Anyway, one of the start-up tech company stories that I love is PayPal. Why you should get interested with PayPal? Because a lot of 'big' tech companies' founders came from Paypal -- like youtube, linkedin, yelp, kiva, slide, and others. When PayPal was 'sold' to eBay, most of the original main people 'quit' from PayPal and start their own start-ups. Following are some of the books I read where PayPal is discussed.
The first book I read which featured PayPal is Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
. If you are into start-up 'culture,' you probably best know Jessica Livingston as one of the founders of YCombinator and also the wife of YCombinator's founder Paul Graham (owkei, enough of name-dropping). If you are into start-up culture or even if you're not, I highly recommend her book. The stories are fascinating. I believe even if you are not into tech and stuff, you can still relate.So back to Paypal, it is one of the tech companies featured in Founders at Work. Jessica Livingston
interviewed Max Levchin, one of the co-founders of PayPal. I believe Max Levchin was the main hacker (CTO) when PayPal started so it is fascinating to hear his side about how they handle spam and such, the technical side of the business.What I like about reading stories from a technical person's point of view because they are not much into profits and such. So you could get a grasp of why they created PayPal, and also the funny stories during their early days.
Another book I read about PayPal is The PayPal Wars by Eric M. Jackson
. Unlike Max Levchin, Erick M. Jackson works on the marketing side. He was there when PayPal just started, and was totally unknown. You will have fun reading their different marketing strategies, and their world-domination goal. You can check here a review I made about the book before.I guess PayPal started back in 2002, it's the time when SEO's and online marketings are not yet that sophisticated so it's a nice way to get a glimpse of how PayPal did their marketing during the early days.
One of the things I kind of learn from The PayPal Wars book
is that it is the users who really has a big say about your product. One of the reasons why PayPal, in the long run, had to be sold to eBay is because eBay has the users. Online sellers at that time only has eBay unlike now. At that time, eBay did all things to make it difficult for PayPal to be used on their site because they also had their own payment application which was, unfortunately, not preferred by the eBay-ers. So, be one with your users.You can read more interesting stories of PayPal from Quora.
