introduction, right? So a friend says, Hey, you should talk to this person. I think if I had to boil down a couple of the reasons why it was easier for me to get some of the access to the story. One is that I am writing about the creation of PayPal between the years 1998 and late 2002. That is that may as well be like a thousand years ago for some of these people. And actually it was really funny because you're making me think back to my first interaction with Elon. We sat down and he, he like, he like started, he's a very funny guy. He cracks a lot of jokes. And he started joking. He's like, man, like this is like the Mesozoic era that you're writing about. Like we haven't even, we're still like cells. We haven't even like learned to walk. We're not even on land yet. We're in still, you know, the primordial soup. And he was being funny. And I laughed obviously because it is funny. But in some fundamental way, the kernel of truth there is that for him, the creation of PayPal from 1998 to 2002 feels like several lifetimes ago. Right. And, and, and, and I think that's kind of one thing. The other is if you're constantly thinking about the future, as some of these people are, right? If you're Reid Hoffman and you're being pitched ideas for what to invest in and help to build for the future. A, an email based payment system that you built 20 years ago really like does feel like ancient history, right? But that also means it's safe terrain to talk about when somebody like me comes in and says, I don't care about Tesla. I don't care about SpaceX, but I want to hear about this really specific thing you did 20 years ago. You, you think of it at first, you're kind of like, why would anybody care? But what I found is that the moment I started asking questions, it felt like they were back at the start of the journey, that there was a quality of like, oh, yeah, like it was like the good old days, right? That people would laugh and they would go back into their files and they would find notes. I had people, for example, find like their offer letters from the company. They didn't look for them before I interviewed them. But after I took them sort of down the walk down memory lane, they would find them and email them to me. I had someone I did an interview with somebody and then they found like their hat and their T-shirt and their coffee mug and they like sent me photos. What would happen is that I was in the same way that if I asked you to reflect on like the start of your business or your, you know, years in school, you kind of think about them differently way after the fact. That's what I got. The other thing that was important is that, you know, there is a, like people sort of misunderstand. They think that building the companies that have come after PayPal is some like fundamentally different exercise, right? But actually like a lot of the principles are much the same. And so in reflecting on PayPal, what I benefited from was the fact that they had done other businesses, but then also that they could apply some of the like thinking and language like back and compare and contrast things, right? And so I had this thing of I was not a threat, right? Because they don't, they're not working at PayPal today, right? So they don't care. They enjoyed it because it's like at the beginning, it's like before they became the people they are. And I think that, you know, you're also the only person in somebody's life who who is listening, right? Like I would like I'd listened for hours, right? I wasn't there trying to sound smart. I was there asking questions and then just listening. And it happened that they wanted to talk for two and three and four hours at a stretch. I, you know, that's like it was a phenomenal experience going through that. I also just wasn't there to Naval gaze. Like, you know, they knew I was doing a book. They knew what the dimensions were. They knew the kind of storytelling I had done in the past. That's a long answer to your question. But but I might my sense is that if someone were writing about something that was going on today, that one of these people was working on, like if you went to Max Levchin and said, I want to write a book about a firm, I think the first thing he would say is that the story is not done yet, right? Like I'm still building it, you know? Whereas with PayPal, they feel like despite it being a real company today and having its own sort of story today, their version of that story is complete. It's in the past. So why not? Somebody's going to tell the story. Well, you did such a good job with incorporating principles and like but history. I almost felt like I was reading like a non-fiction like a fiction history book, but that was real. And so you like get very like in like it's just it was written in a very, very well, well done way. And then you also have a ton of details. So when you were when you were like going to interview Peter, Elon or you know, would you I'm assuming you like did a ton of research. How did you determine like what you were going to ask them? Or was your goal to like you had one at bats? Was your goal to like try to touch on one part and then ask for a second date kind of deal? Like what was what was the strategy going in? Because we could talk all day long about just the back story, which I find fascinating because it's very much of the what what are the guiding principles that have made them to go on to