By Bryan Wish
At their core, Jimmy’s books are passion projects. Jimmy chooses topics because he wants to read about them but can’t find a book to buy on the subject. He is inspired by his literary heroes, including Robert Caro, Laura Hillenbrand, Candice Millard, Daniel James Brown, and Barbara Tuchman. Like these acclaimed authors, Jimmy combines rigorous research with readability – he doesn’t want his books to feel like doing homework. He enjoys obsessing over a subject for years and aims to find as much information as possible, and then make the material readable for a general audience.
jimmysoni.com.
Transcript:
Bryan Wish:
Jimmy, welcome to The One Away show.
Jimmy Soni:
Thank you, Bryan. Thank you for having me.
Bryan Wish:
So good to have you. With all of our conversations the last couple years around the big release coming up for you.
Jimmy Soni:
This has been an episode long in the making my friend. You’ve been alongside me for this insane journey.
Bryan Wish:
I know. I remember you calling me four-three years ago. You’re like, “Here’s this guy.” And I was like, “Great, you would write this crazy book.” So I was in my dad’s driveway, I’ll never forget, I just listened to you talk. I was like, “This guy is great.” Anyways so-
Jimmy Soni:
The feeling is mutual.
Bryan Wish:
Oh, great. Love to know that. Let’s dive in Jimmy, what is the one away moment that you want to share with us today?
Jimmy Soni:
Yeah, it’s interesting. So I spent like a decent chunk of my last four or five years working on this project. And there’s probably things that you might expect where the one away moment, you sort of expect that it was meeting one of the higher profile people or some random encounter with one of them. But I actually have a different memory of it, of the one away moment. And I… When I… One of the things that happened during the course of doing this book, which is this early history of PayPal, is that someone had kindly shared a bunch of random emails that they had kept over the years. We’re talking 20 years this past. And I didn’t really know what I would get from those necessarily, but I remember coming across the weekly company newsletter, there was an internal newsletter. And it was called the weekly expert because Elon is part of the company was called X.com.
And then later it was renamed the Weekly Pal because obviously PayPal. And it was just the internal company newsletter. And I remember seeing that, and seeing what it had within it and what it had within it was random updates about the company, birthdays, they had a weekly puzzle. They had random like shout outs, if someone had a kid or someone got married, like ephemera, that sort of stuff. But I had this every week for five years sorry, three and a half, four years of the company’s history. And it was pay dirt from my perspective, it gave me everything he told me about the time that they celebrated Elon’s birthday right at Fannie and Alexander’s, and he told me about the moment right after September 11, when all these employees are reflecting on what 911 means and how scared they are and what the uncertainty around it all. It gave me a window into what the Halloween party was like and who dressed up as who.
So there’s memories you can get from interviewing people. But those memories especially 20 years later, they’re all hazy. They’re kind of you remember bright moments and they’re not, you might not get everything right. But you cannot argue with a weekly company newsletter and you can’t actually recreate a lot of it. So I’ll give you an example. There’s this moment in the weekly newsletter where the company outfoxes Steve Jobs. And the way they outfox him is Steve Jobs or whoever at Apple, I think it was Steve Jobs, it actually says Steve Jobs in the email, really wanted to rent out this theater near their offices for a screening. And the company wanted to rent out the same theater for the screening of the X Men movie because it’s X.com’s, so they’re like, “Let’s do a group screening for the X Men movie.”
And this woman Tameika Carr, manages to get their first, gets the theater sign on the dotted line, organize the screening. And apparently, there was this battle, Steve Jobs really wanted this theater and Steve Jobs is someone who has a history of getting what he really wants. But the theater was like, “No, I’m sorry, X.com beat you to the punch, and you’re not going to get this theater.” And it’s this amazing moment that’s only captured in the weekly company newsletter. And any attempt, it was a sort of inconsequential story that no one given the context, would have necessarily remembered but I was able to track it down. And it was thing after thing like that. And I can tell you that it was for me one of the most meaningful parts of the whole process because it was really engaging to meet with some of the people in the story and I certainly value those conversations, I’ve learned a lot from them.
Part of doing history is actually appreciating these are things that you can see it come to life when it’s a weekly company newsletter, and when you can see that it’s about birthdays and celebrations and a whole life is lived within these companies. For me, that was epic. It also gave value to everything I’d put into it because I was already knee deep in the project when I found that. And so it was epic in every way. Because I could finally be like, “Wow, there is something here, this company was special and this newsletter can give me a real insight into it.” Certainly it was one of many One Away moments, but it was one of them.
Bryan Wish:
Well, super profound. As a historian that you are, I’m sure digging that up was finding the famous treasure and Indiana Jones. I’m not getting super descriptive, I can’t even remember but just getting that type of artefact to help tell a story of lived experience must have been amazing for you. And I want to come back to this artefact, for sure. But I want to ask you those, Jimmy, you took a very, in my opinion board and audacious risk in a great way to write about some of the most successful, revered, irreverent men and women in Silicon Valley sharing the story of PayPal. Well, I’m curious as why, why out of all the things that you could write about, you picked this group at this time period to unveil the truth of what it was like building this company?
Jimmy Soni:
Yeah, I’m sort of laughing into the question in some ways because my answer is going to be not profound and probably somewhat disappointing. But I will just tell the truth of it. So I had written a proposal to do a book. So I’d written this book about Claude Shannon, who is the founder of information theory. And it was called the Mind at Play. It was a fun book to do. And I sort of started, what’s my next biography going to be? So I wrote this epic proposal for this biography of Bruce Lee. And I was all about it. I was like, I want to do Bruce Lee, I think he’s an amazing figure, I think he was a trailblazer. He is the patron saint of self improvement. He was Jackie Robinson for Asian Americans in film, he’s just epic person, died really young, really tragically, a lot of mystery around.
