Welcome to Business Books and Company. Every month, we read great business books and explore how they can help us navigate our careers. Read along with us so you can become a stronger leader within your company or a more adept entrepreneur. This month we read The Founders the story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs who shape Silicon Valley by Jimmy Sony. The Founders is a comprehensive portrait of the early era of PayPal, predominantly focused on the years between its founding in 1999 and its sale to Ebay in 2002. A deeply researched and well written narrative, the Founders provides the backstory of the group of individuals who became known as the PayPal Mafia, and we are privileged to be joined by the book's author Jimmy Sony. But before we get to Jimmy, let's introduce ourselves.
Hi, I'm David Short.
I'm a product manager at a bank.
Where I work on Zelle.
And I'm Kevin Houdak, chief research officer at a commercial real estate research and advisory firm.
And I'm David Kopek. I'm an assistant professor of computer science. Let's introduce our guest, Jimmy Sony. Jimmy Sony is the award winning author of Rome's Last Citizen the Life and Legacy of Cato mortal Enemy of Caesar with Rob Goodman a Mind at Play how Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age. Also with Rob Goodman. And the topic of our episode today, the Founders, the story of PayPal and the entrepreneurs who shaped Silicon Valley. Before he became an author, jimmy previously worked as a strategy consultant at McKinsey, a speechwriter for the Mayor of DC. And the managing editor of The Huffington Post. Jimmy, thank you so much for joining us.
Well, thank you guys for having me and for taking time to chat about The Founders.
Okay, Jimmy, let's go back to the beginning for you. Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you first became.
A kind of every writer has their version of this, right? Like, they've got their kind of origin story. And I think it's like one of those things where the fish always gets bigger in the fish expands in size as time passes. For me, you know, I was always a reader growing up. I just loved books, and we spent a lot of time when I was growing up in libraries and my know, they immigrated to the United States. They didn't really know about Boy Scouts and stuff and more interesting summer activities. So a lot of my summers were actually just spent, like, going back and forth the library and doing their summer reading programs. And I think for a lot of people who end up writing, you fall in love with writing because you fall in love with reading. And so that was it for me. After that, it was a little bit of school papers and sort of nerding out on yearbook, right? And then I ended up actually falling into speech writing because there were basically, like there was sort of this situation in the mayor's office at one point where no one else was around who was going to want to do big speech writing. And so I just kind of put my hand up and then at the same time I was always noodling on book ideas and a couple of those came to fruition. But I was not somebody who actually sort of had a roadmap for this. I kind of made it up as I went along. But I think if it has a tracing back or an origin point the origin point is really loving books. Just always having my nose in a book. That's great to hear.
How did you get interested in the PayPal story and especially the founding?
Yeah, it was a bit circuitous. I had finished up a book on Dr. Claude Shannon, who is an information theorist, electrical engineer, and one of the big minds at Bell Laboratories and Bell Labs. The three of you will know, but many people don't. Bell Labs in the 20th century is maybe and arguably America's most innovative cluster of people, right? Certainly in the kind of mid 20th century. They win multiple Nobel Prizes, they invent the transistor, they create touch tone dialing, they invent communications networks, basically. So much of modern life can be you owe a big thanks to the people at Bellabs. And I started basically just sort of Google and Wikipedia level research on what are other clusters of talent like that. So at Bell Labs, you don't have one person who's kind of the iconic mind, you have a bunch. So I started thinking, what are other groups? Xerox park sort of floated. General Magic was on that list. Fairchild Semiconductor and PayPal. And with the previous three, I just mentioned somebody either done like really good books or in General Magic's case, a really good documentary about that group and I just didn't find that for PayPal. And then at the same time, the people who helped to build the company are people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Reed Hoffman who are kind know, legendary in our era. And so I sort of spotted this disconnect. I was, wait, there's like endless breathless coverage of these people, but no one has gone back and traced this story. And that's what got me initially interested in even seeing if I could get the access, if I could get them interested in participating. But that's where it came from. Was trying to think of clusters of innovation because I had this sort of operating theory that these stories end up being hugely interesting because the personalities end up kind of having this very interesting interaction when they're in the and that's.
A fantastic segue there. Jimmy to my question, and it's based on past books that we've done in this podcast. So, for example, we did Liftoff by Eric Berger, the story of the early days of SpaceX, and he also had some really fantastic access and featured vignettes with some of the early, most critical employees of SpaceX. And I think that was a great power in his book. And it was a great power in your book. As and in the story of PayPal, we see Amy Clement as a bit of an early conscience of X.com. And later PayPal, we see the five month CEO Harris, who despite his short stay, is Know, created one of the biggest early decisions made when they merged X.com with and one of my favorites was who. He fabulously thought of that idea of random deposits to verify users, which everyone has been used to over the past decades. It seems like such a simple and obvious idea, but no one had really thought of that. And you really dig into some of these personalities and sort of chronicle when they came on board, what they originally thought of the company and where their futures laid out at the company. I'm wondering what was it like completing the research for the book? I know that you have that great sort of methodology piece at the end, but how did you really get access to all these major players and what was that process like?
Yeah, let's just say it was a lot of work, but I'll double click on that and dive into some of the particulars with the people at the very top, the most recognizable names, it was really important to go through someone they trusted. So especially early on, like when I was in the first, say, year of the book process, I would try to make sure that I got warm introductions to most of the people I wanted to reach out to. So that was the Reed Hoffman's and Elon's of the know. I wasn't going to be somebody who just knocked on their door and had it swing open. It would be much easier if someone made an introduction. And so I started with a couple of the people at the top, Max and Peter, and then kind of branched out from there to Ken Howry and Luke Nosick, and then kind of warmed my way into that first sort of seed group, that's kind of one part of the process. The other part of the process, honestly, was I was lucky enough over the course of my reporting to get access to a bunch of documents that were either phone lists or lists of employees or with the best part when I sort of hit pay dirt was getting access to this company newsletter. And the company newsletter gave me the name of every person that worked at the company over that entire period that I was writing about. So I basically worked my way backwards and created a little checklist and would contact everyone. And I used LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. Use those random websites. You can just Google people's names and find phone numbers. And so I tried to make an effort to find not just the bold faced names, but also the people that, like you mentioned, like Sanjay Bergaba, who play this enormously important role. And that was a bit of the process. I would say that 20 years had passed and most of these people, PayPal, was something they had done when they were just getting their start. So they were more open to talking to me about it than they would be if I were writing about something they were doing today, I think. Yeah.
