Jimmy Soni > Quotes

“In these days, when there is a tendency to specialize so closely, it is well for us to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or even Benjamin Franklin.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“I don’t think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in the other room. I was more motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together. Or what laws or rules govern a situation, or if there are theorems about what one can’t or can do. Mainly because I wanted to know myself.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“In one sense, the world seen through such eyes looks starkly unequal. “A very small percentage of the population produces the greatest proportion of the important ideas,” Shannon began, gesturing toward a rough graph of the distribution of intelligence. “There are some people if you shoot one idea into the brain, you will get a half an idea out. There are other people who are beyond this point at which they produce two ideas for each idea sent in. Those are the people beyond the knee of the curve.” He was not, he quickly added, claiming membership for himself in the mental aristocracy—he was talking about history’s limited supply of Newtons and Einsteins.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“How is logic like a machine? Here is how one logician explained it around the turn of the twentieth century: "As a material machine is an instrument for economising the exertion of force, so a symbolic calculus is an instrument for economising the exertion of intelligence." Logic, just like a machine, was a tool for democratizing force: built with enough precision and skill, it could multiply the power of the gifted and the average alike.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“When Musk took delivery of his F1, CNN was there to cover it. “Just three years ago I was showering at the Y and sleeping on the office floor,” he told the camera sheepishly, “and now obviously, I’ve got a million-dollar car… it’s just a moment in my life.” While other McLaren F1 owners around the world—the sultan of Brunei, Wyclef Jean, and Jay Leno, among others—could comfortably afford it, Musk’s purchase had put a sizable dent in his bank account. And unlike other owners, Musk drove the car to work—and declined to insure it. As Musk drove Thiel up Sand Hill Road in the F1, the car was the subject of their chat. “It was like this Hitchcock movie,” Thiel remembered, “where we’re talking about the car for fifteen minutes. We’re supposed to be preparing for the meeting—and we’re talking about the car.” During their ride, Thiel looked at Musk and reportedly asked, “So, what can this thing do?” “Watch this,” Musk replied, flooring the accelerator and simultaneously initiating a lane change on Sand Hill Road. In retrospect, Musk admitted that he was outmatched by the F1. “I didn’t really know how to drive the car,” he recalled. “There’s no stability systems. No traction control. And the car gets so much power that you can break the wheels free at even fifty miles an hour.” Thiel recalls the car in front of them coming fast into view—then Musk swerving to avoid it. The McLaren hit an embankment, was tossed into the air—“like a discus,” Musk remembered——then slammed violently into the ground. “The people that saw it happen thought we were going to die,” he recalled. Thiel had not worn a seat belt, but astonishingly, neither he nor Musk were hurt. Musk’s “work of art” had not fared as well, having now taken a distinctly cubist turn. Post-near-death experience, Thiel dusted himself off on the side of the road and hitchhiked to the Sequoia offices, where he was joined by Musk a short while later. X.com’s CEO, Bill Harris, was also waiting at the Sequoia office, and he recalled that both Thiel and Musk were late but offered no explanation for their delay. “They never told me,” Harris said. “We just had the meeting.” Reflecting on it, Musk found humor in the experience: “I think it’s safe to say Peter wouldn’t be driving with me again.” Thiel wrung some levity out of the moment, too. “I’d achieved lift-off with Elon,” he joked, “but not in a rocket.”
― Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

“Max kept repeating, ‘As hire As. Bs hire Cs. So the first B you hire takes the whole company down.”
― Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

“Robert said: ‘Oh my God!’ and Joe calmly replied, ‘Please don’t exaggerate, just call me Professor.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“For Musk, the Scotiabank internship proved “how lame banks are.” Fear of the unknown had cost them billions, and in his later efforts at X.com and PayPal, he’d return to this experience as evidence that the banks could be beaten. “If they’re this bad at innovation, then any company that enters the financial space should not fear that the banks will crush them—because the banks do not innovate,” Musk concluded.”
― Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

“There were two kinds of researchers at Bell Labs: those who are being paid for what they used to do, and those who are being paid for what they were going to do. Nobody was paid for what they were doing now.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do and, even if their genius is unrecognized in their lifetime, the essential earthly reward is always theirs, the certainty that their work is good and will stand the test of time. One suspects that the geniuses will be least in the Kingdom of Heaven—if, indeed, they ever make it; they have had their reward.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“In early 2000, Thiel and Musk were set to meet with Mike Moritz at Sequoia’s office at 2800 Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park to discuss the merger. Musk offered Thiel a lift from Palo Alto. The year before, Musk had purchased a Magnesium Silver McLaren F1, Chassis #067, from Gerd Petrik, a German pharmaceutical executive. A $1 million sports car complete with gull-wing doors and an engine bay encased in gold foil, Musk dubbed the automobile a “work of art” and “a really beautiful piece of engineering.” Even among McLarens, #067 was distinctive—one of only seven McLaren F1s legal to drive in the United States at the time.”
― Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

