The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
by Jimmy Soni · 22 Feb 2022 · 505pp · 161,581 words
PayPal we know today resulted from the fusion of two companies. One—originally called Fieldlink and renamed Confinity—was founded in 1998 by two unknowns, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel. In the course of finding itself, Confinity built a framework linking money to email, a service dubbed “PayPal” that found an
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arriving for the first time to his home of two years, America. “The whole scheme—or scam—was fairly elaborate,” Levchin said. Scam or not, Max Levchin’s UIUC admission was a serendipitous product-market fit: a budding, energetic technologist entered one of the world’s computing epicenters. For decades, UIUC researchers
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and simplified the browser installation process, changes that mainstreamed the internet and accelerated its growth—with UIUC at the center of it all. For freshman Max Levchin, the university’s computing triumphs were notable, but at the time, he sought what all new college students want: belonging and diversion. He found
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like losing money elsewhere. Here, you earned points for effort—not just for an exit. * * * With Nosek busy building his company and Thiel his fund, Max Levchin searched for a more basic asset: air-conditioning. His Palo Alto efficiency apartment wasn’t equipped, so he had to improvise. Levchin discovered that if
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like, I found my people.” Benjamin Listwon, a technical designer, was happily employed and not looking for “his people” when he met David Sacks and Max Levchin. After they met, Sacks invited Listwon to lunch at Confinity. “Lunch turned into seven hours,” Listwon recalled. The spontaneous several-hour jam session about design
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employee remembered thinking as the mutineers furtively moved against Musk. * * * The plan took shape in the weeks before Musk’s departure. Luke Nosek, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and early board member Scott Banister attended the same technology conference in August. While there, they aired frustrations about the company’s direction. That weekend
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agreed to function as Chairman with operational responsibility until the new CEO is named. Reporting to me will be Reid Hoffman, Dave Johnson, Sandeep Lal, Max Levchin, David Sacks, and Jamie Templeton. Peter Thiel Chairman, X.com Five hours later, Musk sent a follow-up, with the subject line “Taking X.
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endeavor. “Those that bring the big ideas into hard, unpredictable reality are the practitioners, the high-leverage ones, and I admire them almost without reservation,” Max Levchin wrote on a personal blog, years after PayPal. “One key ingredient of being this kind of a person is an almost irrational lack of fear
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to not get caught up in all the little details… while being remarkably aware of the really important ones.” By that point in his life, Max Levchin had ushered several ideas into “hard, unpredictable reality.” And yet, he ended with an earnest request for advice: “There must be many more essential
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they would tell me, ‘Dude, you fucking crazy,’ ” Chris said. * * * The two clipped every nugget and scrap they could find about Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and the other PayPal alumni. As the PayPal founders grew in their public profiles, Chris and Stephen amassed a large collection of clippings
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Simmons PayPal’s was a game-playing and puzzle-solving culture, and virtually everything that could become a competition was turned into one. Courtesy of Max Levchin From its modest origins, PayPal debuted on the Nasdaq as a public company on February 15, 2002. Many employees who had been with the company
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near Jessup, Maryland. They studied the PayPal founders and their achievements and shared those stories with fellow inmates. Robyn Twomey/Redux Debts At their start, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel had thought the exercise of creating Fieldlink would be brief. Build the company, scale quickly, and sell it off to take advantage
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University of Illinois, May 30, 2018, https://storied.illinois.edu/maximum-impact/. “What are you working on?”: Author interviews with Scott Banister (July 25, 2018), Max Levchin (June 29, 2018), and Luke Nosek (October 28, 2018). “I started to shift”… “do that”: Author interview with Luke Nosek, October 28, 2018. “Caffeine”… “