Jimmy Soni:
I had everything, I had all the goods. And I went to Simon Schuster and they said, they gave me a tentative yes. But in the course of that tentative yes, we also discovered that this author Matthew Polly had been working on a Bruce Lee biography for a number of years. And he was everything I was not. He was a martial artist, he spoke Mandarin and he had basically finished the book and Simon Schuster, I guess he had had some issues with his original publisher. The publisher was thinking about buying it. And so they came to me and said, “Hey listen, we know you want to do Bruce Lee but there’s this guy, Matthew Polly, it seems like he’s got a good, he’s done a lot of work and he gets this face really rigorously.” And I remember I was a little heartbroken because I wanted to spend a few years doing it, but I also remember thinking now this book is going to be great, because he actually has the knowledge to do it. And I’m not a martial arts person.
Jimmy Soni:
So I remember that was actually the project I was supposed to do. I was not supposed to write some history of a Silicon Valley company. But I just started thinking about clusters of talent. And it was in the course of doing Claude Shannon, I studied and visited Bell Labs and really immersed myself in Bell Labs history. And so then I just started like, what are other clusters? Pay Pal is one of the ones that naturally pops up because of everything that these people have gone on to do. And I just went on Amazon and I really couldn’t find again, this is actually a very mundane story in some ways. I couldn’t find a rigorous really extensive soup to nuts history of the company, the sorts that have been written about other companies. And so I was like alright, let’s see how far I can push the rock, I can push the ball until someone says no. And so I just started reaching.
Jimmy Soni:
I just started reaching out to the people who are at the heart of the story, through networks and contacts and friends little like cold emails and stuff. And basically nobody said no, it was one of those hours I was really waiting for somebody to shut the door in my face, but nobody did. Sometimes it took a little bit of persistence, certainly there were a couple of you I wanted to talk to. It took about two to three years of trying before I was able to get them to talk to me. I did jump through a lot of people, people were really skeptical. They said, “We don’t want you to do this.” Or they would, “What’s your angle? Can you answer these questions for me? That sort of stuff?”
Jimmy Soni:
But I think it was really an exercise of just going and seeing it, there wasn’t a book, deciding that I wanted to do it and then having a take on it that was about, what does it mean to tell the biography of a company? You could tell biographies of individuals, but it’s actually interesting to do a biography of a company. It’s not one person, It’s not one hero, right? It’s hundreds of people. And so I had this thought, literally Bryan, it was like, just keep going until someone says no. It was like, just keep going. And eventually someone is going to be like, “Wait you’re an imposter, you’re not authorized I’m sorry, you’re in the wrong room, get out.” I had this, it was like a soundtrack, it was like, “Just keep going until someone says no and then I’ll find another project.” No one said no and five years later I’m not trying to take away from the work I did but I am saying that it was no grand plan.
Jimmy Soni:
I wanted to understand, I wanted to understand what it was like to build this company in the late 1990s. And I figured that just because people were famous didn’t mean they didn’t have stories to tell. And I assumed that there were a ton of people that had never actually been asked about their experience in this company before. And I figured that was going to be pretty rich material as well.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah, totally. So what I’m taking away is, it took Bruce Lee, he said, you can write the other biography of a person. Got it like a semi okay. But maybe more interesting, let’s write a biography about the company. Well, you didn’t just pick any company. You picked the helm at the top of the mountain type of company with some major players and also took a very circuitous roundabout to getting everyone caught together to interview and put a lot of the pieces together. So you said, let me go do this. Were you certain though that all these people were going to give you their time, energy? Because if you didn’t get those people’s thoughts and perspectives into the book, it probably wouldn’t be as authentic as it could. So was there any fear around that?
Jimmy Soni:
Oh God, it was endless fear man. You and I have talked about this in different ways. But it was basically like a daily dose of fear for five years. I cannot tell you how many times I revised notes to people. And it took a lot to even send certain emails to people to make the ask, to do cold emails or cold outreach or even lukewarm outreach. It was a lot of fear because these are their formidable people. Both the famous names and then the folks that are more behind the scenes, these are formidable people who run technology in Silicon Valley today. I suppose I did a couple things in order to deal with the fear because I think fear can be adaptive, right? Fear can actually be a very powerful fuel.
Jimmy Soni:
There’s this great line Jimmy Iovine has in the Defiant Ones, which is one of my favorite documentary series. And he said, he learned, I guess it was in the course of working with John Lennon, that he turned fear from a headwind to a tailwind. And I would think about that a lot when I was doing this, and I was like, “Well, how am I going to turn the fact I’m terrified into something that’s actually productive?” I did that through insane research. And what I mean by that is basically, I would just… There’s this great Muhammad Ali quote, where he talks about how if he became a garbage man, he would just be the best garbage man ever, if he became a journalist he would read everything about somebody that he was going to interview before he went into interview them. It’s a pretty epic Ali quote, one of many.
Jimmy Soni:
What I would do is if I had an interview with somebody like David Sachs, who is formidable, very smart, very active, vocal on Twitter, I would go back and I would watch hours and hours and hours and hours of footage and read everything that he had said about PayPal before I ever set foot in the door. And so what I became was, I kind of knew pieces of the story well enough and close to the action enough meaning I was listening and watching interviews from 2002, 2003, four or five, that I never went in blind. Any person I would go and see and like a site like listen notes or C-SPAN or YouTube or Vimeo, what else have they said, where else have they said it? What’s been written? I would read and I would reread until it got to the point where I knew I’d be comfortable in an interview setting, not sounding like a total idiot, because the truth is a lot of these people have no time, right? They have no reason to talk to me, right? I have no platform.
