Summary: You Only Have to Be Right Once by Randall Lane

The Unprecedented Rise of the Instant Tech Billionaires. Embark on a journey through ‘You Only Have to Be Right Once’, where audacious dreams transform into technological empires. Witness the unparalleled ascent of Silicon Valley’s mavericks, whose stories redefine the essence of success.

Dive deeper into the narratives of tech’s greatest visionaries. Continue reading to unlock the secrets behind their billion-dollar breakthroughs.

‘You Only Have to Be Right Once’ chronicles the meteoric rise of the instant tech billionaires. It delves into the lives of Silicon Valley’s most influential entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, revealing how their simple yet groundbreaking ideas reshaped industries. The book highlights the importance of boldness, persistence, and the willingness to challenge established norms. It showcases how these individuals turned their visions into ventures that command colossal valuations, even without traditional revenue streams.

Genres

Business Biographies, Business and Money, Finance, Venture Capital, Computers and Technology Industry, Company Business Profiles, Business Technology Innovation, Company Histories, Entrepreneurship, Self Help

Review

The book offers an insightful look into the minds of those who have dared to disrupt the status quo. It is well-researched and presents a compelling narrative that is both inspiring and instructive. The author, Randall Lane, provides a nuanced understanding of what it takes to succeed in the highly competitive tech landscape. However, some critics may find the book’s focus on success stories a bit one-sided, lacking the perspective of those who did not reach the same heights. Overall, ‘You Only Have to Be Right Once’ serves as a testament to the power of innovation and the spirit of entrepreneurship.

This comprehensive collection of profiles features Silicon Valley’s newest and most influential tech entrepreneurs and provides you with an inside look at the habits, philosophies, and ideas that helped them take the world by storm. In this summary, you’ll explore the lives of four major figures who created companies that are reshaping the world and how they achieved their super-entrepreneur status by betting big on major ideas.

Based on Forbes magazine interviews with some of Silicon Valley’s most successful tech entrepreneurs, You Only Have to be Right Once outlines how today’s tech wunderkinds achieved their successes.

Discover insider secrets to entrepreneurship from the tech giants shaping the world.

READ THIS BOOK SUMMARY IF YOU:

• Are curious about the unbelievable success found in the tech world
• Want to find out about the new breed of billionaires
• Wonder how super-entrepreneurs create their empires

Did you know that Airbnb started out as an inflatable mattress and WhatsApp as an online address book with the ability to share status updates?

Over the last few years, a few entrepreneurs have struck it big, very big. In a relatively short space of time, the people behind success stories like Dropbox, Airbnb and WhatsApp have taken an initial simple idea and made it into businesses worth billions.

This book summary describe the journey that many of these tech billionaires have taken. Based on interviews with Forbes, they teach you that in the modern digital world the possibilities from simply having a good idea are endless.

In this summary of You Only Have to Be Right Once by Randall Lane,In this book summary you’ll discover:

• how one entrepreneur got into Silicon Valley through selling carpets;
• why the genius behind Tumblr didn’t want to run his own business; and
• which innovative product began life as a disposable camera strapped to an arm.

Introduction

The disruptive power of technology is changing the world one invention at a time, and the new tech billionaires who populate Silicon Valley are leading the way. With unprecedented genius and massive amounts of venture capital, these superentrepreneurs come from all walks of life but share one crucial quality: They each discovered that, to make it big in the tech world, you only have to be right once.

In the digital age, innovative platforms and software that change the way people live are being invented every day, and it only takes one incredible idea to create an international phenomenon. The keys are knowing when to keep working on your vision and how to launch your venture before someone else thinks of it.

Thanks to rapid global development, technology isn’t an isolated market anymore. Every market is now a tech market — from medicine to housing to transportation. Tech startups are changing the face of every industry imaginable and making their founders and investors enormously wealthy in the process.

In this summary, you’ll examine in-depth profiles of four of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs: Elon Musk, creator of Tesla and SpaceX; Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter and Square; Alex Karp, creator of Palantir; and Jan Koum, creator of WhatsApp. These innovators of the internet era prove that the American Dream is alive and well. They also show that, in the age of technology, it only takes one successful idea to catapult you to phenomenal levels of wealth and achievement.