“At Bush’s MIT, math and engineering were an extension of the metal shop and the woodshop, and students who were skilled with the planimeter and the slide rule had to be skilled as well with the soldering iron and the saw.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“Et Thiel n’aimait pas perdre. « Montre-moi un bon perdant, et je te montrerai un perdant”
― Jimmy Soni, Les fondateurs: L'histoire de PayPal et des créateurs de la Silicon Valley

“I’m a machine and you’re a machine, and we both think, don’t we? —Claude Shannon”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: The Brilliant Life of Claude Shannon, Inventor of the Information Age

“Thomson’s tidal solution was something like the inverse of Bush’s lawnmower. The surveying machine would read the land’s data of hills and dips and even manhole covers and output a graph; the tide machine invented by Thomson and his brother, which they christened the harmonic analyzer, took a graph as input. The operator stood before a long, open wooden box resting on eight legs, a steel pointer and a hand crank protruding from its innards. With his right hand, he took hold of the pointer and traced a graph of water levels, months’ data on high tides and low; with his left, he steadily turned the crank that turned the oiled gears in the casket. Inside, eleven little cranks rotated at their own speeds, each isolating one of the simple functions that added up to the chaotic tide. At the end, their gauges displayed eleven little numbers—the average water level, the pull of the moon, the pull of the sun, and so on—that together filled in the equation to state the tides. All of it, in principle, could be ground out by human hands on a notepad—but, said Thomson, this was “calculation of so methodical a kind that a machine ought to be found to do it.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“Up the street at X.com, CEO Bill Harris wasn’t resting easy. “We were both the same size, growing at the same speed,” Harris remembered. “We would have destroyed ourselves competing.” He saw the writing on the wall: two payment networks catering to the same market couldn’t achieve scale simultaneously. “True networks are a naturally monopolistic business,” Harris explained”
― Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

“Let there be no doubt, that what we are witnessing is, indeed, history’s greatest financial bubble,” wrote an investor at the market’s peak in 1999. “The indescribable financial excesses, the massive increase in debt, the monstrous use of leverage upon leverage, the collapse in private savings, the incredulous current account deficits, and the ballooning central bank assets all describe the very severe financial imbalances which no amount of statistical revision nor hype from CNBC can erase.”
― Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

“I don’t think people know how precarious it was,” Klement offered. “If we hadn’t raised that $ 100 million round, there would be no PayPal.” Mark Woolway extended the counterfactual: “If the team hadn’t closed that one hundred million,” Woolway said, “there would be no SpaceX, no LinkedIn, and no Tesla.”
― Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

“As the story goes, the manuscript that formed the outlines of Wiener’s contributions to information theory was nearly lost to humanity. Wiener had entrusted the manuscript to Walter Pitts, a graduate student, who had checked it as baggage for a trip from New York’s Grand Central Terminal to Boston. Pitts forgot to retrieve the baggage. Realizing his mistake, he asked two friends to pick up the bag. They either ignored or forgot the request. Only five months later was the manuscript finally tracked down; it had been labeled “unclaimed property” and cast aside in a coatroom. Wiener was, understandably, blind with rage. “Under these circumstances please consider me as completely dissociated from your future career,” he wrote to Pitts. He complained to one administrator of the “total irresponsibleness of the boys” and to another faculty member that the missing parcel meant that he had “lost priority on some important work.” “One of my competitors, Shannon of the Bell Telephone Company, is coming out with a paper before mine,” he fumed. Wiener wasn’t being needlessly paranoid: Shannon had, by that point, previewed his still-unpublished work at 1947 conferences at Harvard and Columbia. In April 1947, Wiener and Shannon shared the same stage, and both had the opportunity to present early versions of their thoughts. Wiener, in a moment of excessive self-regard, would write to a colleague, “The Bell people are fully accepting my thesis concerning statistics and communications engineering.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“Tout ce qui se faisait dans les jeux vidéo était bien plus avancé que dans tout autre domaine, explique Musk. Les meilleurs programmeurs sont dans les jeux vidéo. » Il a observé que ceux en fonctionnalités étaient techniquement complexes, bien plus, à certains égards, que les sites Web de l’époque.”
― Jimmy Soni, Les fondateurs: L'histoire de PayPal et des créateurs de la Silicon Valley