Jimmy Soni:
But what I came in with was actually at that point a pretty decent understanding of the dimensions of the story, what else had been written about it and some of the places where I felt like, Okay, you got to give me more here or more here. I think that also made for engaging conversations because we saw it starting it at ground zero, right? So I would say, I was terrified. Fear pushed me to be probably actually better prepared than I even needed to be. And it was just purely out of a sense of self preservation, I have to be able to hang. I got lucky, you got to be in a room with Peter Thiel, this grandmaster chess player, and not have him think of you as a total idiot. And Aaron Aravis, you have to actually be able to perform and ask him questions that are going to be engaging and thoughtful. And the way to do that is to review every other question he has been asked about PayPal, and then work backwards and say, what hasn’t he been asked? Where are the places where I feel like we’re a little undercooked?
Bryan Wish:
So it sounds like it took an incredible amount of front end research before you even touched on their door, knocked on their door, because you had to catch their attention. You had to really thread something in a way that wasn’t vanilla, wasn’t generic and something that had never been done before. So the level of resources and materials though, is fascinating. You did not just go look at one YouTube interview or one post on Twitter, you looked at the full body of work around a very particular time period. And then found the opening maybe to catch their attention. So we’ll go ahead.
Jimmy Soni:
Oh no, I mean I think… But I think it was two observations. So your description is 100% right. It was probably overkill. It turns out they were super, they were friendly, they were nice, they weren’t out to tear my head off or anything. I actually went in probably way over prepared, in some ways I maybe should have lightened up a bit. But I refer to two things on it. The first is that the kind off, you can learn a lot without… You can study an individual and learn a lot without ever actually engaging with the individual. So if you think about, part of what I was able to do is watching hours of footage and material, I learned a lot in that process, meaning a lot of the quotes that are in the book are not from interviews I did, but from interviews that had lasted the Sands of Time. There’s this interview that Elon did on Chinese TV.
Jimmy Soni:
And on Chinese television, he is asked about what a company is, what does it mean to build a company? And he describes it as this process of like, you start out you’re mostly wrong. And you work backwards and you sort of figure out what is right. And it was a really, he quotes this in the book, it’s a really evocative quote, I promise you most people have not seen that video, because it is that minute 32 of this video where he’s being interviewed on Chinese TV, but I would just watch and listen and read everything. And it gave me the ability to find little gems that were tucked in other places that maybe hadn’t been lifted out. And then also to go in and not ask him that question meaning when I’m with him, he has already answered in one place and he is pretty consistent in how he gives answers.
Jimmy Soni:
I’m not going to ask him that. I’ve got other things I can ask him. The other part of it is, he gave me a sense of confidence, I went into those conversations, conversations where I was terrified to even send emails. And actually I would feel good about going in because I was like, “I’ve seen how this person answers questions, I sort of appreciate what they’re about, I can do this, I can actually handle this.”
Bryan Wish:
It’s just so impressive to me Jimmy that the thoughtful precision that you took and the care and the diligent way you went about this because it’s just so rare. I think no matter who you are is a testament to you, I hope you’re okay with the flattery here. But it’s a testament to you, what you put together. You didn’t just write a book, you went on a major journey. The journey itself is like a book. And I think that’s a testament to you, even though you put these leaders, men and women on a pedestal in a way to say, here’s the story and things about that. They’ve never had the ability to share and articulate in the way you did for them. But the journey that you took to put it together is what I find fascinating. Don’t get me wrong, the book is great.
Bryan Wish:
But it’s that journey that I’m fascinated by. So just one more question. You got access to some of the most profound individuals in the world who happened to build a company out of Silicon Valley. Once you had all your research, what was your process to get in front of them? Was it intros, were they just I’m going to go in cold and with some good bait on the line. For you to pull this off, because this is what fascinates me is that you’re actually able to do this.
Jimmy Soni:
Oh, yeah. You mean how do you get in the door? Is it a question?
Bryan Wish:
How do you get in the door?
Jimmy Soni:
This is like PTSD from this. I had sort of several thought processes and approaches, right? The first thing was, actually let me start from the beginning. I came from a slightly advantaged place in the following respect. I had written books before. And so once you’ve written a couple of books, especially one that was about Claude Shannon, you’re sort of perceived as someone who could do this thing, right? What I mean by that is, if you walk into a room and you have a book already, it changes the recipients mind. It’s like this person isn’t starting out or doing this for the first time.
Jimmy Soni:
They’ve done it a couple times, they got some experience. So I don’t want to make it seem like I was a total neophyte. I have written books. And so that’s an advantage certainly because you can walk in and say, “Hey, here’s my last book, here’s what motivates this project. Let me describe it to you, let me explain what I’m doing.” So I was like, you have to have the sort of ante at the table. So I had the ante at the table. I was really careful about introductions and about the difference between cold emails, warm introductions, that kind of thing. My perception was that if you’re going to email someone like Reed Hoffman, there’s a chance he responds to a cold email. There’s a better chance if it comes from someone he knows, and that it’s an intro.
Jimmy Soni:
There were people like John Malloy, who was a board member at the company, I just took a guess, I was like if I email John, I bet he’ll respond because he’s not somebody whose inboxes inundated with like 1000 emails a day. And I was like, I bet I could just email him cold and I’ll be okay. Tim Herd early board member, early investor in a company from Madison Dearborn partners at the time. Same thing, I was like, Tim is an under the radar person, I suspect if I write a really good note and explain what I’m doing, that will be good. Now, I also knew in the back of my mind that they would forward that note to someone like Peter Thiel or Elon or whoever and they would say, “Hey, who’s this guy? Have you talked to him?” So I went in some order, meaning I started with the earliest founders of the company, because I knew if I didn’t have their buy in, there was no point to doing the book.