all be wildly successful. It's like I'm shocked quite frankly that you are the first person to really write a book like this. I mean, no, hey, yeah, you and me both. I would Walter Isaacson is a friend of mine. And I remember the first time I talked about the book, I said, Walter, this is really like a you book. Like this isn't even a me book. Like this is like what you should be writing. And I meant that because I kind of thought like why hasn't anybody done this? Right. You know, I could talk probably for an hour about the preparation, but I'll give the very condensed version. I had a guiding principle when I would go into the meetings with the senior most people or the people who like are the called the household names, right? Or or household names in Silicon Valley, because I don't think Max Levchin's a household name in the world, but he's certainly a household name and widely admired in Silicon Valley. My principle was I'm only going to get one at bat. And I got to make it really count because the value of their time is so high. I don't get to screw around, right? You don't you don't get multiple at bats. You don't get to hang out for a week. You know, you don't get to be like, hey, I'm going to move into your bedroom. And then like, you know, that's not going to happen. So my thought was always, okay, what can I do to make that at bat count? And the and I don't know that this is the right way to do it or that there is a right way to do it. But my print, the principle I always sort of led myself to think about was use the time to ask the things to get information you can't get anywhere else. Meaning, so like, here's how that translates. I would watch every single YouTube video and read every single article about them from, let's say, like the late 1980s on down the line until about 2005 or 2006. Because then they reach a point in their lives where like everything becomes billionaire caricature. And it's just like actually not that useful, right? But basically between like the late 1980s and 2005, 2006, I would, I would like study all the material. And I would see the places where they were asked the same questions again and again. And I would essentially like, like cross that off my list of things to ask, right? So for example, somebody might say to Peter, you know, why did you choose to invest in Max Levin? He had answered that a bunch of times in different places. And so I actually would ask like a different, I asked a different question. I didn't ask him why he invested in Max. I asked him why he decided to become CEO of the company that he invested in. Because no one really asked him about that transition, meaning they asked him why the money, but not about taking a leadership role. I hadn't seen anybody ask him that. This had two advantages. One, I don't think these people ever felt like I was wasting their time. I wasn't the person on their calendar or in their inbox. It was annoying or useless or underprepared. That's one thing. The second is the value per minute of my time with them went up really, like it went up really, really high because I was typically asking them things that they weren't asked about on like a tech crunch stage. And the reason is because like I had watched all the tech crunch videos, like I had gone to school. And this also created the element of surprise, so let me give you an example. Just to illustrate. This is really, really important. That what you're going to explain is very, very important to how to win friends and influence people. Yeah. Well, and again, I wasn't there to actually, like I really wasn't there to win friends. I was there to get info. And that's actually an important thing is like you should try to be a professional. I was a professional. I was there to write, not to be liked. But I did this thing that was really interesting. So in one of my interviews with Elon, I kicked it off and I remember it was like, I mean, my last one, it was like, it was long and we really only had time and I wanted to cover some bases. And I kept thinking like, what am I going to do to make this? Like he was really busy. It was a crazy period. I mean, when is it not a crazy period? But it was really, and I, I remember I had this anecdote about one of his close friends had passed away. This guy, Greg Corey, he was an early investor with Elon in zip two, and he helped to build the company. Like he moved in with the kit, with the Musk brothers and built the company. He was really, really important. And he died tragically at the age of 51 or 52. And I had actually tracked his widow down in Florida and I had done this two and a half hour epic interview with his, with Greg Corey's widow. So I thought to myself like, hmm, Elon's the same age that as his friend is when his friend passed away. This person clearly played a big role in his life, but it kind of got like, you know, like it never really got like kind of talked about. I wonder what would happen if I asked not a, not a business question to start with, but a question about Greg Corey. And I remember saying to him at the start of the interview, I said, Elon, I'm going to go in a little bit of a different direction to kick us off. You've done, you've answered a lot of my other questions about PayPal. What I want to know is I have this section I'm writing about zip two, and I want to ask you about Greg Corey, because he seems to me to have played a huge role in your