The Founders

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER National Bestseller * New York Times Editors’ Choice * Financial Times “Books to Read in 2022” A SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS FINALIST “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. 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.

God and the Founders explains the church-state political philosophies of James Madison, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.

In 1776 the U.S. owed huge sums to foreign creditors and its own citizens but, lacking the power to tax, had no means to repay them. This is the first book to tell the story of how foreign-born financial specialists—the immigrant founders Hamilton and Gallatin—solved the fiscal crisis and set the nation on a path to long-term economic prosperity.

The must-read summary of Richard Brookhiser's book: “What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers”. This complete summary of "What Would the Founders Do?" by Richard Brookhiser, a renowned American journalist and historian, presents his examination of how America’s founding fathers would deal with the controversial issues facing the nation today. Added-value of this summary: • Save time • Understand how previous American leaders would have dealt with today's moral and societal issues • Expand your knowledge of American politics and history To learn more, read "What Would the Founders Do?" and discover how the founding fathers and creators of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence might have dealt with 21st-century political issues.

‘Michael Barone is the perfect person to write this important and thought-provoking book.' Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny The Founding Fathers were men of high intellect, steely integrity, and enormous ambition—but they were not all of one mind. They came from particular places in already diverse colonies, and they all sought their futures in different horizons. Without reliable maps of even nearby terrain, they contributed in different, and sometimes conflicting, ways to the expansion of a young republic on the seaboard edge of a continent of whose vast expanses they were largely ignorant. Mental Maps of the Founders explores the geographic orientation—the mental maps—of six of the Founders. Three were Virginians, who vied to expand their new nation toward different points of the compass. One, a refugee from Puritan Boston to more tolerant Philadelphia, built a commercial and journalistic empire spanning seaboard colonies and the West Indies. Two came from buzzing commercial entrepots of glaringly different character, the sugar-and-slave island of St. Croix in the Caribbean and the stern Swiss Calvinistic city-state of Geneva. These disparate origins informed their foundation and management of a financial and taxation system that enabled the new republic’s commerce to thrive. Inspired by the many wonderful books about the Founding Fathers, the journalist, map lover, and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics Michael Barone set out to explore the geographical orientation—the mental maps—of the Founders. In a series of reflective essays, Barone shows how the Founders’ mental maps helped develop the contours and character of a young republic whose geographical features and political boundaries were yet unknown.

America's Founding Fathers shared similar beliefs on the nature of civic life and the character of those supposed to be able to self-govern. Although they studied the failed republics of the ancient world, they believed that classical ideals were still applicable to politics. This unique contribution to the literature on American Founding gathers leading thinkers who set out not to relate its history, but its intellectual underpinnings. They explore the Founding Fathers' assumptions about civic life, human nature, political institutions, private morality, aesthetics, education, and history. Chapters on natural law, the Judeo-Christian conception of human nature, the influence of Aristotle and Cicero, the symbolic role of architecture, and the importance of education help understand the foundations that led to the Declaration of Independence and a constitutional charter that aimed to be universal in its human aspirations. This authoritative work provides a conservative response to more liberal interpretations of America. It will enrich the debate on civic life and be a key resource to anyone interested in America's "experiment in ordered liberty."

What would George Washington do about weapons of mass destruction? How would Benjamin Franklin feel about unwed mothers? What would Alexander Hamilton think about minorities in the military? Examining a host of issues from terrorism to women's rights, acclaimed historian Richard Brookhiser reveals why we still turn to the Founders in moments of struggle, farce, or disaster. Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Adams and all the rest have an unshakable hold on our collective imagination. We trust them more than today's politicians because they built our country, they wrote our user's manuals-the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution-and they ran the nation while it was still under warranty and could be returned to the manufacturer. If anyone knows how the U.S.A. should work, it must be the Founders. Brookhiser uses his vast knowledge to apply their views to today's issues. He also explores why what the Founders would think still matters. Written with Brookhiser's trademark eloquence and wit, while drawing on his deep understanding of American history, What Would the Founders Do? sheds new light on the disagreements and debates that have shaped our country from the beginning. Now, more than ever, we need the Founders-inspiring, argumentative, amusing know-it-alls-to help us work through the issues that divide us.

"A definitive look at the origin of PayPal and its founding team--including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared. They have defined the modern world. This experience defined them"--