Jimmy Soni:
Like, if you don’t actually have those people, they could just tell everyone else like, “Wait, I’ve never heard of this guy before. I’m sure he’s just some random person.” We all get enough spam email from some random person who needs us to transfer a million dollars to the backyard today or else something bad happens. You don’t want to be that guy. And so I started with the earliest folks, I kind of gauged their level of interest that showed they might be interested, had conversations with them, but two things respected their inboxes and respected their time. I didn’t hit him up for every favor. I deliberately actually did not over communicate. Because they get enough email. They get enough people bugging them all the time. I knew, they knew, I wanted them to understand, I was going to do my homework, if they gave me an hour of their time, I wasn’t going to need an hour the next day or the next week or the next month.
Jimmy Soni:
I even told him, I remember I told Peter, I said to him, we had a conversation I said, “Listen, you’re probably going to hear from me for like a year, maybe longer, I’m going to go to wait in my cave and do my work for a while.” And I was very open about that. There were some people where it just made sense to have intros. Elon is a big enough figure in public life that it made sense to have an introduction and one of the people I interviewed was kind enough to make an introduction and to talk to him about the project at a dinner that they had before I ever went in. There were people who worked at the same company, where sometimes I would chance into one introduction because they happen to work down the door or down the road or down the corridor from their friend or from whoever they’re working with. And so that worked in my favor.
Jimmy Soni:
I remember one time the first interview I did with David Sachs, I did not anticipate that his colleague Mark Huawei was going to be in the room. They were in Chicago or something or New York or something, New York for a meeting together. And Mark was on my list of people to contact but he just showed up. And I remember having to completely change my script. And at one point I just copped to and I said, “Listen Mark, I have to tell you, I have a whole separate series of questions for you. But I didn’t know you were going to be here so if you’re cool with it, we can just kind of jam and riff and we’ll see where this goes and maybe I can set a time with you later.” And he was very gracious and he was like that’s totally fine I get it. He’s like I just arrived because you’re going to talk about PayPal and I remember I was there. I put a lot of thought into every person I contacted, with some people it took a lot longer to earn their trust, to get past certain
Jimmy Soni:
To make sure that I was real, that it was okay, but I’ll be honest with you, some people, I was the first person ever email them and ask them about this experience. I’ll give you an example. There was a guy I emailed named Jeremy Roybol, Jeremy started out in customer service at PayPal. He eventually became a fraud analyst at PayPal. No one had ever emailed Jeremy to ask him about his PayPal experience. It was one of the professional high points of his life. And he gave me two of the most passionate interviews that anyone of the hundreds I interviewed gave me. I mean, no joke, incredible, blew me away. No one had ever asked him of Pay Pal before. And it was a real shame, because his stories are amazing. They form some of the best moments in the book. And so for some people, it was just… I did just cold outreach, because why not? What’s the worst thing they’re going to do or say.
Jimmy Soni:
I also kept a really organized, you asked about process, I kept a really organized document of the number of times I contacted somebody, you don’t want to be the person who’s just crowding up what are already crowded inboxes. So I would wait a period before I would recontact somebody. I don’t think I did this perfectly. I don’t think for a project of this scale, you could ever do it perfectly. But I also benefited from that weekly newsletter document we talked about, I had basically everyone’s birthdays. So I used the birthday list as my Mission Impossible mock list. And I went in and I was like, okay, “Have I contacted this person?” And just went on down the line.
Bryan Wish:
Oh my God Jimmy. I mean,
Jimmy Soni:
Thinking aloud, it feels crazy but it works. It worked anyway.
Bryan Wish:
I mean, I have respect for you, prior to you telling me this. I think I have even more respect for you after you telling me this. I mean, but seriously though, it’s the intentionality. The level of intentionality and the proactiveness is unbelievable to me.
Jimmy Soni:
Could I actually add one thing to it?
Bryan Wish:
Yeah, do it.
Jimmy Soni:
The one amendment I would make to what I said is, some of it can feel like a sort of goofy exercise in just contacting people. A big part of my motivation was the recognition that the best stories within companies often are told by and lived by people who never get to be on the front pages of newspapers. And so a big part of the reason why I did the book… People will look at it and already people are like, “It’s a story about Elon or it’s a story about Peter.” And it’s not really, honestly not what it is. There are so many people in this story who did amazing things, who never talk about it in podcasts or at TechCrunch conferences or whatever. And I would say the one part of it where I conviction was, I did make a really concerted effort to reach out to the earliest people within the company, no matter where they live, no matter what timezone they were in. And I went for broke in trying to talk to people who got written out of past histories.
Jimmy Soni:
That was my kind of thing. I was like, I promise you the best stories are going to come from the Jeremy Roybal’s [inaudible 00:27:58] and my hypothesis was right. But in order to do that, I had to actually be insane about LinkedIn and like, “Okay, is this a phone number? Let me call this and leave a voicemail, maybe the best way to contact them is this.” And again, I don’t think I got it exactly right but I collected a lot of people who would say to me, “Hey, it’s cool to hear from you but nobody has ever asked me about PayPal before.” That was when I knew this is great.
Bryan Wish:
So you were a philosopher, you are a detective, you are a stalker.
Jimmy Soni:
Very crazy stalker.
Bryan Wish:
You know, you built your resume skills on this book alone.