life. And then all of a sudden, you know, he's, he's gone. Could you tell me about him? And like, right away, like he, he starts reflecting on his, one of his closest, the people closest in his life, and starts talking about him and gave me things in the book that I mean, honestly, I don't think he shared really elsewhere too much. And it helped round out that section about this figure who played a critical role in his life and helps advance a story. I tried whenever possible to ask questions that were at least a little bit different than what they were accustomed to, because that gave them the ability to think about things that aren't going to bore them to tears and aren't going to like just be the next person to ask them like about entrepreneurship broadly, or like, how do you develop technology? It's like, no, they've answered all of that in 15 other places. Hours of interviews are available to learn from if you're asking about general generic things, they do that all day long. If you are there to write something, and I would say actually there's a good principle for just generally busy people, if you're trying to meet with a busy person and you actually land the meeting, make that time count by being over prepared and then knowing exactly like how you want the interaction to go. I'll give you like two other little things I did, they're kind of random, but you opened up a vein. So this is like actually inside the process. I never had a laptop open during my interviews. I only ever had a piece of paper that had like a, I'll explain the paper in a second, but then I had my phone, which was on airplane mode, except for the recording, which was recorded, no interruptions, no distractions, no random, you know, like pinging or anything that comes up. And the reason I did the paper is because I would actually have all of my questions and I essentially had like, like kind of if then statements. So I had this whole series of questions, like the questions I knew I wanted to ask. And then I had this little section, it was called, I can look it up on my Google docs, it was like, if, if interview going well, then ask, and then I'd have like four or five questions, right? And it said like, I know there were a couple where I was a little scared. And I was like, if interview going badly, then ask. And then, and then I'd have another section that was like, if time and need to kill time, ask the following. And so what I did was I had over prepared for the first meeting with every person, assuming they would get, no, not give me a second meeting. I was really lucky. They all gave me additional meetings and time, which was great, but not necessary. I tried to like knock it out in those like, I had like, would time these things. So I was like, okay, if I get only 45 minutes, here's what I'll get. That's fine. It'll help me fill in this chapter, in this chapter, in this chapter. I was, I didn't go in assuming they would give me endless time, which actually ended up having the counter, like the opposite effect, which is preparation yielded interesting conversations, and they would respond to emails later to have multiple follow up discussions. I think it made the book better. But, but more importantly, it actually like forced me to up my game because I wasn't going to go in and just like randomly show up to read Hoffman's office. No, no, no, no, I was like, I was such a nerd about it. I like would drive the car parking that parking lot an hour before the meeting started. I had my paper, I had my phone, I like had everything outlined. I knew exactly how it was going to go. And, you know, I think that's a generally good principle if you are in a situation where you're trying to ask somebody for the most valuable resource they have, which is their time. I so many things you said there. I think there's something very, very special about doing your research on somebody and starting like asking them questions that they don't really talk about a ton, especially if you can have that tie back to some one of their whys in life or someone who's very like special to them. There was only this happened one time and I remember it very clearly where somebody I was on a podcast, usually I answer the same questions over and over again, probably like, well, like what you end up doing on podcast. And they asked me a question and they clearly did their research. And I was just, I had like this love in my heart for them from a standpoint of like, I'm so honored that you would go out of your way and ask this question because it allows me to talk about someone that I love dearly and almost praise them in a way. And it just is one of those things where like there's so many things that you've done from a standpoint of being prepared, being focused. And there's no doubt in talking with you like why people just are not like I'm like interested in what you're doing. You also weren't trying to like become famous by getting writing a gossip, you know, all I'm kind of dealing. So there's just, there's a lot of things that you've done well. And I just want to point something out what you didn't start this project to get clout. But the what's going to happen to you in the next two, three, four years because of this book and because of that six year investment, dude, you're going to be all time. And it's because of not just the writing, but it's because of who you are and the kind of person you are. I mean, didn't