These two distinct pools of candidates for PayPal resulted in an initial staff that was nearly all white and nearly all male. Of the six original founders, the one nonwhite person was an immigrant from China. All were men. All but Thiel were twenty-three or younger. Four had built bombs in high school. A picture of the staff six months later shows that it had grown to thirteen and included one woman, an office assistant. “The early PayPal team worked well together because we were all the same kind of nerd,” Thiel recalled. “We all loved science fiction: ‘Cryptonomicon’ [by Neal Stephenson] was required reading, and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek.”