Jimmy Soni:
Someone said to me, there’s a person I interviewed at the very end. And she said, you’ve really been trying for like two years to get me on the hook, haven’t you? We laughed about it because she was like, “I get it, I got your notes.” Okay.
Bryan Wish:
So let me ask you this, Jimmy. Clearly let’s just take this One Away moment around you getting this email trail of years of history as part of this question, right? You go in blind to I’m going to go write a book about the PayPal story. And did you have any idea what it was going to take to put this together? What was your initial thoughts on information architecture? Or did you just have to roll over a ton of rocks first and then figure out how you’re going to weave it together? What was the process to put this together in a way that was sensible and to give any clue to that going in?
Jimmy Soni:
Yeah, I would say half of it was, I did have some experience doing books. And I had this amazing editor who passed mid book process. Her name was Alice Mayhew. She was like a titan in journalism and in publishing circles, just a force of nature. Edited some of the people I admire most in the world. And actually the biggest intervention that she made was she sort of recognized early on. She was like, “Okay, you’re going to have a ton of information and interviews and all these people are going to want to talk to you. What I need from you right now is an outline, a chronological outline of the parts of the book and the chapters and I want you to break out what is the chapter about, and where does it fit chronologically, and why are you telling me the story this way.” And I remember rebelling against this for a little while, and avoiding the project. That actually was one of the best things because I had to lay out parts one, two, and three.
Jimmy Soni:
I had to go through and outline how many chapters there were going to be. I had to go within and put in bullet points of what the stories are going to be within each chapter, why does this chapter matter? And it wasn’t a perfect framework, but boy it came mighty close to like actually being the final book. The book didn’t end up in three parts, it ended up with, whatever, 20 odd chapters. And it was because of that outlining process. And I have found other writers are better outliners than I am. I’m probably frankly save themselves a lot of heartache. I got to the outline and the outline provided a rough framework for what I was going to do. And then I would say there were like two or three other things that really helped. One is Scrivener is a piece of software that I think most often is used by fiction writers. I mean, maybe nonfiction, I don’t know. But they seem to advertise as more of a fiction novel writing piece of software. It’s amazing.
Jimmy Soni:
And it was the best place to warehouse a ton of information and nuggets and little things I’d written, the scraps. And just the way the UX on that software is helped me keep my own thoughts square. And then I would say I used Google Docs and Google Sheets the most because they live update. You can go back to old versions if you need. And it just helped me keep everything organized. So every chapter went through multiple iterations. And I have the v1, v2, all the way through to like the v8 of each chapter on a Google sheet and it has links to separate Google Docs. So that helped me keep everything organized. The interviews themselves were their own infrastructure. So you can imagine I have 15,16 days worth of audio end to end. If you were to listen to it end to end, it would take you like 15 days or whatever total to listen to it. And so that was its own sort of epic spreadsheet.
Jimmy Soni:
I use otter.ai as my transcriptions service and software. And I would just I mean, for lack of it, I’ve just hustled through it. I would listen and take notes, listen, take notes. And look, I’d done a book before, so I knew what monstrous enterprises books were, these are not easy things to do. But I also didn’t walk in completely blind. I was like, “Okay, this is how this is going to go.” I tested the patience of every person that Simon and Schuster with a number of revisions I did at the end. And that was just a function of getting better stories and more interviews and finding people who finally responded to an email after two years of trying. But that’s a little bit of the process.
Jimmy Soni:
I would say there’s no wisdom that comes from… Every author kind of has their own approach, for me the big thing was writing rough material every day for a very long period until I had a big chunk of material was actually what helps you get the thing going. So I had to hit a word count every day, put it in Scrivener, and just do that every day. And then you can start to see like, “Oh, I’m really, really good at the beginning of the book in Elon’s early life. But I have nothing on X, Y or Z.” And that’s kind of how I approached it.
Bryan Wish:
Wow.
Jimmy Soni:
You’re like, “You need to get some therapy now Jimmy, so we’re going to leave you be. This episode away so you can go get some help.”
Bryan Wish:
This is your therapy session. Okay. Eight revisions on each chapter.
Jimmy Soni:
Eight’s undercounting it actually. Eight before we move to PDFs, and then I did another five that.
Bryan Wish:
Great. So when Elon listens to this and Peter and Deb Blue and all your people they’re going to know that you put about 20 revisions into each chapter. I mean, that’s a work of art right there. You’re like a sculptor. You’re a sculptor.
Jimmy Soni:
Yeah. Well, the other part of it actually, Bryan. The thing the thing about it makes it sound like it was all about the research and the drudgery, here’s the second half of it.
Bryan Wish:
Tell me.
Jimmy Soni:
You can have a really interesting fact and make it super boring to read that fact. And I had to balance making sure the book was 100% accurate or as close to accurate as I could get it, but also not making it homework. You can’t make reading these things like watching paint dry, you have to bring it to life, especially when you’re talking about what is fundamentally like payment processing on the internet in the late 1990s. We’re not talking about Formula One racing or an epic drive for a world championship in football or something. This is payment processing on the internet. Let’s remember what the context is. Big personalities to be sure, but it’s not like the subject matter needs to come to life. And so a big part of the revision process was finding ways to just make the reader move through things.
Jimmy Soni:
How do you make a scene come to life? What stories are you choosing and not choosing? What words you choosing? So a lot of the revision in the beginning was just gathering string. You pull all this material together. But a lot of the revision is… I had friends who would witness over text a paragraph go from one to two to revision three to revision four, and it’s only on the fourth round, I got it. I nailed it. I figured it out. And so that was a big part of it. Getting it right is one thing, making it readable is another. Readability is a big problem with history books. People they don’t always enjoy what they read. So for me, I want the reader to like smile and laugh and maybe cry and that’s hard to do with late 1990s payment process.