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.edu/sitemanager/getfile.asp?id=542. “Jesus-like”: Author interview with Ken Howery, June 26, 2018. “[Nosek and Banister] were the subversives”: Author interview with Max Levchin, June 29, 2018. “Don’t bring that near me”: Ibid. “Max is the person”… “fairly big deal”: Author interview with Scott Banister, July 25,
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2018. “We burned through”: Max Levchin, “Seven Sixty Four,” Max Levchin Personal Blog, July 15, 2016. “I don’t think PayPal”: Author interview with Luke Nosek, October 28, 2018. “I was a very happy nerd
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”… “my bathroom”: Author interview with Max Levchin, June 29, 2018. “Perhaps nowhere”… “Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers”: “CS Alums as Media Darlings,” University of Illinois Computer Science Alumni Association, Alumni News, Spring 1995
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York: Apress, 2018), 2. “There is some art involved in how”: Ibid., 3. “I’ve seen these devices”… “measure exactly 45 minutes”: Author interviews with Max Levchin and Peter Thiel, 2017, 2018, and 2021. “Peter wasn’t technical”: Author interview with Luke Nosek, May 31, 2018. “They sound like cute puzzles”… “take
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2021. “I did have a lot”… “from then on”: Author interview with Tom Pytel, December 4, 2020. “He was a true vagabond”: Author interview with Max Levchin, June 29, 2018. “His toes”: Author interview with Russel Simmons, August 24, 2018. “They were the most comfortable”: Author interview with Tom Pytel, December 4
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August 24, 2018. “At that point in your life”: Author interview with Tom Pytel, December 4, 2020. “If you store them”… “my passphrase”: Jessica Livingston, “Max Levchin,” Founders at Work (New York: Apress, 2001), 3. “Not all applications”… “inches or so”: Bill Dyzel, “Beaming Items with Your Palm Device,” PalmPilot for Dummies
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Infrared Port,” Dr. Dobb’s Journal, April 1, 1999, https://www.drdobbs.com/the-palmpilots-infrared-port/184410909?queryText=musgrove. “quaint and silly”: Jessica Livingston, “Max Levchin,” Founders at Work (New York: Apress, 2001), 3. “I remember thinking”: Author interview with Lauri Schulteis, December 11, 2020. “better than cash”… “US Treasury”: Confinity
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(April 8, 2019) and Luke Nosek (October 28, 2018). “John was a”: Author interview with Scott Banister, July 25, 2018. “the unsung”: Author interview with Max Levchin, October 30, 2018. “had bought”… “tumultuous day”: Author interview with John Malloy, October 29, 2018. 6. Hosed “I’m like”: Author interview with Elon Musk
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.com/article/195199/article.html. “We are living”: Author interview with Reid Hoffman, July 30, 2018. “That should have been a clue”: Author interview with Max Levchin, June 29, 2018. “Things happen on the internet”: Author interview with Erik Klein, April 25, 2021. Sacks’s grandfather: Suzanne Herel, “Meet the Boss:
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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYA_vdHSD8w. “For as much as people”: Author interview with Giacomo DiGrigoli, December 9, 2020. “We worked”: Author interview with Max Levchin, June 29, 2018. “None of us”: Author interview with Erik Klein, April 25, 2021. “It’s kind of funny”: Author interview with Russel Simmons,
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”: FAQ section of paypal.com website, October 12, 1999, accessed through Internet Archive paypal.com/FAQ.HTML. “If you’re an engineer”: Author interview with Max Levchin, June 29, 2018. “After Peter had”: Author interview with David Wallace, December 5, 2020. “Even in the current”: Author interview with Erik Klein, April
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with Julie Anderson, July 19, 2019. “People were working”…“slow leak”: Author interview with David Gausebeck, January 31, 2019. “Macks@Confinity”…“unclaimed”: Author interview with Max Levchin, June 29, 2018. “Every single person”: Caption on levchin.net photo, http://www.levchin.com/paypal-slideshow/3.html. “a sense of dread”…“prepared for
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2020. “It was one of those”… “organically”: Author interview with David Sacks, November 28, 2018. “I had a fairly vague”… “our site”: Author interview with Max Levchin, October 30, 2018. “We thought”: Author interview with Doug Mak, June 18, 2019. “On the product side”: Author interview with Skye Lee, September 24, 2021
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7, 1999. 9. The Widget Wars “They were paranoid”: Author interview with John Malloy, July 25, 2018. “Hey, if you’re going”: Author interview with Max Levchin, October 30, 2018. “We were getting”: Author interview with David Wallace, December 5, 2020. “I had a little window”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January
