Alex RaineyAlex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
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Sep 23, 2024 03:58 PM
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Sep 23, 2024
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I absolutely love early-stage startup books
The gritty first few years of the companies that made it. And I just found a new favourite: The Founders. It covers the early years of PayPal — which was created when two companies merged, respectively run by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It also covers the infamous PayPal mafia, and the incredible concentration of talent in one organisation.
Standout takeaways from the book:
- Lessons in being the underdog (they faced significant competition from eBay and many others)
- Lessons in grit and persistence (they were doing something that none of the major banks or regulators wanted to succeed)
- Lessons in ingenuity and first principles thinking (they created their own fraud detection system built by people with no fraud experience that was significantly better than any fraud system built by a large bank)
- Lessons in network efforts (they understood the huge value in a large network and paid through the nose to get to a critical mass before anyone else)
And so many more. One of the best books I've read this year.
Written by
Alex Rainey
Alex is an experienced CTO and founder who largely focuses on all the technical areas of My AskAI, from AI Engineering, Technical Product Management and overall Platform Development.
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