And you mentioned Bergava as well. And I'm wondering, with some of those less obvious characters who are real people, obviously in your book, I'm wondering, do you have not necessarily a favorite, but one of the lesser known names who you think really made an outsized contribution and may have not necessarily gone unrecognized, but someone that you would want to highlight is just an interesting story. I gave three of the ones I thought were most interesting. Would you say you have one from your.
Sort of I can't one up you in some ways? I would say your description of Amy as the conscience of the company, I wish I had thought of that line when I was writing the book because I think it's great. And I think she played that role really powerfully. Sanjay was brilliant and provided some of the best explanation for how X.com, which was one of the precursor companies to PayPal, how he arrived. But I would say there's actually someone that there's a woman named ESB Master who founds a firm called Master McNeil. And what Master McNeil does is they name companies, they name companies and they name products. And so, for example, if you're on your laptops, the trackpad this is true for Apple laptops, the trackpad on the Apple laptop, that name, the trackpad actually came from her and her firm. She is responsible for the PayPal name. Before their product was called PayPal, you had two companies that merged. One was called X.com, that was Elon's company, and the other was called Confinity, that was Peter Thiel and Max Levchin's company. Now, Confinity, it was later concluded, was not exactly the best name for a financial firm because it starts with the word Con, and you sort of don't want the word con at the beginning of a financial company. But you have these two companies, X.com, which to some people sounded really ominous, and Confinity, which to some people either sounded confusing or ominous in a different way. And ESB Master, who has an undergraduate degree in English and really loves language and also has a graduate degree from Harvard in business, loves business. She marries this sort of union of art and science and has this process that she and her team do to come up with the name PayPal. I had not seen her written about anywhere else, but finding her, learning her process, seeing the original slide deck that she presented, when she presented the PayPal name, was definitely one of the thrills for me. I would also argue that I made a point in my process and I think, by the way, Eric Berger did a brilliant job of this with his book Liftoff to try to find the people who are the unsung heroes. You actually have to do that because companies aren't. They aren't generally if they're successful, they're not cults of personality. They have a huge number of people who make them tick. And it's a writer's obligation to go and find those people and tell their stories. And by the way, those stories end up being usually ten x better than many of the people that everybody knows.
Jimmy, let's dive into those early predecessors to the merged PayPal confinityandx.com for our listeners who are not familiar with them. Can you tell us a bit about their founding visions, what they intended to do, and maybe we'll later on get.
Into how that evolved. Sure. So picture sort of late 1998. A young, fresh out of college University of Illinois graduate named Max Levchin has just arrived in California and he meets this guy named Peter Thiel and he convinces him to invest in the company that would become PayPal. At first that company is called FieldLink, and its vision is actually to connect basically to do mobile encryption, mobile security. So the idea was, if you're like a field tech for a company, you should be able to have your Palm Pilot connect with homebase. That evolved. And the kind of big signature product debuted in 1999 was going to be that two people could beam money to each other through their Palm Pilots using the infrared ports. So the infrared ports are brand new in 99 and Confinity's Vision was using our product PayPal, you could beam $10 to each other over lunch. So if the four of us were at lunch, like, one person gets the bill, the others whip out their Palm Pilots and we beam money. That was their product. That was their vision, was a mix of what I would call sort of at the beginning, mobile security and then evolving to become mobile money transfer. Then down the street, literally down the street, there is a guy named Elon Musk. He has just exited his first startup, Zip Two. And his view from his first days ever working at a bank when he was a college intern is basically that banking is archaic and all of its infrastructure is in serious need of an upgrade. Oh, and why do financial services exist in silos? There's no reason for this. One place should be able to do everything from brokerage to savings to mortgages to loans, all of it. That Vision, a broad financial services vision is called X.com. And that's what he's trying to bring to life, just again, a few blocks down the street.
And how did the PayPal email based.
Payment system end up coming about?
Yeah, it's one of those great serendipitous stories. So to be fair and a part of the story that I think is sort of underappreciated. Both companies devise an email based payment system at around the same time. Confinity is probably like a few weeks ahead of X.com. So on the Confinity side, what happens actually is that very quickly the board and friends of Peter and Max start to push back on this money beaming Palm Pilot vision. And one of the people who pushes back at a late night meeting that summer of 99 is Reed Hoffman. And what Reed Hoffman says is like, look, if we were to walk into a restaurant in the Palm Pilot capital of the world, you would still have a hard time building a use case for this money beaming stuff. And he kind of pushes this critique. He says, look, this has a ceiling on a success. And he asks a key question, what if one of us, one of us four at lunch left a Palm Pilot at home? What do you do then? And what Max lechen says is, well, what if we built an email companion, like basically a backup system, so that if you don't have your prompilot with you, we've got this email thing, you can kind of email the money, great, done, that's like a part of the plumbing, but it's not the core product. That is the birth, the proper birth of what becomes the email based money system for Confinity. On the X.com side, the way it was explained to me by Elon as well as other employees that were there in the early days, they just assumed emailing money was going to be a part of this very big vision that they had for X.com. And the basic gist as Elon said, he's like, we just kind of assumed, like, it's so easy to build an email based money system. That's going to be what we do, that's just going to be a part of you could get a mortgage and you could send money by email. And he said it's super easy to build. Technically, we just figured this was going to happen. Neither company really thinks this is going to be the core product and they build it basically as an aside on both halves of the company. So that's the origin story again, it's not a part of the plan.
Yeah, and I found that really interesting as well, Jimmy. And at one point you had Musk saying that evolutions, not revolutions in online banking was important and like you mentioned, he just thought that the online money transfer was just one step in the way to revolutionizing the financial services industry. PayPal, and at that point know, was more focused on the beaming at first, like you mentioned. And I think it shows that sometimes you arrive at the real impact by looking at your backups, looking at the iteration of the process. So that's a great point.
It's also just to be clear, when it was really funny, one of my favorite moments in the know. Musk is one of these people that and I think people this this gets him into hot water sometimes, but he's always reaching for humor. So he's got this bit of a kind of comedy streak about him, right? Even in answers to basic questions, I think he's always reaching for a joke if he can. And sometimes, again, those jokes get him in trouble. When I was asking him about the email thing, he actually was so dismissive. He goes, yeah, emailing money. I mean, you're just moving one line in a database from one place to another and you do it. He's like, it's super easy, it's so dumb. My kid built one, he's like twelve. And this is like how dismissive he was of that product. And again, in a way that was jovial and ingest, but it shows you that it was such a small part of his big vision for what X.com could be. And that just the way he described it. Like, my kid built one, he's twelve. I found that to be pretty endearing.