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25, 2019. “We were both”… “monopolistic business”: Author interview with Bill Harris, July 3, 2019. “Bill had on his suit”… “for this”: Author interview with Max Levchin, October 30, 2018. “We walked out”: Author interview with Pete Buhl, July 30, 2018. “Eight percent”… “inexperienced people”: Author interview with John Malloy, October 29
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safe”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January 29, 2019. “I’d achieved lift-off”: Author interview with Peter Thiel, September 11, 2021. “The biggest thing”: Max Levchin commentary to Stanford University eCorner, January 21, 2004, https://ecorner.stanford.edu/videos/when-and-why-to-merge-with-a-competitor-to-dominate-a-market
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in my interview”: Author interview with Kim-Elisha Proctor, May 15, 2021. “You’ve just been”… “more of that”: Robert Cringely, Nerd TV, episode 2, “Max Levchin,” September 13, 2005, https://archive.org/details/ntv002. “[Workaholism] does no good for me”: Author interview with William Wu, December 5, 2020. “You’d get
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Thiel, September 11, 2021. “I built a company”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January 19, 2019. “I’m just going to leave”: Author interview with Max Levchin, September 23, 2021. 14. Ambition’s Debt “company drama”… “turning point”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January 19, 2019. “David [Sacks], pulling us all
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Maryland, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcut1JfTMoM. “He behaved”: Author interview with John Malloy, October 29, 2018. “He does not hold”: Author interview with Max Levchin, September 23, 2021. “Give the first woman the living child, and by no means kill him”: 1 Kings 3:27, New American Standard Bible. “I
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here’s a quick”: Email from Peter Thiel email to all@x.com, September 28, 2000, subject line: “Company update.” “naïve about fraud”: Commentary by Max Levchin to Stanford eCorner, “Coping with Fraud,” January 21, 2004, https://ecorner.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2004/01/1028.pdf. “Merchant fraud”… “brake
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would create one hundred of those”: Author interview with Mike Greenfield, August 7, 2020. “PayPal is, actually, more or less”… “retrieve the money”: Commentary by Max Levchin to Stanford eCorner, “Coping with Fraud,” January 21, 2004, https://ecorner.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2004/01/1028.pdf. “Losing a lot
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sites/2/2004/01/1028.pdf. “You could see like the cost”: Author interview with Ken Miller, January 21, 2021. Levchin notched: “Innovator Under 35: Max Levchin, 26,” MIT Technology Review, accessed July 22, 2021, http://www2.technologyreview.com/tr35/profile.aspx?TRID=224. For Levchin and Frezza’s: System and method
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Down Two of the World’s Most Dangerous Cyber Criminals (1st ed.) (Boston: Cengage Learning PTR, 2011), 104. “You think you got me?”: Dan Fost, “Max Levchin Likes the Edge,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 26, 2006. Kothanek: “Hey buddy”: Steve Schroeder, The Lure: The True Story of How the Department of Justice
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Brought Down Two of the World’s Most Dangerous Cyber Criminals (1st ed.) (Boston: Cengage Learning PTR, 2011), 108. “Screw you”: Dan Fost, “Max Levchin Likes the Edge,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 26, 2006. “They were blatant”: Deborah Radcliff, “Firms Increasingly Call on Cyberforensics Teams,” CNN.com, January 16, 2002
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July 23, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/01/16/cyber.sleuthing.idg/index.html?related. “I am the impenetrable Russian”: Dan Fost, “Max Levchin Likes the Edge,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 26, 2006. “We got all the evidence”… “about it”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January 19, 2019. “
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know when”: Author interview with Melanie Cervantes, June 5, 2021. “Wild horses”: Author interview with John Kothanek, May 11, 2021. “Fraud is love”… “fintech nerd”: “Max Levchin of Affirm: Why I Built Affirm after PayPal,” Evolving for the Next Billion podcast, February 24, 2021, https://nextbn.ggvc.com/podcast/s2-ep-38
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Program Patents in His ‘Ask Tim’ Column,” February 29, 2000, accessed July 25, 2021. https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/537. “They just come in”: Max Levchin commentary to Stanford eCorner, January 21, 2004, https://ecorner.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2004/01/1029.pdf. “Peter goes”: Author interview with