“Shannon was an engineer—a man more attuned to practicality than most—and yet he was drawn to the idea that knowledge was valuable for its own sake and that discovery was pleasurable in its own right.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“During the bust, fuckedcompany.com—a snarky twist on the technology magazine Fast Company—became popular with the tech crowd. As its name suggested, Fucked Company logged the era’s many misadventures. Several X.com employees remembered browsing Fucked Company daily during this period—not out of schadenfreude, but out of fear that they might be next. That Confinity and X.com didn’t end up in the Valley’s discard bin was attributable to a number of factors, not least that it had enough runway to ride out a rocky year. “Back then, there were probably five to seven other little piddling online money moving services… that just got starved of oxygen over time. And they all died out by the fall,” said Vince Sollitto. Former employees point to the $100 million round’s timing as a watershed for PayPal. “I don’t think people know how precarious it was,” Klement offered. “If we hadn’t raised that $100 million round, there would be no PayPal.” Mark Woolway extended the counterfactual: “If the team hadn’t closed that one hundred million,” Woolway said, “there would be no SpaceX, no LinkedIn, and no Tesla.”
― Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

“Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work—of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence “unnatural,” but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“A good rule of thumb is that diversity of opinion is essential anytime you don’t know anything about something important. But if there’s a strong sense of what’s right already, don’t argue about it.”
― Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

“Even PayPal’s millions of dollars in bad transactions could be justified for the extensive data set they generated. “Losing a lot of money to fraud was a necessary byproduct in gathering the data needed to understand the problem and build good predictive models,” Greenfield later wrote on a personal blog. “With millions of transactions and tens of thousands of fraudulent transactions, our fraud analytics team could find subtler patterns and detect fraud more accurately.” Taken together, PayPal turned fraud from an existential threat to one of the company’s defining triumphs. It also had the unexpected benefit of thinning out the competition. “As the Russian mobsters got better and better,” Thiel said, “they got better and better at destroying all our competitors.” Thieves forced to work ever harder to fleece PayPal customers moved on to easier prey. “We’d also find that fraudsters were kind of lazy, right? They want to do just the least amount of work… So we just kind of hoped to push them off onto [our competitors],” Miller observed.”
― Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

“On a trip to Korea, Thiel’s corporate credit card was declined as he tried to purchase a return ticket home. The investors he had met with were only too happy to furnish a first-class plane ticket—which they did on the spot. “They were excited beyond belief,” Thiel remembered. “The next day, they called up our law firm and asked, ‘What’s the bank account we need to send the money to?’ ” The crazed nature of it all confirmed Thiel’s suspicions about the market. “I remember thinking to myself that it felt like things couldn’t get much crazier, and that we really had to close the money quickly because the window might not last forever,” he said. The final $100 million figure actually disappointed some on the team. Confinity and X.com had secured verbal commitments for double that amount, and some on the team had wanted to hold out for the remaining funding or push for a billion-dollar valuation. Thiel disagreed, urging Selby and others on the financing team to turn handshakes into actual checks, to get term sheets signed, and have deposits confirmed. “Peter kicked everyone’s asses to get that funding round done,” David Sacks remembered. Many Confinity employees—who had seen Thiel at his toughest—rarely remember him this insistent. “If we don’t get this money raised,” Howery recalled Thiel saying, “the whole company could blow up.”
― Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

“Quatre mois plus tard, cet épisode était de l’histoire ancienne. Dans l’intervalle, X.com a obtenu un financement d’une société de capital-risque de premier plan, a mis au point un produit fonctionnel, développé ses bancs d’ingénierie et de gestion, et signé des accords avec des banques dans le pays et à l’étranger. Comme toujours, Musk voulait des résultats plus rapides et plus spectaculaires, mais au moins lui et son équipe pouvaient regarder le passé avec soulagement et l’avenir avec détermination. X.com était bien réel.”
― Jimmy Soni, Les fondateurs: L'histoire de PayPal et des créateurs de la Silicon Valley

“You only have so deep a well from which to make choices throughout the day. The same is true of willpower. If you accept that both your ability to choose and your ability to act are limited, you discover the virtue of routines. I try to pre-program as many of the mundane decisions as I can. A rough regularity on the insignificant things helps preserve energy for the significant ones.”
― Jimmy Soni

“Musk donnait une grande liberté à ses employés (« la possibilité d’être tout ce qu’ils pouvaient être ») mais fixait des attentes très élevées en matière de résultats. « Je n’ai jamais travaillé aussi dur ni aussi vite de toute ma vie », a-t-elle déclaré.”
― Jimmy Soni, Les fondateurs: L'histoire de PayPal et des créateurs de la Silicon Valley

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy soothed Musk’s existential worries by suggesting that framing the right questions was as important as divining the answers. “A lot of times,” Musk explained, “the question is harder than the answer, and if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.”
― Jimmy Soni, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley