Jimmy Soni

Bio

Jimmy Soni is Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. He is a best-selling and award-winning author. His latest book, The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, was a debut national best-seller and has earned praise from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and The Economist, among many others. Described as “an intensely magnetic chronicle” (NYT) and “engrossing” (Business Insider), the book featured exclusive interviews with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and many others, and it explored PayPal’s turbulent early days and the shaping of a generation of technological talent.

Soni’s previous book, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, won the 2017 Neumann Prize, awarded by the British Society for the History of Mathematics for the best book on the history of mathematics for a general audience, and the Middleton Prize by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The book explored the life and times of Dr. Claude Shannon, founder of the field of information theory and one of the 20th century’s forgotten geniuses. Fortune magazine called the book a “charming account of one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished scientists…Readers will enjoy this portrait of a modern-day Da Vinci.”

A prior work, Rome’s Last Citizen: the Life and Legacy of Cato, shared the story of the ancient Roman Senator Cato the Younger, arch-rival of Julius Caesar. Soni is also a co-author of Jane’s Carousel, completed with the late Jane Walentas, which captured one woman’s remarkable twenty-five-year journey to restore a beloved carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park. He started his career at McKinsey & Company, and he lives in Brooklyn, New York.