Well, it's interesting too, because they almost happened upon so many other trends and revolutions as they were doing this. So for example, at one know, the language that I read in your book was elon was almost moving towards NFTs and crypto at some point as well. As part of this, I think what I would say is the first Ted Talk almost happened. I can't remember who the executive was, but they went to China and participated in a conference. And I believe that one of the companies had an hour's worth of speaking time. The PayPal executive convinced them to give him 15 minutes. And it sounds like he basically gave a Ted Talk or a very Jobsian presentation that swayed all of the Chinese business leaders and bank leaders to really just intersperse PayPal throughout their comments. The rest of the conference, and maybe you can remind me who that executive was.
Yeah, it was a guy named Jack Selby. And he's invited to this prestigious conference in China. There are all these other kind of banking executives there and he writes this note back to the company. And the reason I actually took the note and put it in the book is because Jack Selby was not one to send company wide emails. He was actually kind of annoyed by company wide emails. But the experience in Beijing so struck him that he sent this note to the company. And for me it was an illustration of a few things. One, how quickly PayPal went from a domestic use case to its expansion abroad and its interest abroad. Two was it allowed me to widen the aperture of the book so that we have this sort of like even with American technology firms, they sort of look at it always from the inside out. Meaning, I live in the United States, I sort of see these companies. I understand the lingo, the jargon. I see how they're seen by the American media. It was really useful for me to see how the Chinese saw PayPal's success and then to do it through Jack's own words. And then the last reason is partly because I was always going for humor, but the Chinese thought that Jack not wearing a tie when everyone else at the conference was wearing a tie was, in his words, tremendous. And so he sends back this long note. But it's this moment for me that again puts PayPal in context because the Internet is one of America's great exports, right? Many of the building blocks of the Internet are built in the United States and the tech boom, but even the tech bust that is felt powerfully in the United States. But there's a delay abroad, so PayPal still has a halo. Even though the Nasdaq is tanking in the year 2000, PayPal is still received so well abroad and no one wants to sort of have FOMO. And so even when the company is struggling and its representatives go travel to places like South Korea, places like China, they're received like conquering heroes.
So Jimmy, thank you for the clarification on that one. It's super interesting. Anecdote from the book. I know that your book jumps around in time a little bit and I'm going to ask you to do the same. As I jumped a bit ahead, I wanted to go back to the race for customers between Confinity and X.com. I know at one point it was competing in terms of the incentives and the bonuses they could provide to customers. There was a lot of that sort of transactional, less strategic competition going on that was just about dollar figures in the user's accounts. And ultimately that sort of a mentality could have potentially bankrupted both of them. I'm wondering, in your opinion, was their merger inevitable? Was it the only viable option? What do you think could have happened otherwise?
I'm in the tough position of I interviewed all the big personalities that were at the heart of it. Right. And so I was really careful with this book, as I hope came across that my opinion really matters not. Right. I was trying to do the best job I could of taking, let's say, Elon's opinion or Max's opinion and bringing it to life on the page, because I don't think authors should necessarily have their thumb on the scale, especially know I was working with subjects who could tell me what they were thinking. But you've asked the question, so I'll do my level best to answer it. If you look back at and I benefit from, again, hindsight and PayPal's success. So this is all with a big caveat. I think that the merger, tough though it was, and difficult though it was in the moment, was really the thing that set the company apart from the, I don't know, dozen, two dozen other payment systems that were established at the time. It's actually one of the pieces of the story that matters a lot, and I hope I did it justice, which is PayPal's. Success was anything but inevitable. There were plenty of other players in the space. There were digital wallets, there were other payment transfer firms, there were banks that were building their own products. And so you have really a massive group of companies and a mix of startups and established banks that are fighting for the same terrain. Because X.com and Confinity were ranked kind of one and two and decide to join forces, they basically achieve the escape velocity they need together and they build a critical mass, particularly given that they both build their critical mass right on ebay. So they become the dominant payment system for this kind of economy on ebay. I don't see a way that either company could have succeeded without the merger because I think that, per their own accounting, they were burning up money really fast fighting one another, and they were also working really hard to fight one another. Now, I think if you were to interview and I asked them this, I think some of these people are competitive enough that they believe they could have eked out a victory. But I think if you sort of look back at the growth rates, the trajectory and everything else, the merger does seem like the thing that rescued them. And again, it's hard to run the counterfactual, but you sort of see what happens right away, which is they merge these user bases. They are able to become the dominant player on ebay and their growth becomes at that point, the growth becomes self fulfilling because they're so large on ebay that buyers have to join PayPal because all the sellers are taking it. And sellers have to offer PayPal because all the buyers want it. And so I think that is a byproduct of the merger. The other thing that happens, and this is sometimes also missed in the retellings of this story, it brings people like Roloff Bota into Max and Peter's orbit and it brings people like Russ Simmons and upan into Elon Musk's orbit. So you have a combination of the talent on these teams and to, you know, many of the people that he hired, julie Anderson, Todd Pearson, Sanjay Bargava, they were rock stars and they become rock stars at the combined entity. And so I think those are two big reasons. One, it united the user bases, but two is that it united these teams and you had the talent, kind know, you had this massive concentration of talent once these two entities joined forces.
Yeah, and it was a very interesting combination as well. You go into a lot of detail in the book about the various coups and sort of crazy back and forth both within the merger, where Elon tells it that he literally was going to reject once it became a 50 50 offer. But that Bill Harris sort of put a gun to his head that he would quit as CEO and blow up their current funding round, effectively killing the company. And so Elon was sort of forced into accepting it when he'd originally come in with I think it was like an 8% offer for the merged entity going to Confinity but then from there, then there's the Nuthouse coup and then ultimately Elon getting pushed out as well for Peter Thiel to come back.
Could you go into a little bit.
Of the details there as the back and forth among the CEOs through the merger?