Elon Musk (Tesla & SpaceX)

You’ve probably heard of Elon Musk’s two pioneering startups: Tesla, which focuses on renewable energy across multiple sectors, and SpaceX, which aims to privatize space travel and exploration. But even if you’re not familiar with Tesla or SpaceX, you might know him by the other wildly successful companies he was involved with: eBay and PayPal.

Musk, the inspiration for the popular Iron Man character of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has been called the greatest entrepreneur of the 21st century, and for good reason. Musk dreams big, works tirelessly, attempts to tackle some of the world’s greatest problems, and makes his career of disrupting some of the most outdated industries on the planet — energy and automobiles.

Only a visionary could attempt such lofty goals, and few people have the grit to endure the enormous pressures he’s faced to protect his companies. Known for his tenacity and ingenuity, Musk has successfully led his companies in creating technologies that are on the cutting edge of modern human history.

In Musk’s world, Hollywood and Silicon Valley converge, each providing inspiration for the other. Musk, a father to five boys, spends most of his time working on his ideas himself, with his background in engineering and his insatiable curiosity propelling him toward new inventions. One of his key traits is his honesty. He gives brutally honest feedback on business operations and designs and expects to receive the same in return.

Together, these qualities — authentic curiosity, brilliant imagination, unparalleled vision, and rigorous honesty — have contributed to Musk’s outrageous success. They’ve enabled him to weather the storms that have rocked the tech world in recent years and propelled him to the highest levels of business success.

Jack Dorsey (Twitter & Square)

Jack Dorsey made history (and billions of dollars) by founding two of the world’s most exciting tech companies almost simultaneously. In his case, he’s been right — really right — about the potential of an idea not just once, but twice. This earned Dorsey a reputation as one of Silicon Valley’s major game-changers.

Twitter, one of the most popular and ubiquitous social media platforms of the digital age, began with a simple idea: What would it look like if the internet could send and receive text messages? This idea turned out to be powerful and transformative, disrupting traditional news cycles and forms of communication. Dorsey and three friends created what would become one of the most visited sites on the web within months of its launch, and eventually, it would become the internet’s ultimate promotional platform, news disseminator, and communications tool. Today, major corporations, news organizations, and world leaders break stories and interact directly with the public via Twitter — which is currently valued at nearly $40 billion.

Square, Dorsey’s lesser-known enterprise, was created to help small businesses accept credit card payments without incurring outrageous fees. While Square hasn’t quite reached the same heights of success as Twitter, it has significantly altered the landscape of traditional payment platforms and democratized access to online financial services. Today, two million small businesses use it regularly.

The way Dorsey allocates his time is crucial to his success. He uses everyday activities like running, walking, and traveling to their fullest, so he can concentrate on structuring his thoughts. One of his favorite things to do is let his mind wander while he wanders around his offices or unexplored parts of town. This is how he mentally tucks into the process of unpacking his next great project.

Alex Karp (Palantir)

Palantir isn’t a household name — but it should be. Considering the wealth of intimate knowledge it has likely collected about you, Palantir could aptly be called Big Brother. But despite the breadth of information it has collected, it remains one of the most mysterious companies in the tech world.

Palantir’s data-mining capabilities are second-to-none, which might explain how it won early funding from the CIA and other government groups. And while advocates of transparency and civil liberties might decry its purposes and uses (it purports to help the government track terrorists and detect corporate hacking attempts), there’s no denying that its advanced, custom programs can perform incredibly complex calculations instantaneously. It’s truly one of the most powerful tech innovations to emerge from the past decade.

Alex Karp, the company’s founder, holds a doctoral degree in social theory and is acutely aware of both the profound benefits and dark drawbacks to creating a product that’s developed around poking into people’s private worlds. The competing tensions of privacy and security influence his approach to how his business operates, but it can be hard to balance them equally when most of the company’s contracts come from government surveillance agencies.

Nevertheless, Karp’s incredibly successful idea has catapulted him to the top of the tech world and landed him a spot on the burgeoning list of Silicon Valley billionaires. With his uncanny ability to translate complex ideas into simple terms and his dream of building a platform that enables humans to analyze vast sums of data, Karp has maintained a steady focus on nurturing a major idea. That idea has changed how governments, corporations, and investigators map out the secrets and intricacies of the modern world. Few people are aware of the vast scope of Palantir’s growing reach and resources, but there are few people beyond the scope of Palantir’s ever-multiplying data points.

