What I learned from reading The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni.
And finally to Venice, to whom this book is dedicated.
The idea for this project started when you were a one year old, and it was completed when you were six.
The intervening five years have been among the happiest of my life, in large measure because you made them so.
You, too, indulged my stories about Max Levchin and Elon Musk, and you offered wisdom of your own kind.
In my moments of doubt about the project, you are unlikely to remember most of what happened these last five years.
I will never forget them.
Authors of books like this should usually refrain from burdening readers with lessons.
The reader is smart enough to figure those out for themselves.
But there's a special acknowledgments only exception to that rule for author dads, and I'm going to take advantage of it to offer you a message in a bottle for whenever you get around to reading these words, here goes.
Your life will be shaped by the things that you create and the people you make them with.
We tend to sweat the former.
We don't worry enough about the latter.
The story of PayPal isn't just people banding together to shape a product.
It's about how banding together shaped the people themselves.
The founders and earliest employees of the company pushed and prodded and demanded better of one another.
I hope you find people like that, too, and that you make things with them.
That sounds simple, but it's awfully hard.
I've been fortunate.
I have a sequence of those people in my life, many of whom have been named in the previous pages.
You know them as Auntie Lauren and Auntie Grace and Uncle Justin and so on.