Yeah, I don't think I expected this much Shakespeare in a tech story. I sort of anticipated having to learn about the differences between Linux based systems and Windows based systems. I thought I would need to get smart about some of the basic elements of product management but I really didn't think that this would Macbeth or anything of that sort, but it turned out that way. There's a kind of like broad call it a conclusion that Elon talked about when we talked about the first time that there was an attempted overthrow of his leadership early in X.com. And I asked him about it and he know there's always drama in startups and I didn't make much of that line at the time. I mean, I included it in the book because it was his concluding thought of this very difficult early period. But I've thought about it more since, and you sort of look at any one of these stories of how these new things come into being, right, these new entities, and you end up having to have people within these companies who basically look at some industry and say, no, I can do it better. And I can do it faster or cheaper or differently. And I think that draws a certain kind of person and it's not always going to be the person that kind of gets along with everybody else, right? And so what happens in the PayPal case is you have a ton of IQ points in the room at the same. So you know, by my reckoning or by my counting there was one attempted coup, then there were two actual coups, then there was sort of the distant possibility of a third and there was a lot of what I describe as sort of like Game of Thrones kind of stuff that happened in the middle of the story. I tried to focus more on kind of what the strategic and substantive differences were across the leaders and less on maybe call it the personality conflicts. Because I think that at the end of the day, if you look at some of the coups that happened or near coups, they weren't really about people kind of being snarky. It was more about substantive disagreements, about company vision. And I think that's one of the key things is that as you pointed out. Eventually Max and Peter Do and a group of other folks at the company, do push Elon out of the company, and I think it was a difference of founder vision. In Elon's case, he wanted to fulfill the original expansive X.com vision. And in Peter and Max's case, they thought that the payment services model that PayPal had built was the only path for the company's success. They also thought that the company had a pretty high burn rate and wasn't going to be able to make the broad financial services superstore work. So they sort of organized an overthrow of the CEO. It's a famous moment in Silicon Valley history. It's a very painful moment for Elon himself. But in some ways and again, this is like per the liftoff book about SpaceX and obviously what's happened with tesla in some ways, people pointed out that it's quite possible that if elon hadn't been overthrown, he would have continued to run PayPal and try to make it into the financial services superstore, leaving uncertainty for the future trajectories of SpaceX and tesla. So it all worked out. But I do think that the important thing is that these things tend to be written as personality conflicts. In this case, at least, almost all of these big leadership upheavals happened because of differences in strategic vision. It didn't mean that there weren't sort of funny comments and starky things and sarcasm and whatnot, but I do think it's important to underline the substantive differences of opinion that are at the heart of a lot of these things.
Yeah, and I actually took away from your book, Jimmy, two big important themes, one of which deals with what you just mentioned, and you described it as Shakespeare and Mcbethie and et cetera, but it was almost like there was a friendly competition, there was a spirit of competition that ended up being positive. And in the beginning of the book, you mentioned some of the case interview questions that Peter and Max would give to the new candidates, and that was something important. And even when Elon was pushed out as a result of the Nuthouse coup, I remember that he wrote that very it was a very decent and dignified exit email to the team, and some folks were even surprised about that. And I thought that that spirit of friendly competition was important for the company. The other thing you mentioned, too, is that a lot of the employees at either X.com or Confinity were recruited because they weren't coming from payments world, not coming from the financial services sector.
They were bringing in not that much.
Subject matter expertise, but a lot of big thinking, big creative thinking. And I thought that was important, but just as an observation that you can respond to or not, some of the key moments in the life cycles of the company come from some of those I would deem them suits coming in. Right. Bill Harris was previously at Intuit and he was ultimately the one who saw the value in the 50 50 merger that could have ultimately saved the company. That was more of that business risk mitigation thinking, not so much the soaring take no prisoners startup approach. Another one was when they closed their round early and they could have stayed out and raised more money and had more exposure to the.com bubble, but they ended up closing right before it. And that was another kind of point where it was risk mitigation business strategy world, not so much the freewheeling no ties culture. And I thought that was one of my key takeaways, was that a balance of those two approaches likely works best keep the CEO from intuit there for five months, make one of the biggest decisions in the company and reap the reward and benefit from that.
It's a really perceptive observation. I'm not sure I could have made it when I was writing it, but it's spot on. There is a balance between bearing risk and then mitigating risk that is at the heart of this story, and I would argue is at the heart of every successful startup story. You have to have someone that is willing to put his own money on the line and give it away for free to users as a way of getting growth and hitting that escape velocity. You also have to have someone who is working like Rolof Bota to design a model that essentially outlines where the pain points are within the company, where the cost curve is unsustainable, and then say, look, if we don't fix this, we're dead right. And so you have a mix of personalities at the company. I've taken to know a startup like PayPal. If it were all Peter Thiel's probably would have been unsuccessful. If it were all Elon Musk's probably would have been unsuccessful. It was in fact a mix of people who were inexperienced and experienced. In fact, one of the names that we kicked off the podcast with Sanjay Bergava is a prime example. Sanjay had done, I think, by that point, ten or 20 years in the financial services sector and he joins X.com with Elon and it's a real education right away and sort of how startups are different from these established financial institutions. But it is because he has that experience that he can really think through the payments plumbing system and rewire it and think about it a little bit differently than people have. And so I do think there were some places where inexperience really served the company well. A great example is fraud fighting. They were willing to take risks with their model that maybe an established bank wouldn't because they had fraud on the platform at the same time they were able to defeat the fraud. There were other places, Sanjay, and there's another gentleman named Sandeep Lal, where having experience when you're talking to banks abroad like HSBC or Santander or one of these that really helped. Like it helped to have someone there that spoke the lingo, that knew what they were doing. And so I can't sort of weight the scales one way or another, but I think the mix of experience and inexperience proved to be important for this company's success.
You've talked a bit about achieving that escape velocity and of course the fuel for that rocket was ebay and PayPal's dominance of the payment space within ebay. I think some of our younger listeners might not be familiar with just how big ebay was in the late ninety s and early O's, both culturally and also kind of producing this whole cottage industry of ebay power sellers around the country. Could you tell our listeners a bit about just what a big force ebay was and also why PayPal specifically was able to capture so much of its payment market share?