Jan Koum (WhatsApp)

In 2014, Facebook acquired the messaging platform WhatsApp, which facilitates the conversations of over half a billion people worldwide, for the tidy sum of $19 billion. Jan Koum, WhatsApp’s unlikely founder, became the recipient of much of that sum. In a nod to his unconventional background, Koum used the moment to distinguish himself from many of the Silicon Valley elites populating the startup offices around him. As a poetic gesture, he signed the deal against the door of the welfare office where he used to go as a teenager.

Jan Koum’s story follows the quintessential trajectory of the classic American Dream. He led a rags-to-riches existence, culminating in one of the greatest tech deals of the century. Born in Ukraine, Koum emigrated to the U.S. as a teen, living on government checks with his cancer-stricken mother until she died a few years later.

Koum’s one big idea was to create an indispensable social utility for mass communication — an idea that would materialize in the form of WhatsApp. The company became an almost overnight success, with nearly half of its users returning daily and hundreds of millions of people using it to connect with loved ones locally and around the globe. In addition to its text, video, and picture-sending capabilities, WhatsApp also provides voice calling — all with the added benefit of encrypting your conversations.

It’s no wonder people all over the world rely on it for their communication needs and equally unsurprising that Facebook purchased it for such a massive sum. And although the app has already erased $33 billion in text message revenue from mobile service providers around the globe, they promise even more disruptive moves in the future. Their goal is for the service to reach half the people on planet earth in the next few years.

To understand how Koum transformed WhatsApp into what it is today, you must first understand the environment that shaped him. Before coming to America, his family lived in poverty in Kiev. Hot water and electricity were rationed, and there was limited access to hospitals and schools. Although there was a beauty to the family’s rural life, danger clouded their days: His parents avoided talking on the phone because they knew it was likely being tapped by government officials. Raised with this looming concern for privacy, Koum internalized the desire to talk freely and communicate without the ear of the state listening in.

Years later, after designing networking infrastructure at Yahoo, Koum found a way to give that desire wings. He created the code for WhatsApp, incorporated his business in California, and began writing the code that would allow his app to connect with any phone number in the world. His messaging service expanded exponentially when people realized that it allowed them to connect with friends anywhere around the globe at the touch of a button, all with encryption built in — for free. There was nothing else like it.

Regarding his success, Koum, an intensely private individual, says that all he ever wanted was to do one important thing and do it well.

Many tech-billionaires achieved their success by boldly pursuing a dream.

If you want to be successful in life, what’s the best path to take? Here’s the conventional answer to that question: work hard at school and then find a mentor to help you along your career — which you should pursue at a slow and steady pace.

Although this approach probably sounds familiar, most of today’s mega-successful young entrepreneurs — the tech-billionaires — followed a different path. For them, success was all about boldly pursuing a dream and ignoring what society expected of them.

Let’s look at one example: when he was just 23-years-old, Evan Spiegel, the co-founder of Snapchat, turned down Facebook’s offer to buy his company for $3 billion. Although it’s too early to tell whether his decision was wise, we can still learn from Spiegel’s stratospheric path to success.

Like many other successful entrepreneurs, Spiegel learned how to get his own way at a young age. When his high-powered lawyer parents split up, Spiegel used it to his advantage: his dad refused to buy him a BMW, so Spiegel moved in with his mother. It wasn’t long before his dad caved and bought him the car.

There’s another similarity between Spiegel and his entrepreneurial peers: that he dropped out of college to pursue his startup. He and Snapchat co-founder Bobby Murphy came up with the idea for their app while they were still in college, but struggled to get the concept to take off. Although their parents pestered them to look for “proper jobs,” the duo stayed true to their dream.

And finally, they received an investment from a venture capitalist. Spiegel promptly quit college (weeks ahead of graduation) and started on Snapchat day and night.

And of course, you know how this story ends: Spiegel’s efforts paid off and Snapchat became one of the world’s most popular apps — so popular that Facebook offered to buy it for $3 billion.

Plenty of outsiders have broken into the closed world of Silicon Valley.

After hearing that last story, you might be wondering, “Hmmm. Was Evan Spiegel really an outsider who achieved success solely through hard-work and boldness? After all, weren’t his parents high-powered lawyers? Didn’t he go to Stanford?”

Although there’s some truth to that objection, plenty of tech-billionaires come from different backgrounds. Here are two stories about mega-successful entrepreneurs who came into the tech industry as complete outsiders.