Elon tweeted about you after one of your meetings and like he didn't you didn't ask him to do that. Like it's just, it's just kind of person you are. No, I look, I really, I mean, I hope I live up to what you just said, right? So there's a, I appreciate it. But I also hope I live up to that. You know, he did, he was really generous. He did tweet about me. And I actually think that I appreciate his tweet because what he was saying was not that like I was a nice guy or a fun guy. What he said was that I had attention to detail and my questions were, were, he used the word, I think, superlative. And that was very nice of him to say. And I, it really, in a weird way, like I was trying to go for that, right? So people have remarked to me about the fact that there's like very specific things in the book that, that only someone who like lived the experience would have had access to. And there's this one thing that is really funny that's in the book that people may not appreciate because you wouldn't know it unless you were talking to me about it. There's a moment where the company launches, so PayPal launches, and all of a sudden they've like built a payment system, but they don't have a very robust customer service operation. And I wanted to make the point to people about how intense it is when you are dealing with not like a few angry customers, but literally tens of thousands of people who are pissed at you, right? And I was really like trying to wrap my head around like, how do I do that? So there were some places where I had like angry customer comments in some emails, and I found those and I put those in the book because they were funny, right? And I wanted people to laugh. But then I thought like, how do you, how do you describe the scale of this? I found a spreadsheet buried in an email archive from the company that did their customer service operations at the beginning. And it had a list of like the number of calls and the day. And so it'd be like, you know, February, whatever, this number of calls, February, whatever, this number of calls. So I actually went in the spreadsheet and I like did the math on how many calls there were. It was like $27,900, I think, and I counted up the number of days. And then I did the math on how many calls that represented per minute. And when I wrote it, I was like, this describes it. This is actually like how intense it is. But I had to actually like dive into the original spreadsheet to like make heads and tails of the craziness, because I couldn't appreciate it any other way. He was really nice in tweeting those things. I details matter. Like, you know, and it's kind of a funny thing to say it, but like the, the, the thing that I admire in good writing is that it doesn't run away from the number of customer service calls over a five day period, right? That if you are going to tell the story about the McLaren car crash that involves, you know, Peter and Elon, you, you like, I benefited so much from finding somebody who actually knew why the McLaren was a hard car to drive. And then essentially picking his brain for two hours and saying, Hey, can you like explain that to me? Okay, wait, wait, why is the acceleration like this? Like what features are in normal cars that are not in McLaren's? How come it was built like this? I think that's, uh, people have responded really positively to that. And it's because I went insane trying to get the details, but the details matter and they make for better stories. That's by the way, the other piece of this, there's a self interest in this too. It's hugely entertaining to find the details because they're the stuff that everybody misses. Right. And so like, like you can tell these stories in really flat and dry and boring way, but you can also like find the angry customer service note and like stick it in the book and get people to laugh for a page. And it keeps them moving to the next page. And in a story that's about a business like about a dot com, that's a payment services company, there's a way to tell that that makes people's eyes glaze over. I didn't want that. I wanted people to see the humor that I saw when I sat with them and they would tell stories and they would start to laugh. I was like, I need to make that come to life as well. Yeah, I love that man. And there's, there's, there's so many little stories that we could go into. And obviously like, I'm going to ask you kind of like a, I'm going to put a ball on a T and let you do whatever you want from a standpoint of this next question. It's like, obviously this book is how long on audible? I've been, I've been listening slash reading. It's, it's long. Yeah, it's long. I mean, it's long. Yeah, it's long. So the, and there's so many great details in there. Big picture. You, you, you knew very probably little about the story, but yet more than 99% of people even going into this project. Big picture. What were some of the guiding principles? What were some of like the, the most fun moments in writing this? And then I'm going to ask you if we have time about Elon especially and some of the, some of the life lessons, because you shared with me the first time we chatted some of the things I never even heard about with Elon. And I just think because he's such a popular figure right now, you, you have some really interesting research on him that I think would just be fun for the audience if we have time. Yeah. Guiding, guiding