Bryan Wish:
I mean, it just so cool to me because you dress… And it sounds like you’ve really put a lot of thought into how you’re dressing it up. Again, from history to giving it some style to making it an engaging read and being thoughtful in what the reader was going to experience in the process of reading it. Which just again, your thought and the research and then beating down the doors to the writing of the product. Everything was so deliberately thought through, how you orchestrated it. wishes. It’s incredible. I mean, most authors I would say don’t give this level of detail to their work.
Jimmy Soni:
I don’t know if I agree with the last point. And the only reason is because I always feel like I’m at a kid’s table and the people who are at the adults table are Robert Keroh and Stacy Schiff, and Candice Millard and Doris Kearns Goodwin and Walter Isaacson. All of the folks, all of these towering history figures that I read. Laura Hillenbrand, by the way, is the author of Seabiscuit. I am in awe of her work. So I’ll give you the story that is actually relevant and inspired me. The author who did Seabiscuit is also the author who did Unbroken, and she has what’s been called and I think she sort of criticized even the phrasing of it, but it’s called chronic fatigue syndrome, CFS. She basically is bedridden for years and years and years dealing with this affliction.
Jimmy Soni:
She wrote a beautiful article in The New Yorker about it. But she’s also one of the best pound for pound researchers in narrative history and really goes for broke and she reads… For the Seabiscuit and for Unbroken she would read like World War II newspapers, day after day after day of World War II newspapers just to understand that period. And so in a way yes, I did all the work. What I was really trying to do is just imitate the writers I admire. And the writers I admire are insane. I mean, they’re nuts. Robert Carroll and Laura Hillenbrand, they’re like the biggest names in this space. And I just always thought to myself, if they were attacking the story, what would they do? Well, what they would do is they would try to call or contact everybody. What they would do is they would try to print out old blogs from the year 2000 to understand what the internet was like.
Jimmy Soni:
What they would do is… I stood on University Avenue where these companies were and I walked between the two addresses of the companies just to see what the walk would have been like so that I can understand it. I did all kinds of crazy. I looked at Peter Thiel’s old chess games to see if there was any evidence that he favored a certain style of play. I did that because I thought it’s what Laura would do, or I thought it’s what Robert Carroll would do, or I thought it was Barbara Tuchman who was an old… She’s not alive but she was a historian who did this remarkable book called the Guns of August. I always asked myself what would they do? So I would say that’s the one disclaimer, is there are other people who do this, plenty of them I think.
Bryan Wish:
I love that you gave credit, where credit’s due. And you were able to build off some of those experiences to bring into your own. And I think that’s so important, where you’re like this isn’t just how I did it, but I was able to witness or learn from others who-
Jimmy Soni:
Learned from by osmosis or that sort of thing.
Bryan Wish:
So Jimmy what I’m also curious about is for you’re a couple months removed from really the manuscript set in stone before the book hits market. I mean, I know your marketing right now, but what would you say as you hold the candle up to yourself and look in the mirror, what would you say you learned the most about yourself through this process as a professional, as a human, as a person, as a father?
Jimmy Soni:
That is a great question. Okay, this is good. This is one of those answers that it’s not like a fully formed thought, but it’s fully formed sort of in my gut. Basically, every day for several years I have worked on this project, meaning seven days a week. So during the week, it was 4:00 AM to 9:00 AM. Weekends, it was like 4:00 AM to about four or 5:00 PM. Every day essentially, with very few breaks. I worked on all the holidays, everything else. And to some people, I think that can sound like wow, that’s like a sad life. And what I would say is, in a funny way I actually, I have missed it. Now that I’m out of the manuscript stage and the book’s about to come out, I missed the homework.
Jimmy Soni:
I miss the challenge of contacting people. I miss the interviews so much. I enjoy these interviews so much. I miss the chase, I miss finding the fact that’s buried in those newsletters. I think the thing that I learned about myself was just how much this work fits with the kind of person I am. I actually really enjoyed being alone at 4:00 AM listening to old YouTube videos, trying to find a nugget about a company so that I could bring it to life for readers. Your question’s a very perceptive one because it’s not just that creators shape projects, projects shape creators. So it’s like the things we build actually do build us in some meaningful way. And the thing that this gave me, especially at the end of it and seeing how like people are excited about it, and there’s some stories in here that never been told before.
Jimmy Soni:
It gave me a kind of reassurance about what can seem from the outside like a series of really bad life choices. You can look back at this and be like, “What fool would get up to do this every day for this long about a company? It’s already existing. Why don’t you go and build something?” But I actually loved it. I learned to love it and that’s something different. What I think about a lot is there’s this great Jerry Seinfeld interview with Howard Stern where Howard Stern is talking about how he improved as a disc jockey on the radio. And he says something about how it’s like dedication or discipline or something. And Jerry Seinfeld cuts him off and says, “No, you have that wrong.
Jimmy Soni:
I’ll tell you what that is.” And he says, “That’s love.” He says, “You have love for your craft.” And there’s this whole long meditation that’s worth googling. But that’s what I found was… And not to get too ethereal about it but it really is. I found a love for that process, for the daily waking up and doing this thing. And it’s the best high there is.
