New Delhi, Feb 17 (IANS): This is the gripping inside story of PayPal, one of the largest online payment processors in the world, indeed the company that created the digital age as we know it.

Out of PayPal's ranks have come three billionaires and dozens of multi-millionaires, including household names like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman. PayPal's alumni have built, funded and advised almost all of the billion-dollar-plus companies to emerge from Silicon Valley in the past two decades.

Today, every online video you watch and every internet purchase you make bears PayPal's fingerprints - its inventions made the modern internet possible and are embedded in our social networks, our banks and our intelligence agencies.

In "The Founders" (Atlantic Books), Jimmy Soni, the former Managing Editor of The Huffington Post, tells the revealing and page-turning story of how the so-called PayPal Mafia turned a scrappy start-up into one of the most successful businesses of all time, worth over $70 billion today. Full of fascinating characters and anecdotes about Silcon Valley's biggest titans, "The Founders", with its juicy details not yet made public, also relates how its founders continue to shape our future today.

"If you've used the internet at all in the last 20 years, you've touched a product, service, or website connected to the creators of PayPal," write Soni, who was born to Indian parents in Toulouse and raised in Chicago. He attended Duke University and graduated in 2007.

He has worked for the New York Observer and the Washington Examiner, among others, and with Rob Goodman, is the author of "Rome's Last Citizen" and "A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age", which was nominated for a National Book Award. He lives in New York.