principles from the PayPal experience, you know, there's, there's sort of a laundry list, right? In a way, it's hard. The reason the book is not titled like how to build your own PayPal is because, is because, A, I didn't want it to be boring. But B, I, what I found were principles about problem solving and principles about teams and principles about people that I think extend like beyond like payment services or technology, right? Meaning you could be an entrepreneur or a creator in pretty much any field. And I think learn something from this story. I'll offer a couple that are pretty important, at least from my perspective. One that's really important that stood out to me is the ability for this group of people to be very candid with each other and to be almost like sometimes like gruff or like abrasive or like brusque, right? With each other, but in the service, not of like insulting someone or, or taking them down a peg, but of getting to better ideas. So there, there is this, there's a contest within the company frequently around ideas and somebody will say something and somebody also come right back and say something else. And it's really intense. And sometimes I would read it and I would like get uncomfortable on like vicariously. But as I interviewed people, what they would say is, you know, it was really good for us to have the kind of culture where we didn't stipulate each other behind each other's backs. There were some of that, but the volume knob on that was turned pretty low. What was happening was this kind of argument around ideas or products or services or concepts where you needed to be forceful and it was okay to be forceful. And I had this, there's a meditation in there from Max Levchin inside the book where he talks about, he said, you know, frequently people who are like that aren't angry at the person, they are angry that we're not done yet, that the solution isn't finished yet. And I remember reading that and being like, wow, that is like, that is such a powerful observation that if you are building a culture where the expectation is that everyone's going to be nice to each other all the time, you might actually be building a culture that's toxic to getting work done. Because you can't actually deliver difficult information. Because if you feel like you always have to be nice, you know, that it actually creates a complication. I heard this quote the other day, or like a story about like the difference between kind of being nice, and like the person who's nice will not tell you you have lettuce in your teeth. And the person who's kind will actually tell you you have lettuce in your teeth, because the kind thing to do is to be honest, right? And I think you can, by the way, you can take this too far as well, like there's definitely extremes. But I one of the things I discovered in the PayPal culture was this willingness to be direct, and to sometimes even be aggressive about your thoughts about an idea. Because you believe you're right, and you've done the analysis. And it's important for that to happen with some force, as opposed to like people kind of dancing around the issue. And I think that there was a tone set that that was just the expectation. Jeremy Stalberman is one of the people that I interviewed for this project. He is one of the co founders of Yelp, a service that probably everybody listening has used every day. One of his first jobs, this wasn't his first job out of school, I think it was his second. But one of the things that he said is, you know, he was in a company where he would send company wide emails, flat out criticizing the senior most executives in the company. And it wasn't just like tolerated, it was celebrated, right? Like people would like had him on the back and be like, that was awesome. And, and but what he meant by it wasn't that like you want the kind of culture that's just like, doing that to be ridiculous, it was no, we have like a point or a purpose, like I want to get to the right idea here, I'm gonna, I'm gonna state my position and do it with some backbone. I look, I haven't seen that described in the same way in other companies. And I think it is one of the operating principles that one can take from this, which is how do you build a culture where people do not, where people can argue very vocally, but not take things personally. I don't think it's easy to do, but I think it's absolutely essential to do if you're going to try to get to the right answer about something. That's kind of principle one principle to is sort of it's not even actually connected to the principle one. People think of entrepreneurs in this story and they think of Elon and Peter and Max and David sacks. I would encourage them to think more broadly about the people that were at the heart of the company, because a lot of them like are not the quote unquote, like person who's going to fit your typical mold of what an entrepreneur is. And I think we need to break that mold up. Like, I think we actually need to destroy it because there were people in this story who had spent 20 years in financial services, joined the company and totally changed the game. And there were also people who dropped out of high school and joined this company and totally changed the game. And so the idea of a lot of what we take for granted with quote unquote, who or what an entrepreneur is PayPal is actually like totally bust that narrative