Yeah, this is one of my favorite parts of the book to write. It was like sort of diving into ebay history. Right? So when PayPal arrives on the scene, ebay is one of the glittering stories of the.com era. They have just gone public. People are talking about how basically that fixed price retailing would be dead and ebay was the one to kill it. They have an incredibly passionate user base. I think there were some estimates that had them at like ten or 12 million people in the year 2000, which again, relative to the size of the total internet at the time, is significant. They have this incredible thing, they don't have any inventory, so their margins are insanely high even when the.com bubble is bursting. Ebay is one of the few companies that actually manages to stay very solid during that period because again, their growth has been organic from the start. There's a story, and I may get it wrong, but I remember something along the lines of when their first outside money wrote them a check pero midyar, basically put it in, they cashed it, but they kept it on the side because ebay was profitable from the get go and they never ended up actually needing that money. At they're a, they're a powerhouse now. Part of their model early on their operating model was we're going to service online auctions and we're going to connect auction buyers with auction sellers, but we're not going to help you take photos of your items, we're not going to help you do the last mile of your payment system. We're not going to handle shipping and handling. We're going to leave all those ancillary services to our users and they're going to have to sort it out among themselves. So what does that create? I had this executive, I didn't include this quote in the book, but this executive from PayPal said when you used ebay in the year 2000, the auction part of it felt like the year 2000, the payments part of it felt like the 1950s. Because as soon as you finished your auction, you basically had to figure out with the seller, like, are you going to take a check? Am I going to mail you cash and envelope? Am I going to send you Western Union wire transfer? What are we going to do here? That created an opening for an email based payment system which both Confinity and X.com were creating. And it is on ebay where their products first take root and first have a lot of success. A big part of that is that both companies are giving away bonuses. So David, if you wanted to sign me up for PayPal, you send me a referral link, I'd get $10 and it would say, David has sent you $10. But what's more powerful is that David, you would get $10 as soon as I signed up. And so what happened is they created this incredible referral pipeline. They had huge user growth, but those ten and $20 in the caseofx.com bonuses helped to underwrite a lot of ebay transactions, which in many cases were small dollar transactions. So they were sort of increasing the margins on all of these ebay auctions, growing like crazy on ebay. But a big part of that is that ebay had not created a unified payment mechanism for its auction buyers and sellers. And I remember someone telling me from PayPal, they said, you know, one of the things that we did was we were always in this foot race with ebay to see if we could build and deploy our products faster. And a big moment of success for us was when we realized that our payments emails were getting to ebay users faster than the emails indicating that the auctions were closed. And they goes, that's when we knew we were winning. Yeah.
So it really does come down to, I think, the quality of the technology and the user experience as well.
I mean, when you look at Bill.
I believe it was called Billpoint, which was ebay's incumbent in house function when they switched over to that Buy It Now, which I always thought was the most useful thing on ebay. Then again, I wasn't using it in the early 2000s, but apparently Buy It Now would be sending notifications to buyers and sellers eleven days or so after the transaction took place. And one thing I just wanted to get into as well, Jimmy, was the idea and relating back to the previous episodes of this podcast. This season, for example, we read about Edwin Land and Polaroid and how Kodak didn't even notice Polaroid at first and thought, and even though Polaroid largely depended on the chemicals from Kodak and some of those processes, and then once they realized, it was just too late. What I sensed in this book was, and from the PayPal story, was that PayPal was not necessarily on the ebay radar in the beginning, yet that was PayPal's fuel to growth in the email, peer to peer payments there was also the credit card companies. As you know, at one point PayPal largely depended before they started hooking into bank accounts on the credit card processing and on the credit cards as well. They were so dependent on some of these platforms and companies. I'm wondering why didn't ebay act sooner? Why didn't the credit card companies or big financial institutions act sooner?
Yeah, it's a great question and it's a question that actually the people who live this story would ask themselves all the time. So you're spot on because they would look in the mirror and say, how is it possible that we're even doing this right? I think the answer has multiple parts and I think it depends on if you're sitting in an ebay executive's chair or if you're sitting in the chair of someone who's at Visa or Mastercard or American Express or Discover. On the ebay side of things. They acquired this company Billpoint in early 99. Billpoint is really young when it is acquired. I don't actually know that they had even had a product deployed formally. They were at the final stage of things where you could build something really quickly and then get it acquired really quickly and hope for the best with the integration. And they had a lot of the same ideas that PayPal had. I mean that's like I interviewed a bunch of the folks who were there, interviewed one of the co founders and he said, look, we had studied the micro payments literature. We knew what we were doing. It was the same kind of the same sort of process. But we had an acquisition offer on the table from ebay and it was a giant and why wouldn't you take that? It insured some security except was acquired by Amazon and so you know, others in the space that are getting acquired. So with know a big part of the reason why they didn't want to wade into the choppy waters of payments is because payments are hard and they're subject to fraud and you get all kinds of noise in the system. And ebay was a business that was sort of free from that noise to some degree. By not owning payments, you also don't own the problems that come with payments. You get to take your margins on auctions, you get to design better platforms, you get to expand into new auction categories, you get to do ebay Motors, you get to expand abroad. You don't have to worry know, Russian hacker trying to put up fake ebay listings and then benefiting from the credit card thing and then having to deal with chargebacks. It's a really messy thing to build a payment system and ebay wanted no part of it. The other thing is you have to think about relative to the total size of ebay's business. Even if they did integrate payments at that time, payments were really only going to increase their margins by a percent. 5%, 10% maybe. So if you were giving the most generous interpretation you could to the ebay side, what you would say is this they let PayPal endure four years of total grief and a ton of fraud and $200 million burned up in order to eventually get the payment system right. That's the ebay side of it on the Visa. And you know, what PayPal becomes is essentially what's called a credit card Master merchant. They sit in between these small dollar payments that are happening on ebay and what they're essentially saying to the market is, we're going to underwrite the risk here for these small dollar sellers, right? Meaning people on ebay, not massive multi million dollar businesses. They don't have years of accounting they can go through to subsidize them or to check to make sure that they're good for what they say they are good for. So ebay is taking a PayPal is taking a big risk in playing that credit card Master merchant role. And I would say that from Visa and Mastercard's perspective, it wouldn't have been worth the headache, right? In some ways, the more natural owners of that business would have been Visa and Mastercard because PayPal essentially has to operate on top of those businesses to make its own business successful. But if Visa and Mastercard are staring at somebody running something out of their garage on ebay and a buyer that you can't really like, a digital buyer on ebay, that's not a place where Visa or Mastercard are going to over index when they've got much bigger fish to fry. Yeah.
And thank you for the answer. And I heard you say the word grief there living in grief for four years. And I wonder if they didn't have the sort of damocles hanging over their head constantly, would they have taken some of those risks and been as open minded and made some of the moves they did which ultimately contributed to their success?