Bryan Wish:
I just want to pause and take that in. I really appreciate the answer because it seems like you’re bringing this baby into the world. You didn’t know though how much you were going to love the baby. And by the end of the process of shaping the baby, you that much more in love with it. And now it’s time to give it wings and really let that love flow into the world because of what you put into it. I mean, you almost got a little emotional. I was just watching your eyes because it was this incredible process for you. The work of art shaped you as a person is what you said, it was really stuck and you grew through it. And also maybe found your ability or identity in saying, “This is the kind of work I really like. I don’t need to go build a massive company. But this is the work that I can bring my full self to.” What a cool thing to experience. Most people never wake up and realize what they love in their work. And you maybe saw that firsthand in the even more forceful way than Claude Shannon.
Jimmy Soni:
Oh 100%. That is true of this project for me in a way that I don’t think it was true about Shannon. I valued the chance to do Shannon and it was a big challenge and I was unfamiliar and with the subject matter. This was different. This was climbing Everest. It was the Everest of technology history. And there’s a satisfaction that comes with that. And I miss it. The truth of it is as hard as it was, and it was really, really hard, I miss those mornings now. And I don’t think I could have said that. You and I were talking a year ago, and I was like, I can’t wait until this thing is done. It’s awful. It’s the worst thing in my life.” And now I miss it. I miss the research phase of it. I missed the part of it where I was learning new things. But that’s actually the virtue of doing this kind of work. I’m sure I’ll fall in love with something else in the same way and have to approach it in the same way.
Bryan Wish:
That’s special. And yes, like you said, you can give that love to other things. But you know what feels right in your heart when you’re on the right path with your work, and you want to share and celebrate that with other people. And what I also took away was, it wasn’t just about Elon and Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman and some of the other women and I apologize I don’t know those names as much. But to you, what I’m taking away is you found so much joy in the process of talking to the people who are the unheard voices, the people who weren’t out there as much, which I also think is so compelling because like you said, they had the nuggets that you’d never be able to hear because you only hear people in the mainstream. So I just kind of wanted to add that as you’re talking about things.
Jimmy Soni:
Yes, it was the best part of the whole thing honestly. At the tail end of my process I had a meeting with Skylee and Amy Rowe Klement, who are two very big favors in this story. Amy is one of the leaders of the product team and goes on to a really distinguished career as an executive, and today as an investor. And Skylee runs UX and design for the whole company. And they were like these twin pillars of just incredible talent and bravado and insight. And no one had ever written up their contributions to the company. And I thought this was just like a crying shame. I remember actually looking on listen notes for podcasts of Amy before I interviewed her.
Jimmy Soni:
Same process, look at what they’ve said before and then see what… And there were like two or three podcasts she had done and she was a bigwig at the Omidyar Network. So obviously, the focus of these podcasts was on that work. But PayPal was a limited piece of it. And I just remember thinking her colleagues that I had interviewed had said incredible things about her and I just remember thinking like, “I’m sure we’ll have the best conversation if I can just get my foot in the door.” And that part of this process is the best… I think the best thing in the book is not stuff related to the people you know, it is entirely connected to the experience that PayPal was for all these other people.
Jimmy Soni:
And it was for me the best part of the research was when somebody who others would regard as like a name that time forgot would respond to me and say, “Yes, okay. Cool. How is Tuesday at three?” And we’d talk and they would just light up. Every conversation I had with people who are part of the story went way over time. And so that was also a really cool thing.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. Now, I appreciate the historical tales you’re sharing and how you brought those people to life and give those perspectives. It gives a book a whole richer meaning. So I want to shift the conversation a little outward now. We talked about you, we talked about the books and the people in the book. Let’s talk about the audience, the future founders out there, the current founders out there, the executives, businesses like PayPal that want to go off and do their own thing. When they pick this book up, what do you want them to feel? What do you want them to take away from this work? And how do you see it impacting them?
Jimmy Soni:
I’ll give a little bit of a counter intuitive answer. I would say that they are going to… Every founder who reads the book or somebody in that sort of role is probably going to take something different from it. And as an author, one of the things I think, at least for in the line of work, you have to be careful not to put your thumb too heavy on a scale of here’s what I want you to take on. Here’s the lesson. I actually have a really light touch with that kind of like, “Okay, no, no. I’m going to tell the story and then you take away whatever.” One author I’ve listened to describe is you have to leave a reader’s sized hole in the book because they’re all going to make of it what they need to make of it.
Jimmy Soni:
And so for some people, I imagine what they’re going to say or take away from it is “Wow, it takes a lot of like Elon level of determination to make a company successful.” I’m like, “Yes, there’s some evidence for that in the book I’m sure.” Other people are going to say, “Whoa, it takes us a crazy cast of personalities and everybody’s a little bit different.” I think that’s probably one of the takeaways from the book. Another person might say, “Man, they just got really, really lucky. Oh boy, they just got super lucky.” And they’re luck is a big part of the story. I never tried to be too presumptuous so like, “Here’s the lesson.”
Jimmy Soni:
What I’m trying to do is tell as accurately as I can a story about how the company came to be from 1998 to 2002. The one exception I would say is that at the very end of the book, I bury this little like lesson for my daughter, like at the very, very, very, very end if you’ve suffered through the whole book. I described as like a message in a bottle for her. And the message in a bottle is, look for people who challenge you, look for friendships that will provoke you and make you better. So don’t just look for friendships of comfort. When I described as look for friendships of productive discomfort. Meaning, other people in your life who love you enough to be totally honest with you.
Jimmy Soni:
Because one of the thing that I did see in this company, and even in the after life of this company and in the people I interacted with was a real focus on respecting one another enough to be completely honest with each other and saying, “No, you’re wrong. And here’s why you’re wrong. And I’m going to show you all the 25 ways you’re wrong. But it’s in service of making you better, it’s not personal. I want to help you or this company, or this product, or whatever, get better.” And I would say that until I did this book, I don’t think I did a good enough job of having those kinds of people in my life.