apart. Like, if you had a company of all Elon's, this company probably wouldn't have been successful. You needed other people in this story, including people by the way, didn't seek the limelight who avoided me when I tried to interview them, right? They they're essential. And I think we need to have a broader like tapestry of what that looks like, because it's actually an honest retelling of entrepreneurial stories, right? If it's all cult followings, if it's all like the cult of personality stuff, we actually like make it harder for people to aspire to do things like this. I would argue that being employee five and not a named co-founder at a company like PayPal, you played as important a role in the creation of the company as somebody who was employee one or two, right? You weren't a named co-founder. But the reason that I called the book the founders and put people on the front and back covers and on the inside covers who were not quote unquote named founders is because what I was talking about is the founding period of a company. That to me, like we need to we need to actually like have a principle where we say you can be just as vital if your employee 10 as if your employee one. Maybe that's not the most important thing, but I actually think it'll culturally it shifts the way we talk about this stuff. You actually got some criticism on Amazon for putting people that weren't the technical founder. And I was like, man, that I love that you did that because that is such a guiding principle that I think we can all learn. You also said this when we last chatted about like the urgency of time of like all these all these people know that they're going to die someday. And like they're even though they've made it, they're like are they have an urgency. Can you speak to that for a second? Yeah. And you know, my description of it is going to be probably like insufficient. But I noticed this, you know, I noticed it in like even my personal interactions with them. There was a restlessness. Like there is a a an energetic restlessness about this group of people who in some cases today have like more money than they're ever going to know what to do with, right? So they have no real reason to be restless in this sort of sense. But I got the feeling that that at the company, there was a real priority placed on like moving exceptionally fast. And also in almost like feeling like things were going to collapse if you didn't move fast, like there wasn't just like it wasn't just move fast. It was like there's a gigantic cost if we don't move fast, right? You know, some I explore some of that like some of that is real. It was the dot com bubble burst. eBay is attacking them. Visa and MasterCarter upset. They have 10 competitors that sprout up at the same time. But some of it I think is constitutional. It's just character like they were people who moved very rapidly. You know, they didn't wait there. They were executors, right? I think I can pinpoint some of where that comes from. But even today, I noticed that that is still true for this group of people, right? That there is a kind of like they will make it work. They will do weekend meetings. They will finish. There is an urgency about the work that they are doing. And I think that that's like people have written about that in other places. But I think I saw it so vividly at PayPal. There was this person who worked in QA, not somebody who makes the news. And she said, you know, when I worked at the company, I felt like it was all on my shoulders. And if I didn't show up, the whole company could collapse. And she's like, that's how we felt. We felt like one person could be the bottleneck. That's maybe not by the way, maybe not like the healthiest way to live or the healthiest way to run a company, but it's powerful. Yeah. And due to time, that's where we're going to end. I remember us chatting about, you know, when you met with Elon on a weekend and you were like, thank you so much for like meeting me. And he's like, I every day is a work day. And like the other thing that I just wanted to say, and this will maybe tee up for a future conversation about like Elon, when he first got started, being willing to work for free, reaching out to people, failing in a college race, you know, all these fun and exciting things that I go like, man, I relate. And actually, when speaking to you for the first time, I got so inspired because there's a part of me where I'm like, man, should I have better balance and all that stuff? And it's I'm going to get a lot of feedback on this. Let's do let's do 10 more minutes. Okay, okay. So, okay, so when it comes to Elon, and when it comes to his mentality, there's a moment where he's, he's reading a newspaper, and he finds someone that he wants to mentor, like get mentored by this part for me is one of my favorite stories about what you write about. Because this right, like that one piece right there, I've been telling people, including myself is like, this is the reason why I'm where I'm at is like, I think long term, and I'm so attracted to people that have already done it. And it's like so in my DNA. And yet, so many people are like, don't work for free, all these things. And like, even I had people very close to me that told me to leave the bank and work and get more money. But it's just like they, they were looking at it from their perspective. The fact that Elon took this approach blew me