First we have Pejman Nozad. Born in Iran, Nozad’s family fled to Germany when he was a boy. Later, he made a bold move to San Francisco with just $700 in his pocket. Although he didn’t speak English, he soon learned the language and found a way to survive by doing odd jobs.

Eventually, without having prior experience, he started working as a salesman at a carpet store. He turned out to be a great salesman and an even better networker. Through his sparkling conversational skills and personal warmth, Nozad built up relationships with many of the businessmen and tech leaders who came to the store. And eventually, he leveraged these connections to start the investment fund Amidzad, which invested early in successful companies like Dropbox — earning over $100 million in the process.

Our second story centers around Adi Tatarko, who co-owns Houzz, a home-design community worth $2 billion.

Tatarko is one of the few women who achieved great success in the tech industry despite the overwhelming gender bias in Silicon Valley. (Consider that 43 percent of the 150 biggest companies in the Valley don’t have a single woman on the Board of Directors!)

How did she manage to cut through the sexism? Well, it had a lot to do with sheer energy: Tatarko can work nonstop. And for motivation, she looks up to her grandmother, who worked as a designer when fashion was still a male-dominated industry.

Tech entrepreneurs get to the top with a little help from their friends.

Whenever we read about the latest wildly successful tech wunderkind, we’re tempted to think, “Wow—he must be a genius to accomplish so much at his age!” Not to detract from anyone’s well-earned success, but it’s important to remember that all of these people had lots of help along the way.

To that end, let’s look at the story of Tumblr. Today, the wildly successful social network is a top tech enterprise, yet, founder David Karp never planned for it to be a business. He was just happy to have the tool for his personal use.

Luckily, he had a mentor. Entrepreneur Fred Seibert recognized Tumblr’s vast potential for success, and managed to persuade Karp (pretty much against his own will) to turn his product into a business.

At first, Karp hated being a manager and overseeing the expansion of his company. But he persevered and Tumblr flourished. Eventually, the company’s success attracted Yahoo!, and the tech giant bought Karp’s blogging platform for $1.1 billion. So, thanks to Seibert’s advice, Karp turned his small idea into a major success.

Here’s another story about mentorship in the tech world. It concerns Palmer Luckey, the creator of the Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) headset. It’s important to note that VR is a notoriously tricky field, and that many have tried and failed in this area — including games giant Nintendo, whose 1996 foray into VR was so disastrous that it literally gave players a headache when they used it.

Nevertheless, Luckey ventured forth. And luckily, he had the help of VR pioneer Mark Bolars, who shared his trailblazing research with Luckey for free. Luckey also had the help of video game programmer John Carmack, who demoed Oculus Rift to the games industry.

All this assistance paid off: Facebook eventually bought the company for $2 billion.

So now that we’ve seen a few tech-billionaire origin stories, let’s delve deeper into what it takes to turn a great idea into a phenomenal success.

Many billion-dollar companies have created simple solutions to small, everyday problems.

What does it take to come up with a great idea? Surely it’s a matter of thinking long and hard about life’s great problems.

Well actually, no — not at all. To be successful, you don’t have to come up with a formula for cold fusion or design a perpetual motion machine. Rather, success often lies in simplicity, in solving a small, everyday problem.

This was the case for Nick Woodman. After his first business idea failed, Woodman took some time off to surf in Indonesia and Australia. When he wanted to record some of his surfing adventures, he faced a problem: how was going to take pictures while riding the waves?

He came up with an incredibly simple solution and strapped a disposable camera to his wrist. When he told his friend about his DIY creation, his friend urged him to take his simple idea to the next level.

Woodman eventually created a wearable camera with durable casing, so that it would be impact resistant and waterproof. This tool developed into GoPro and Woodman went on to sell $1 billion worth of cameras.

Next, we have the story of Jack Dorsey. Dorsey is best known for his world-changing product, Twitter, but he also has a $1 billion stake in a payment processing company called Square.

Square was inspired by a real-life problem: Dorsey’s friend, a glassblower, lost a $2,500 sale because he didn’t have the tools to process a credit card payment.

Dorsey set out to find a solution, and ended up creating a very cheap smart-phone-based terminal that would allow small businesses to accept credit cards.

It was a very straightforward solution, and it was also Dorsey’s second billion-dollar idea.

Challenging established companies and business models can lead to success.