Jimmy Soni:
And in the course of doing this book, I was very quickly able to identify who those people were because I saw it play out on the page and in between Peter, and Max and whatever. And I don’t want to make too much of this because this is not a book about lessons, it’s book about history and what the company was. But for me the lesson that I wrote into the book for my daughter is a lesson about productively uncomfortable friendships.
Bryan Wish:
I absolutely think that’s phenomenal. And something your daughter as she gets older will grow to appreciate. And I think any human with an open mind and a growth mindset appreciates those relationships of productive discomfort in their life, because those are what shape our thinking, open us up, evolve us and make us better. And you entered into a significant period where I’m sure there’s a lot of productive discomfort, to drive being of a company that is shaping and changing lives for the last 20 plus years.
Bryan Wish:
One other question I want to ask you, and answer this anyway, someone once asked me this, and I thought it’s a really interesting question. This book was a really meaningful experience. If you could maybe pay, Christian [inaudible 00:52:47]. He runs a gratitude podcast. He’s a friend, client, mentor type. He asked a question on his show, and I want to give it to you. If you could pay your respects of gratitude to someone throughout who’s significant in this process who you don’t maybe think of or pay enough respect to, who would it be and why?
Jimmy Soni:
It’s a great question. I think it would be my editor. So my first editor for this project was Alice Mayhew and she passed away a couple of years ago. Then a call came from, I assume, like Simon and Schuster, or high command, to an editor named Stephanie Friedrich. And Stephanie was basically… As best as I can tell, got a call and he’s like, “Hey, we have this book project. It’s this thing about PayPal. It was an Alice project, we got to hand it to somebody.” And she took it on, and has gone through hell and back for this book. I mean, legitimately, I was told that I sent to Simon and Schuster record for revisions between the first pass and the second pass, and then revisions between the second pass and the third pass.
Jimmy Soni:
I annoyed the crap out of everybody there with endless requests for little things on here, and the cover and this and that. This book was not easy to bring to fruition. And Stephanie willingly did this, despite not having signed the book on from the beginning. So it wasn’t her project. It was Alice’s project, it was handed to Stephanie. And so it means all the more that she did everything she did to bring it to life. And I am endlessly grateful to her because not only did she do all of the things I described, she also just made the book better.
Jimmy Soni:
She would go in and say like, “You didn’t explain this to me. I need more context here. You can’t assume your reader knows this. You’re writing about the late 1990s internet. Don’t forget. We don’t know anything. What’s the point of this passage? Do you really need this?” I mean, at a level of granularity that is honestly what editors did years and years and years ago and sometimes the difficulties of the publishing business don’t allow them to do now. Stephanie did all that and more. And so she’s the person actually that I’m probably most grateful to in the grand scheme of things.
Bryan Wish:
Well it sounds like she created and induced some productive discomfort for you and me.
Jimmy Soni:
Absolutely. That’s 100% right.
Bryan Wish:
So Jimmy, this was a blast. And I am excited to do a live with you to dive into the details of the book. But I think this was a great place that you are able to attribute your learned experiences from writing and the value that you brought to this, which I am just in admiration of, and our friendship as well. So thanks for being such a friend, an incredible figure. Where can people go buy this book, find you, reach out to you? What’s best?
Jimmy Soni:
Look, the road cuts both ways. One of the people who gives me a lot of productive discomfort is you Bryan, so I’m grateful for that because you push my thinking in ways that are really really important. And you always forced me out from underneath my rock to go and do the things I need to do to make sure people actually hear about the book which is also powerful. The book is available everywhere books are sold. It’s on Amazon and everyplace else. It’s called The Founders. I’m on Twitter in frequently at best I’m jimmyasoni on Twitter. I’m not great about tweeting or being much of a presence there. But hey, it’s a great place where it’s like I see it as a P.O. Box. If you reach me there, cool. I’ll get back to you in a couple months.
Jimmy Soni:
Bryan is cringing because he knows that’s not the way it should be but so it is. And then I have a website jimmysoni.com. Also not the most… I’ll update it more this year I think because now I’m out of the craziness of the process. But my format is I go under a rock for three or four years and then emerge with something and hopefully the thing is good. And then I go back under the rock for a little while. But I love engaging with readers. The truth is I actually really enjoy it because it’s the reason you do this kind of work. And so I’m happy to hear from anybody on any of those formats or mediums.
Bryan Wish:
Well, thank you Jimmy. And yes, I am cringing because you said [inaudible 00:57:14]. Jimmy sends me tweets so I engage in and retweet and Jimmy doesn’t even engage or retweet. I mean, that’s how social media avoidant here.
Jimmy Soni:
Right, exactly.
Bryan Wish:
Jimmy, I think you’ve dug yourself a nice hole with this book.
Jimmy Soni:
I was going to say. I really have. I can’t hide at the moment which I sort of want to do but it’s okay.
Bryan Wish:
Great. And on the last note you and Ryan Holiday should hang out because I’m sure you tell you not to live in a cave.
Jimmy Soni:
I know. Well, Ryan’s great. Ryan’s actually is a friend and he’s the reason this book got started because he made the first introduction to Peter Thiel so that I could actually get my first foot in the door. So we were talking about really amazing people who can help and nudge and push and he’s definitely one of them.
Bryan Wish:
Great. Sounds like a nice holiday present for you. So, Jimmy, it was a pleasure.
Jimmy Soni:
Thanks, Bryan.
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This post was previously published on BW Missions.
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The post Jimmy Soni: One Chapter Away From an Untold Story appeared first on The Good Men Project.