away. Yeah, it's, it's interesting that it's a part of the story that you have to be a certain kind of person, I think, like yourself to, to really appreciate it. So just to sort of take, give people context for it. When Elon arrives in Canada, he is he has left South Africa, and he's going to Queens University in Ontario. And his he didn't know anybody, he's got no money, he's like an undergraduate, he's like new to Canada. And he and his brother start to read the newspaper and cold call, right, no, no emails. I mean, there might have been emails, but there was a very primitive system. This is like, you know, the late 80s and early 90s. They start to cold call people they find interesting, and then kind of try to kind of finagle meetings. And I had read about one of the people that Elon had a relationship with his name is Dr. Peter Nicholson. And so in my first meeting with with Elon, I asked him about Dr. Peter Nicholson. And it was the most incredible thing because it there's this there's this gentleman, Peter Nicholson, he was a PhD, he was a scientist, but he found himself like working in politics and policy and then ended up at a place called Scotiabank. There was a long profile written about him and Elon read it and reached out to him. And I interviewed both of them. So I interviewed Dr. Nicholson for his perspective, and then Elon for his perspective. And Dr. Nicholson said to me, he's like, you know, I didn't like have college students randomly cold calling me just to hang out or talk to me or, you know, ask for a job. But that's exactly what the Musk brothers did. They like they called and I kind of on a large said like, all right, I'll meet with you. I'll have lunch with you. And he said, you know, Elon said at the, even today, he said, he's like, you know, man, Dr. Nicholson, he was super smart, a giant brain. There's so much admiration, despite the fact like this is the Elon of 2019, when I'm talking to him, like he still is like, looks up to this person as wow, that person's a gigantic brain. Oh my God, like how cool is that? He wanted to find someone to work for who would teach him something. And the interesting thing about that is that he didn't join to become a banker. He didn't join Scotiabank to like become the world's best banking person. He joined Scotiabank in order to basically be Peter Nicholson's right hand so that he could see how a scientist, somebody who has a PhD from Stanford can learn like flexibly and then apply it in different places. And I had this amazing thing happen where Dr. Nicholson is a very private person. You know, he lived, he like, he doesn't trade on the kind of Elon connection. He actually avoids it. He doesn't really talk to people like me. He had seen that I'd written a book about Claude Shannon. I think it was part of the reason I was able to get the access. And Dr. Nicholson said, you know, we would spend our spare time at the bank talking about space and puzzles and math and like the big things. And it was this mentorship relationship that is around ideas. And I, it could have been that Elon was paid. I don't, we didn't really talk about whether he was paid or not at this internship. But the point for him wasn't that he was going there to like be the best banker. The point was this person's insanely smart. And I want to be as close as I can to this person because that would be really, really cool to learn from them. That is a hard thing to do when you are a freshman and in college, right? It's a hard thing to do when you're an adult. I mean, come on, like, take this off the table. Age is not a factor here. There was a real sincere admiration of the kind of life that Dr. Nicholson had lived where you applied science and scientific principles in different places. I thought of it as like just the most epic thing. Think about what that would take. Like you're reading a newspaper article, then you call the reporter that did the article and say, I want Dr. Nicholson's phone number. Then you call this guy you've never met who was like in the Prime Minister's office in Canada and you say, I really want to meet with you because I want a job. And like Dr. Nicholson said to me, he's like, it took some gumption to call me and basically like ask for an internship, right? Or ask for a meeting. I don't think people appreciate that that is part of his early story. And I don't think that there's a fundamental appreciation for what that takes. Like it takes a certain amount of hutzpah, courage, gumption, whatever you might not call it, full hardiness. You have that in spades, right? I think that we, you have to overcome so much to do something like that and to do it with respect. And I think it's something that is worth talking about more. And do it in such a way where it's not like, what I'm not saying, what you're not saying is like call someone up and say, I want a job or can you meet with me? Like that's what's so fascinating is like, what did Elon bring to the table? Did you ask what Dr. Nicholson saw in Elon and like why he took the meeting and like why he gave him a job? Like because I think I know, but I have no clue of the details and that's what I'm most curious about. Yeah, I asked him this question and he said, you know, even at that age, he was already a pretty big picture thinker and he was smart and worked really hard. And so what would happen is Dr. Nicholson was within Scotia Bank, Dr. Nicholson had