If you want to rise to the top, you’re bound to upset a few people along the way. And tech-billionaires aren’t scared to.

Consider Aaron Levie, the founder of Box, a company which allows you to share and edit files and documents on any device.

Before we dive into his story, it’s important to note that for years, the computer software industry was dominated by four main companies: Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM. Their dominance didn’t lead to a lot of innovation in the tech industry: Since there was so little competition, clients paid high fees for tech services and upgrades; and furthermore, the quality was often not the highest. Even today, these companies lack many adequate products for the mobile and tablet markets.

For startups like Box, this presents an opportunity. The Box app allows people to share, open and edit files on any device. This kind of software has traditionally been Microsoft’s domain, but the tech giant has been slow to adapt its Office Suite for mobile. And what’s more, Box offers a free basic service without requiring users to pay for upgrades.

The company’s nimble, efficient approach has proven to be a huge success: By 2013, Box had $124 million in revenues and even traditional powers were clamoring for a partnership.

But for startups, success isn’t always about challenging established leaders. For companies like Airbnb, it’s about creating entirely new ways of doing business.

Faced with a market completely dominated by hotels and guesthouses, founder Brian Chesky thought outside of the box and developed a whole new model for hospitality. Airbnb allows people to connect online to find private lodging while traveling.

Although the company’s share of the hotel market is still small (Airbnb has $100 million of a $1 billion industry), established companies have taken note. Airbnb poses such a threat to the traditional way of doing business that the hotel industry is counting on government regulation to curb the company’s growth.

For tech entrepreneurs, persistence and the ability to overcome failure are crucial to success.

In the case of any challenging, competitive venture, success is largely a matter of persistence.

And the story of Dropbox founder Drew Houston epitomizes this lesson. When he was just 14 years old, Houston already knew what he wanted to do. When a teacher asked his classmates what they wanted to be when they grew up, his hand shot up: “I want to run a computer company,” he said.

From that point forth, he never gave up pursuing that dream. As a high school student, Houston started working as a beta tester for an online game. The company spotted his talent and hired him as a network programmer. Later in college, Houston worked for five more tech startups.

And then one day, Dropbox was born: Houston needed to pull up a few files, but realized they were on another computer. He started working on his idea right away, developing the basic technology which would allow him to synchronize files over the Internet.

Five years later, Houston has a $600 million stake in his $4 billion company — and he’s made his childhood dream come true.

Of course, many aspiring entrepreneurs experience failure on their path to success. This was the case for Sean Parker, the former president of Facebook and founder of Napster.

Parker’s path was riddled with failure. For example, while he was president of Facebook, police found cocaine in a house that was rented under his name. Although the incident led him to resign from the social network, Parker didn’t give up.

He went to Spotify, the super-successful music streaming service which was then in its early days. Parker helped secure deals with major record labels like Universal and played an instrumental role in Spotify’s social network integration. As you can see, Parker didn’t let obstacles hold him back.

Successful entrepreneurs are prepared to tweak their products to develop what the users want.

It’s easy to feel protective of a company you’ve started, but resisting change will get you nowhere. The most successful companies know how to be flexible and respond to what their customers want.

Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, exemplifies this principle. Today, Instagram is an incredibly successful photo-sharing network, which was recently purchased by Facebook for $1 billion. But when it first started, Instagram was a very different kind of company.

Systrom and his co-founder first created Instagram as a combination of Foursquare, which allows users to “check-in” their location, and a photo-sharing service. This concept fell short: the overall product was slow and cumbersome, and people didn’t respond to the check-in feature.

But then, while they were vacationing in Mexico, Systrom had an idea. Why not add filters to the photography feature? These filters would allow users to add instant nostalgia or poignancy to everyday pictures. Within a month of introducing the filters, Instagram’s user base grew to one million.

Facebook’s other recent purchase, WhatsApp (which was purchased in 2014 for $19 billion), is another great example of a flexible startup.

Jan Koum, the brainchild behind Whatsapp, was a poor immigrant from the Ukraine. He and co-founder Brian Acton originally launched their company as an address book for the iPhone which allowed users to update their status (e.g. “at the gym,” “battery low”).

Although the initial idea didn’t win over users, things changed when Joum and Acton combined the concept with Apple’s new “push notification” feature. Now every time you updated your status, all your WhatsApp contacts would get a notification about it.