I think it's 100% I think pressure is a big part of this story. Pressure in this story becomes generative and it's actually a big part of what I would say. People will often ask the question, and I'm sure the three of you are actually better versed in this than most, what is the difference between a startup and an established company? And I would argue that there are a number of factors, but I think that with this story in particular, part of what made this company successful is that it always felt like it was going to go out of business the next day. I had an interview with someone who talked about how there was this psychological shock when the.com bust started happening because all of a sudden Palo Alto went from a place where there were fancy startup parties every single night to a place where storefronts were being boarded up. You had tech companies that could do no wrong, that would spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads and then something like 85% of the value of the Nasdaq is wiped out in the space of a year, year and a half. And one person described it as the Killing Fields. Right? And that is the moment that PayPal basically starts to take off is at the moment when all of their contemporaries are running out of money. And so they have this enormous pressure that they're feeling internally as well as pressure externally. I would say the other thing that happens is that pressure basically leads them to work seven days a week for four and a half years to make the company successful. Because if they don't get it right, they have a feeling that they're going to end up and you have to pardon the French, they're going to end up on this website called Fuckedcompany.com, which was essentially cataloging all of that era's. Dot Misadventures and I had this person who worked at the company say, every day we woke up, we woke up and we would check Fuckedcompany.com because we were just like, okay, this is the day we're going to end up here. This is it. The jig is up. And so I think that pressure, it forced the company to move faster, it made them work harder. And I think without Know, I'm not sure the PayPal would have been successful.
Yeah, I think the details of the difficulties that they went through are really inspiring and interesting. And I think Peter Thiel even kind of says that he thinks part of the success of the team afterwards was the crucible of the PayPal team, that they really did go through a lot. That if you're at Google and it's just like everything's great, you created this brilliant thing that just up and to the right forever and you have no real competition, it's a different kind of thing. And so sure there are people that came out of there, but not as many. And so maybe that is sort of what leads to the PayPal mafia and all of these future founders and successes that we see. Do you think that dynamic of the difficulties of the journey there is what then led to so many succeeding as.
Founders down the line?
I think it's certainly part of it, meaning I think it's necessary but not sufficient, if that makes sense. Sort of one ingredient, and there were several, but I will say on that point in particular, it makes me think of this story that is not in the book, but is a part of how I always think about this particular lesson. So one of the things that PayPal had to struggle with is product distribution, right? Not just how do you build something great, but how do you make sure people actually find it and use it and kind of stick with it. And they're facing this problem of they've basically commandeered the cash registers at someone else's store, right? They're running ebay's payment services, but ebay is not something they own. Ebay is not like a public platform. It's a publicly traded company that has shareholders, but they've sort of wormed their way in. They're parasitic, right? They're usefully parasitic, but they're parasitic. And so they always had to play this cat and mouse game of like ebay would do something in their code to disrupt PayPal's process. PayPal would do an update, then something else would happen, then PayPal would update. They were always in that posture. Fast forward. The co founders of YouTube come out of the group that made PayPal. YouTube enters into this same kind of relationship with a little website called MySpace, where you have MySpace users embedding YouTube videos. MySpace gets really mad about this and starts to do all sorts of funny business to boot these YouTube videos off. And one of the things that one of the YouTube co founders shared with me is he said, oh, we learned this from PayPal. What we did was we had our users call MySpace headquarters and complain. So we put up their corporate office number or whatever, and it essentially was the same play because that was exactly what PayPal would do. They would have ebay users complain to ebay or complain on ebay message boards about ebay's behavior. And so the YouTube folks basically led MySpace users to complain to the MySpace people to say, hey, reinstate those videos. We really like that platform. It's really working for us. And so there was a way in which there was the difficulty of ebay that led to this strategy of what happens when you're a nuisance on another website. And I think that's one example of many of where if you are in this position of having to be essentially like a startup guerrilla fighter, you don't lose those instincts when you go on to the next fight, right? And I think there is a lot of that in this group. I think some of it is nature. I think some of these people are just competitive by nature, but they definitely nurtured that ethos at PayPal. And you see it in different venues. In the afterlife, though, again, the afterlife was sort of beyond the scope of my writing.
One thing that's interesting about the whole story that you cover so well in the book is how action packed it is in such a short period of time. And there's this kind of dance with ebay back and forth. Is ebay going to buy them? Is ebay not going to buy them? Is ebay's offer high enough? And then they ultimately end up IPOing, but then bizarrely end up getting not really bizarrely, but interestingly, end up getting bought by ebay just a short while later. So I'm wondering if you think the sale to ebay was inevitable, did it have to happen? And how do you think PayPal would be today if that had never happened? There wasn't this like, I think it was ten or 13 years where PayPal.