an interesting job. He was at the head of like essentially like a research team, like a small team that was like asking big questions that are coming from the CEO. And what would happen is like he'd ask some CEO would have some question and he'd hand it to Dr. Nicholson and Dr. Nicholson would assign it. And so he said that even like kind of at this early age, like you could tell right away that this was somebody who had a spark that Elon was somebody who was thinking about concepts like he was a conceptual thinker. He writes this report and writes this work product to get the bank to like take more risk, right? So there's some of those hallmarks. But he mostly what Dr. Nicholson was reflecting was that the first conversation that he had with the Musk brothers in Canada, he's like, you could sort of tell right away that like they're unusually energetic, very, very bright. They are, they're, they're sort of open to ideas. And, and actually it was funny now that I think about it, there's some quote, I might have been from my interview, but it certainly was in an interview where he said, you know, we had this long conversation about philosophy, politics and the way the world works. So it wasn't a conversation at lunch about banking. It wasn't about banking, it wasn't about mortgage rates. It was about philosophy, politics, economics and the way the world works. Right? So there was a broad mindedness too. He said, you know, when he's talking about talking about space, they're talking about like big concepts in physics that engaged both of them. So I hope, you know, there's some, some answer in there somewhere. But it's what's really interesting to me is that I, I said to Dr. Nicholson, you know, have you been what's your feeling on like all the success, straight success? Like, he's like, you know, I'm very proud to have like played a very small role, like whatever role I played mentoring. But he said, you know, you could sort of see that, that his, that energy and that ambition was there back, you know, back at that time. It was great. He was one of the best people to interview because you, you don't get the sense that he had no agenda, right? Like he had really no reason to talk to me. But he admires this person who happened to be his mentee and thinks very highly of him. And it was really cool to see that interaction between the two of them. And then by the way, you know, how many of us can name like a professor or a mentor from our college years who had this kind of effect, one of the first names out of the gate when I was interviewing Elon, he said, Oh, you should try to track down Dr. Nicholson. And like, and then he went on this long bit of praise about him. And so I actually, I found that it was wasn't just one sided praise. It was like the praise cut both ways. Dude, I want this narrative to be shared with more people because I, I that it's like one of the things in the support will end is one of the best compliments you can give somebody is at like, if they is like asking their opinion or asking advice. And a lot of people think it's a one sided, like if someone's a mentor of you, that you're like, you're the one taking, but it's a possible to be mentored and be such a giver in that relationship, let alone like you might go on to do things like you know, found some of the most inspirational companies, but like that, that needs to be shared with more people. And really, if we want to, if we want to go to the next level, we need to be looking for opportunities like that. Jimmy, I am so incredibly grateful for you and who you are and what you write about. And just how you articulate things. I'm grateful to call you a friend. I'm looking forward to seeing this book blow up and and all the exciting things that are going to be in your future. So thank you so much for taking time to be on the show. Well, thank you, Caleb. I really appreciate that. I appreciate the care with which you invest in the podcast, but also just invest in like understanding these stories. It really means a lot. Authors have this weird life, right? Like we basically like, we like are alone with our own thoughts for many years. And then we put our thoughts out and we like, we hope it's okay. And even if you have some other, you know, mediating things you do in the time, it's always really powerful for somebody like me to connect with somebody who cares about the content this much. So I am very grateful to you for that. All right, guys, go get the book, write review and let's, let's learn, learn from the founders. And what's really cool is there's probably someone listening to this that who knows might go on to do some pretty incredible things. So remember us, remember that's all I'm asking and drop a drop a cold email if you don't, you know, you never know when we're right back. Hey, I want to thank you for watching till the end. If you enjoy our content, please like, share, subscribe. It helps other people find our channel and we really, really appreciate it. I also want to let you know that we have this thing called the better wealth efficiency quiz. And our goal is to give you a wealth efficiency score in less than three minutes and really highlight and get you to start thinking about the potential inefficiencies that you have in your life. So if you haven't taken the quiz, go check out, it'll be the link below, check that link out, take the quiz and then let us know your score.
