Suggested Reading: The Founders and After Steve

Quick thoughts on two books, one that's been read, and another that's about to be read. Both look to be solid reads even if it's just beach reading this summer.

About two weeks ago, CIO Chris Versace was walking through an actual Barnes & Noble… actual as in a real deal physical location… and he spotted “The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley”, a new book by Jimmy Soni that traces the history of PayPal (PYPL). Given our Digital Payments & FinTech investment theme and index, Versace was intrigued. Like many of these books, including the recent one on Reddit as well as “Just Do It” and “Shoe Dog Millionaire” about Nike (NKE), the reader comes to see a number of the early challenges, dilemmas, firsts, and of course “whys” behind what we see today as PayPal. We’re not spoiling much by sharing that what stared off as two different companies looking to bring very different products to market wound up becoming a formidable payments company.

Storytelling is engaging and odds are you’ll find the pages quickly turning as you see the company that would one day become PayPal emerge only to be acquired by eBay (EBAY) and spun out several years later.

Musing from The Founders

“Look, what are we trying to do? What does the customer need? Why are we even here?”

“It wasn’t even that we invented money transfer. We just made it useful”

“Efficiency and simplicity without”

“… oftentimes it’s better to just pick a path and do it rather than just vacillate endlessly on the choice.”

“I aspire to not be this competitive, but I’m not always successful.”

“We were incredibly obsessive about how do we evoke something that is really going to have the best possible customer experience… That was a far more effective selling tool than having a giant salesforce or marketing gimmicks or twelve-step processes or whatever.”

“The best teams deal with meteors. Meteors that don’t hit you create opportunity.”

That is a short list of a much larger one of things shared in the book for which Versace marked the pages so he could go back and ruminate further.

We didn’t mention who in the book said what, but we will share those words were attributed to Peter Thiel, John Malloy, David Sack, and of course, Elon Musk. Now you have the fun task of figuring out who said what, and the only way to do that is to read the book.

Enjoy!

After Steve

That brings us to the next book on Versace’s reading list, one he received earlier this week courtesy of Amazon. The title is “After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul” by Wall Street Journal reporter Tripp Mickle. Like many Versace is a dyed in the wool Apple (AAPL) fan, owner and user of numerous Apple products.

If asked, he’ll also share that he’s rather content being trapped in the Apple ecosystem.

We point this out only to share that he is of course going to be biased.

How much the book reveals in terms of product development and personal dynamics between Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Phil Schiller, and Scott Forstall that shaped the company in its post-Steve Jobs era, we’ll only find out by reading it. And much like Versace did above, he’ll be dog earing the pages on which he finds some interesting and amusing tidbits as well as quotes to share.

More to come!