Was a part of Ebay. Yeah, you've asked me the sort of great after dinner question that occupies the minds of a lot of the people in this story. And I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I spent a lot of time speaking to other people who are at the heart of the story about it. Because as you identified, this company that really properly starts in 1999, in February of 2002, it IPOs. It's one of the first successful IPOs after September 11, and actually is one of the first successful tech IPOs in a while because it's been rough, there rough seas for a year and a half. A few months later, they're sold to their chief competitor, Ebay. And there are mixed feelings on the day of the announcement within the company, was this the right thing? Was this the wrong thing? Did we sell out? Could we have made more? Would we have been successful? When I interviewed Elon, Musk himself told me he know I thought we were crazy. He's like, I thought the value there was going be to a lot of value, that it was still to be unlocked later, and it was nuts. But Key and many others pointed out that a big motivating factor wasn't just that they could derisk the company by selling to Ebay. It was also that the team was just fried. Right. Because basically after this really intense four year period, it was just getting really tiring and exhausting to continue to fight Ebay for survival. They've gone public, they're still fighting Ebay for survival. And so part of this was just they sat down with different team members, and those team members played back to me. They said, look, once you've been working seven days a week for a few years and your entire life is about the company, you sort of start to wonder, is this all there's ever going to be? What is going to happen? So that was a big part of it. It is one of the liveliest debates is like, did we sell too early? Should we have sold? I would say that the most level headed commentary about that subject came from someone named Katherine Wu that I interviewed. Catherine was a later arrival to the PayPal team, but she explained to me in terms that made sense to me, she said, for PayPal to become what it is today, which is to say a worldwide payment system, 190 plus countries, huge user base, owns Venmo. She said you needed to have footholds along the way. You don't do that overnight. She said Ebay was a really important foothold for us, but if we were continuing to fight Ebay, we could not convince other places that they ought to take us and accept us as their payment system. And so she described that transaction, ebay acquiring PayPal, as another important step in PayPal, becoming one of the default payment systems on the Internet. And she said it gave us a critical foothold because now we could stop fighting them and we could start explaining to other people why our system worked better and it helped us expand into what they called sort of merchant services, right, which was expansion beyond the auction ecosystem. And so where I net out and here I think I spoke to so many people about this question, and I do net out on if they had continued to fight Ebay throughout 2002, it's possible they could have won, but it would have been basically like a series of rear guard actions. Someone said to me, they said, at a certain point, we basically weren't creating anymore. We were just defending like it wasn't creating new value to continue to try to stay alive on Ebay. So once they acquired us, that fight went away. Now, granted, there were some difficulties with the integration, and there were a number of things that some commentators have said that Ebay could have done different or better to expand PayPal in the earliest years following the acquisition. But I would argue that the acquisition was really important. And then the final point I'll make on this, and again, this is just because this is a big subject of discussion among this group, it also enabled some of the earliest founders and earliest employees of the company to leave the company. There were people who felt a strong emotional attachment to PayPal. I did a podcast recently with Max Levchin, and he described it as home. He said it felt like home. And when Ebay completes its acquisition, there's really no need for a 20 something CTO who thinks of PayPal as home. He has other things he can go do, and now he has the resources to go do them. The same is true for David Sachs. The same is true for Peter Thiel. We know some of the things that those people have gone on to work on. And I think in a way, the Ebay acquisition was the safety valve. It sort of released a handful of these people and then later others, to sort of go off and do other things. It was one of the most important, I would also argue one of the most misunderstood parts of that history. Because the other thing I want to make sure people understand is it wasn't all negative. Like it's been painted, portrayed pretty negatively. But Ebay was also a place where a lot of these younger leaders in technology learned how to manage within a bigger organization. They got management training, they earned equity, their shares vested, they built security for themselves, wealth for themselves, and a few of them had actually flourished at Ebay. So there's also a part of this that hopefully corrects the record that it was also positive for huge numbers of PayPal people who now found themselves Ebay employees.
Yeah, and it's know, I know that jimmy, you had told me that I'd read some. More subtext into your book than perhaps you had intended earlier on. This may be another one, and maybe too clever by half, but the way I think about it, PayPal was that vector for online payments. It was also this vector by which these early entrepreneurs were a channel for much larger global impact in their future lives. You also ended your book with a profile of how what has become known as, quote unquote, the PayPal Mafia actually inspired two juvenile offenders to pursue more productive lives post Know. I'm wondering when it comes to that term, PayPal Mafia, why is that term controversial? Could you explain a little bit of that? I mean, in reality, PayPal Mafia's GDP combined is higher than that of New Zealand, as you mentioned. What is controversial?
Yeah, it's another one of these sort of livewire subjects. The bit of background is that this group of people are often referred to as the PayPal Mafia. That term was the headline in a 2007 Fortune magazine article and it's this cover photo. They are in this Italian restaurant, they're sort of dressed as know, let's just say it's a more evocative cover than if they were all standing in front of it becomes it becomes this mythic moniker that's attached to the earliest PayPal crew. They are often referred to even today as the PayPal Mafia. There was reporting just this past weekend from the Wall Street Journal about Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter and again, the PayPal Mafia was invoked. Here's why it's a bit of a problematic term and I had multiple discussions with multiple people over five and a half years about this term. Specifically, it's because the PayPal Mafia actually describes the later years more than it does the early years. That's one know. A lot of what that term refers to are, for know, Peter's role as being one of the earliest investors in Facebook, or Max Levchin's creation of Slide, and then later a firm, or David Sachs and the success that he's had with Craft Ventures. It doesn't really refer to their period at PayPal when they are frankly, like about as far from sort of an organized mafia ring as you could get. Like they're just making it up as they go along the same way many other startups do. That's one reason. The second is a bunch of people said, look, we're not quite as sinister as that cover made us out to seem. One person said to me, I don't think I included this going through. He said, we're really not that cool. We're really not that sort of group of people. The third thing I would say is that that cover was all men. It was 13 men, I think, on the COVID And as I hope I achieved in the book, this is a much wider group of people. It's a much broader cast of characters at the original PayPal founding period between 1998 and 2002. And so I think part of it is you're not going to put 200 people in Palo Alto and several hundred people in Omaha, Nebraska on the COVID of that magazine. And that magazine article really wasn't about PayPal. It was about what came later. So it's become a bit of a controversial term, but it also has become this hugely popular term abroad. People really do look up to this group of tech founders internationally. And I found this interesting thing that happened is that every time some company somewhere abroad would go public, people would talk about whether it was going to inaugurate the creation of insert company name plus mafia. So there's like the possibility of the flipkart mafia in India, the work brain mafia, the revolut mafia, the monzo mafia. This happens again and again and people really do it. They try to do it deliberately. The other thing, and this is the story that concludes the book, is that that magazine cover found its way into a maximum security facility in Jessup, Maryland, and it is on the wall of a prison cell occupied by these two young prisoners, chris Wilson and Stephen Edwards. And this lights them up. The story of startup success lights up these two African American young men. I think they were 16 and 17 respectively when they were incarcerated. And it makes them think that there's a possibility for them in the future to do business, to build businesses and to learn the language of business. And this starts that obsession. When I interviewed both of them, they knew so much about the co founders and the earliest employees at PayPal, it was astonishing to me. They both end up actually getting earning their freedom today. One of them is a technology entrepreneur. He's a software entrepreneur, Steven, and he's doing some things with logistics software. And Chris Wilson is an accomplished artist, an author, and also owns, I think, two real estate businesses. And so there's this way in which the term is complicated. It is both inspirational and maybe misses the mark in some of its descriptive elements, but it exists and it's a part of our culture.
As we start to kind of wrap up here, Jimmy, I want to ask you a question that's really very tangential. It's not directly related to the book, but it's about Jeremy Stoppelman. I feel like him and the story of Yelp is really a very underreported story. I'm wondering if in your research you got into that at all and if somebody like you who's written three successful books sees that there's potential there for a book about Yelp.
