Jimmy Soni is an American author and former managing editor of The Huffington Post.[1][2] He is best known for A Mind at Play, his biography of Claude Shannon and The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley.
Soni was born in Toulouse, France to Indian parents from Rajasthan and was raised in Chicago, Illinois.[3] He attended Duke University and graduated in 2007.[4] During his time at Duke he was chairman of the honors council and vice president of student government.[5][6]
Soni became the managing editor at The Huffington Post in January 2012.[7] Previously he had worked as a strategy consultant at McKinsey and Company, as well as a speech writer at the office of the Mayor of the District of Columbia.[8]
In 2012, Soni was named to AdWeek's "Young Influentials", a list of 20 people under 40 "who are wicked smart and rebooting your world".[2] He was featured at a TEDx event held at Duke University in March 2012.[5][9]
In May 2014, Soni transferred to India where he was in charge of launching the Huffington Post in the country.[10] He left the company before the launch to focus on writing a book.[11] Later, reports surfaced saying more than a book prompted his departure: internal complaints and a sexual harassment investigation of his management style were cited by current and former employees at the time. Arianna Huffington declined to comment on the matter.[12][13][14]
In 2014, Forbes named Soni one of the 30 people under 30 years of age in the media.[15] That same year the New York Observer listed him as the most "poachable" tech talent.[16] Previously, Soni was named one of Crain Communications' 40 Under Forty talents.[17]
In 2016, Soni worked with Eric Greitens on his successful campaign for governor in Missouri.[18]
Soni has co-authored several pieces with fellow Duke graduate Rob Goodman; their work has been featured in Politico, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, AdWeek, and The Atlantic, among others.[1][2][7][19][20] In 2012, Thomas Dunne Books a division of St. Martin's Press, published their first book, a biography of Cato the Younger, titled Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar.[7][21][22]
In 2017, Simon & Schuster published their biography of Claude Shannon, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age.[23] The book received positive reviews from the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Nature and others.[24][25][26] In an interview with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Soni explained that part of the reason he wrote A Mind at Play was that he was drawn to Shannon's personality and wanted to read a biography about him, but, "it turned out there wasn’t one."[27]
The British Society for the History of Mathematics awarded Soni and Goodman their 2017 Neumann Prize for A Mind at Play.[28]
In 2022, his second biography, The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, was published by Simon & Schuster.[29][30]
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