Remarkably, people started using the app in a completely different way than originally intended, as an instant messaging service. WhatsApp quickly changed its focus, and its user base grew to 480 million before it was acquired by Facebook in 2014.

We’ve learned a lot about how tech-billionaires achieved their fortunes. And now in the final book summary, we’ll look how they’ve managed to maintain their success.

Maintaining success is never easy; successful entrepreneurs will always face competition from other companies.

So now that we’ve learned about how a few tech-billionaires managed to turn simple ideas into billion-dollar companies, it’s time to find out what it takes to maintain that level of success. Because for tech wunderkinds, it’s not enough to stop at the billion-dollar valuation.

This is especially true because the giant established companies — the ones which were challenged by the upstart entrepreneurs discussed in this book summary — are always trying to reclaim their market dominance.

Consider Palmer Luckey’s story. (We’ve already talked about how Luckey was able to turn his design for a virtual reality device into a company, Oculus Rift, which sold to Facebook for $2 billion.)

Despite his immense success, Luckey (who still runs Oculus Rift, even after the sale to Facebook) still faces a challenge in keeping his company at the top of the market.

There are plenty of competitors encroaching on his turf: For one, electronic giant Sony is developing its own VR headset for its latest console, Playstation 4.

Amazon is also rumored to be entering the market. The e-commerce company may be planning to create VR shopping malls. So instead of just looking at a photograph of an item, these “malls” would allow you to virtually pick up a product, look at it in detail and even try it out.

Because of competitors like Amazon and Sony, for Luckey the work never stops. He must constantly seek out new ways to stay ahead of the competition.

And that’s exactly why he used the money from the sale of Oculus to purchase other companies that might allow him to improve his product. Among his purchases were RakNet, an open source game networking engine (which allows people to create and share their own games), and Carbon Design Group, a product design studio.

Conclusion

The internet age is giving rise to tech billionaires by the dozens, not only in Silicon Valley but around the globe. Although episodes of failure and years of wandering sometimes characterize these innovators’ lives before they make it big, what they all have in common is their ability to find the one big idea that changes not only their lives, but the lives of millions of people around the globe.

The four figures profiled in this summary are only a handful of the 15 or so whose lives, ambitions, and successes are featured in the full-length book You Only Have to Be Right Once. Each of these 15 game changers came from disparate backgrounds and walked diverse paths before founding the companies that are shaping modern human life. There’s no proven formula for becoming a tech billionaire, but it certainly takes courage, grit, and instinct to take a brilliant idea and grow it into a platform that transforms the course of humanity.

The key message:

In today’s age of rapid technological innovation, there are plenty of opportunities for success. And as we can see from the stories of today’s top tech billionaires, all you need is one great idea — and the courage and the determination to bring it to fruition.

About the author

Randall Lane is an editor at Forbes magazine and co-founder of 1997 Adweek startup of the year winner, P.O.V. Lane also launched Doubledown Media and is the author of The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane.

Table of Contents

Introduction vii
Chapter 1 Sean Parker, Facebook: Master of Disruption 1
Chapter 2 Drew Houston, Dropbox: No More Hot Pockets 17
Chapter 3 Elon Musk, Tesla Motors and SpaceX: Inside the Mind of Iron Man 29
Chapter 4 Kevin Systrom, Instagram: No Revenues? No Revenue Model? No Problem! 41
Chapter 5 Daniel Ek, Spotify: Hacking the Music Industry 55
Chapter 6 Aaron Levie, Box: The Man Who Would Be Gates 69
Chapter 7 Jack Dorsey, Twitter, Square: Jack of All Trades 81
Chapter 8 David Karp, Tumblr: The $1 Billion Art Project 93
Chapter 9 Nick Woodman, GoPro: Chasing the Thrillionaire 107
Chapter 10 Brian Chesky, Airbnb: The Sharing Economy’s Broker 119
Chapter 11 Alex Karp, Palantir: Meet Big Brother 127
Chapter 12 Pejman Nozad, Angel Investor: Silicon Valley’s Cinderella 143
Chapter 13 Evan Spiegel, Snapchat: The $3 Billion Bet 155
Chapter 14 Palmer Luckey, Oculus VR: Virtual Reality, Tangible Fortune 171
Chapter 15 Adi Tatarko, Houzz: Breaking into the Boy’s Club 183
Chapter 16 Jan Koum, WhatsApp: The Face of the American Dream 193