The companies are dated but the stories are historical and timeless IMO

Yeah it was a whole lot of number theory and basics of public/private keys, SSL etc. This was dot-com bubble just went bust and I wasn't as visionary as Thiel at al, sadly.  

Thanks for the reminder- I've been meaning to listen to Founders at Work- audible offered me a free trial and just downloaded it!

Sounds like it didn’t cover applied cryptography. 

I think the timeline roughly fits to when Levichen and Theil started PayPal and not too far away. Levichen was I believe a cryptographer and they got started (if I remember correctly) because he wanted to create “internet money” which was a popular topic among cryptographers during that time period it seems. They just created a centralized one.

It’s the first chapter of Founders at Work by Livingston. Great book.

k00b

Oh great and mighty SN users, who art thou?

haha man I wish... it was mostly a math class in disguise.  Unfortunately nobody was doing anything too sexy with crypto back then.. 