And know, I would say not only is the Yelp story a founding story underrated, but I think Jeremy is one of the truly underrated people within Silicon Valley. I think know, like Amy Clement. I think he's somebody that operates with a real conscience and I think he has put himself out there and taken some unpopular positions, at least unpopular in some quarters but I think he speaks his mind and he's a really incredible leader. I had other people as well, by the way. There was some podcast I was listening to and I was doing my research and Max Levchin was asked, who do you think the most impressive CEO is out of the people that came out of that PayPal group? And I believe at one point he said Jeremy Salpelman. Jeremy was an incredible interlocutor for me in understanding the transition from his time at the University of Illinois to other startups and then to PayPal. The way I heard the Yelp story told and this may not be true, and it comes with a bunch of asterisks because I really tried to rigorously fact check the PayPal book, but I didn't fact check the Yelp story I'm about to share, so I don't know if it's true. But the way it was explained to me is that essentially in the aftermath of PayPal, max there was a birthday party being held for Max and it was held at a restaurant or some venue where there was food. And Russ Simmons, one of the co founders of Yelp, and Jeremy Stauffleman were there and sort of trying to think about what they sort of sketched out on a napkin, like, what if we could get reviews for restaurants that are all around that were publicly available and other people could comment. And my understanding is that it was not that long between that conversation at a birthday party and Max agreeing to seed Russ and Jeremy with some money to build Yelp. Now, I could have that story wrong, but it's the version that I had heard in doing some of my research and I don't think it's too far off the mark because it is exactly in that spirit of, well, why can't we do this better or differently? And then also it tracks with the ability for Max to use some of the capital that came out of the PayPal success to help to seed and fund these other success stories. And I would say, actually that the part of it that I hope people appreciate, at least from my book and if someone does decide to do the Yelp book, is that Russ Simmons, Max Lebchin and Jeremy Stoppelman are all from the University of Illinois. So despite the sort of West Coast attention that's often and rightly paid to technology know, a big part of the story of PayPal is the success of Midwestern engineers. And that is not just only because I am a Chicagoan and a Midwest native myself. A lot of the earliest engineers who made PayPal successful were graduates of the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana. And so I think that's actually like a common and interesting tie that binds them together. But that was the Yelp origin as I heard it, though you should correct me if I got any of that wrong.
And we shouldn't forget the Omaha nebraska Customer Service Center and its role success of PayPal.
That's right. It's another part of this that is Midwest in its origins. Omaha to me, and this isn't just to me, this is people telling me you build a payment services system and you don't anticipate the number of people who have complaints about their money. And I had this amazing archive of emails which had a lot of those complaints. And so I saw all these people who were sending in nasty grams and threatening notes and notes to the Better Business Bureau and all of these complaints. And the place that fixed that problem was a seed group of customer service agents and their leaders and managers in Omaha, Nebraska. And to this day, Omaha is one of PayPal's biggest outposts.
Well, Jimmy, we've talked about a lot, but I'm wondering if there's anything that we missed. Is there anything you want our listeners to know about the founders? Is there anything else? And also I also wanted to ask you about that Easter egg that we heard about on another podcast that you were on. You mentioned there's an Easter egg in the book. I couldn't figure out what it is. Are you going to share that with.
Us or keep it a secret? No, I'm happy to share it with you. Well, I'll share the rudiments of it, and then I can let people do the navigating of it themselves. I kicked this book off with Max Lebchin's story, and I did that for a variety of reasons, one of which is that he's lesser known than Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and I thought, know, deserve a little bit more attention. I also was drawn to the fact that he was an immigrant to the United States and know, he had Illinois roots and that, know, a lot of the hardest problems at the company are solved by Max and the engineers that he leads. And so that led me to understand his passion for, among other things, code breaking and puzzle solving. And so as an homage to that, and because, I don't know, I probably had the right amount of caffeine that day, I decided to bury a puzzle, a secret code inside the book. And it's a multi hundred page code. And I sort of did it on a lark, and I thought it was clever. And then I shared it, actually, with the person who inspired it, which is Max lechen. And Max was the first person to crack the code that's in the middle of the book. And so if listeners want to take a stab at it, they can send me a DM on Twitter and let me know if they got the right answer. And I'm happy to send them a signed copy of the book or something if they get it right. In terms of things that I hope people take away, your podcast does an incredible job of diving into the stories of business and I think that one of the things that I never intended this book to have an advocacy mission or anything of that kind. It's the story of how PayPal came to be. But when people reach out to me, one of the things they say know, thank goodness that people like David Sachs and Elon and Peter Thiel and Max Leptchen were anxious once in their life, right? Like, it's easy to look at them for the success stories that they are today or to look at their peers who helped to build PayPal and say, wow, look at these know, they're on sort of mount Olympus. At one time, they were figuring out how to fight fraud and they had to outsource it to Omaha and that happened to work out. So to my, like, what I hope people take away from the story isn't just like the principles of product management or fraud fighting or how do you build a payment services system or how do you become a credit card master merchant. It's also that each one of these stories actually comes with this massive dose of uncertainty and you do see people persist in the face of that. And I have had friends just text me to say, like, thank goodness that these people were anxious too, because I'm in the middle of building whatever it is I'm building, and I'm suffering from that as well. So I hope that the book provides a little bit of if nothing else, it allows people to commiserate with some of the titans of our technological world.
Well, Jimmy, thank you so much for joining us today. How can our listeners get in touch with you on social media? How can they follow you and keep up with your next projects?
Yeah, probably the easiest way is Twitter. Though I admit I'm sort of so far from a power user of could. They can email me and find me on Twitter. And I love hearing from readers. It's one of the thrills of doing these sorts of projects is random. People find things in it that you didn't know or they'll give you a fresh perspective. So probably Twitter and my DMs are open and feel free to send me a message. I'd love to hear from readers and.
We'Ll definitely put those in the show notes. Kevin, you're going to introduce our next book for next month?
Sure.
So our next book may seem a little bit outside of the box, but we'll actually be reading a book by a former international hostage negotiator for the FBI named Chris Voss. The book is called never split the difference, and it details Voss's philosophy and approach to high stakes negotiations wherever they may be, ranging from the boardroom to the home, the streets of Kansas City, Missouri, where he was a policeman, to even negotiating with bank robbers and terrorists. We're definitely looking forward to learning from Chris's book, and I hope that our listeners will read along with us.
And David and Kevin, how can our listeners get in touch with you?
You can follow me on Twitter at david g short.
You can follow me on Twitter at Hoodak's Basebasement. Though much like Jimmy, I am not a prolific Twitter user. So always feel free to DM me and I can share my email address.
And I'm at Dave Kopek.
D-A-V-E-K-O-P-C. Don't forget to subscribe to us on your podcast player of choice, and we'll see you next month.