Known the world over as the “PayPal Mafia,” this alumni group is arguably the most powerful to ever exist. Out of the founding employees of PayPal have come billionaire start-up executives, Academy Award–winning producers, and high government officials. Together, they constitute the most influential network in Silicon Valley, responsible for creating, investing in, or advising major tech companies from SpaceX to Facebook, YouTube to Yelp, Palantir to LinkedIn.

And yet, for all that, the story of the company where they all first met has gone untold. In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores the earliest venture of some of today’s foremost business titans. Based on hundreds of interviews and with unprecedented access to thousands of pages of never-before-seen material, Soni’s narrative digs deep into the founding of a company whose creators have changed how we use the internet and technology today. It is a story of sweeping, nail-biting entrepreneurial success—and it is the definitive account of how a generation of technology founders came to learn and practice their craft.