General capital refers to transferrable skills, applicable to a number of industrial settings. Becker’s Human Capital, for instance, delineates the resource as comprising ‘general’ and ‘specific’ human capital. The Founders details the university education and training – which social scientists call ‘human capital’ – that fosters the abilities of such performers. Such findings validate our impression that certain places have some sort of magic in their ability to produce world-leading firms.īut what happens at those universities? Is it the classroom interactions and curriculum that sprinkle unicorn dust? Or is it the mingling at parties and clubs that fosters the ability to found and build high-growth companies? Do universities serve an entrepreneurship-infused Kool-Aid, boosting entrepreneurial intentions? Stanford professor Ilya Strebulaev, and his Venture Capital Initiative, found that Harvard, Stanford and Wharton are the top three unicorn-producing business schools. We often hear about certain schools adorning the paths of the founders of top performing technology firms. Photo LeWeb12 Conference, Paris’ by OFFICIAL LEWEB PHOTOS licensed under CC BY 2.0 The story is framed around how the founders met while studying at university together, especially at Stanford University (in the case of Thiel and Ken Howery) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) (in the case of Marc Andreesen, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek and Scott Banister). For this researcher, the book offers wonderfully rich insight into how universities act as fertile ground for high-performing tech firms. The key characters (who you have a love-hate relationship with across the book!) include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

The writing is compelling, a sort of real-life version of HBO’s Silicon Valley, based upon Soni’s interviews with the founders and his forensic analysis of 20 years of interviews and speeches they’ve delivered. The book is told as a story of this incredible cast of characters, their big personalities, their epic battles (including the merger of Confinity and X.com, which together formed PayPal) and their intense work culture. Jimmy Soni’s The Founders gives an account of the founders – and early employees – of PayPal. Second, because its founders and investors – the so-called ‘ PayPal mafia’ – have gone on to found and invest in some of the largest technology businesses that underpin much of life today (including LinkedIn, Tesla and YouTube).

One, because of the formative role it played in the late 1990s of establishing the infrastructure for how we make payments on the internet, particularly in the US. The online payments giant PayPal, which now has a market capitalisation of over 100 billion US dollars, is important in two ways. The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs who Shaped Silicon Valley. This detailed and candid account shows how social capital fuels start-up growth and should offer insights that will aid industry and policy efforts to better mitigate the exclusionary tendencies of tech bastions in Silicon Valley, writes Robyn Klingler-Vidra. In The Founders, J immy Soni explores the compelling story behind the founders of PayPal and its early employees.

Paypal mafia invest