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with James Hogan, December 14, 2020. “We weren’t a big company”: Author interview with John Kothanek, May 11, 2021. “Considering I am doing this”: Max Levchin personal website, http://www.levchin.com/paypal-slideshow/13.html. “People doing keg stands”: Author interview with Jeremy Roybal, September 3, 2021. “Peter doesn’t
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”: Author interview with X.com employee. Commentary on background. “He said how PayPal’s”: Author interview with Scott Braunstein, November 6, 2018. “The IPO party”: Max Levchin commentary to Stanford eCorner, January 21, 2004, https://ecorner.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2004/01/1029.pdf. “happiness, celebration”: Author interview with
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eBay Integration meetings”: Weekly Pal newsletter, August 16, 2002. “Because of Max”: Author interview with John Malloy, July 25, 2018. “The IPO Day”: Email from Max Levchin to a small group of PayPal employees, November 25, 2002, subject line: “Thank you!!!” “I wasn’t like”… “we’re good”: Author interview with Katherine
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Hoffman, September 1, 2018. “I couldn’t work”: Author interview with Luke Nosek, May 31, 2018. “This is never going to work”: Author interview with Max Levchin, July 24, 2018. “We created PayPal in three years”: Suzanne Herel, “Meet the Boss: David Sacks, CEO of Yammer,” SFGATE, February 22, 2012, https://
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, 2020. “That’s it”: Author interview with Tim Wenzel, December 4, 2020. “Immigrating is”: Author interview with David Sacks, November 28, 2018. “The very best”: Max Levchin commentary at panel discussion, Startup2Startup: PayPal Mafia 2.0 (Part 1), accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WPud4dmdG4. “Were you an
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”: Author interview with John Malloy, October 29, 2018. “It’s made me”: Email from Amy Rowe Klement to author, October 4, 2021. “Those that bring”: Max Levchin, “High Leverage Individuals,” too long to tweet, 2013, accessed July 29, 2021, https://max.levch.in/post/35659523095/high-leverage-individuals. Epilogue In Europe: Isabel
The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin · 14 Sep 2021 · 524pp · 130,909 words
in 1998, he found himself in a classroom at Stanford’s Frederick E. Terman Engineering Center attempting to chat up an awkward but brilliant coder. Max Levchin was twenty-three years old and fresh out of the University of Illinois, where he’d graduated with a degree in computer science just a
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picked her out, too. Most of his friends, though, knew that he simply preferred to steer clear of the subject of sex altogether. In 2006, Max Levchin would confess that he couldn’t recall Thiel ever mentioning his personal life. Once—once!—Thiel asked about Levchin’s girlfriend. “I was shocked,” Levchin
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well as Path, Gowalla, and Slide, which were all also social media companies. The last one, which had been started by Thiel’s PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, was known for something called SuperPoke, which allowed users to virtually “slap,” “punch,” and “grope” their Facebook friends and was about as far from the
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made the recommendation that companies should have them. But he enlivened even these bland lessons with guest appearances from his friends and former employees, including Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and Marc Andreessen. And as the class went on, though, Thiel diverged from pat advice and became more philosophical, infusing his business advice
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Gawker, his support of Trump, and the increasingly indiscreet connections with the alt-right. “Every time I read” about Peter Thiel’s support of Trump, Max Levchin said, “I typically check the calendar because I’m not completely sure it’s not April 1.” Others, especially those who knew Thiel from the
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de facto headquarters of the Republican Party, Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club. Founders Fund is opening an office in South Florida too. Meanwhile, Max Levchin, Thiel’s PayPal cofounder, wants to destroy credit cards and algorithmic credit ratings with his company Affirm, which went public in January 2021, at a
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Musk, posing to promote the banking ambitions of PayPal in 2000. That year, Thiel would lead a coup to replace Musk. Thiel’s PayPal cofounder, Max Levchin, was a twenty-three-year-old coder when he pitched Thiel in the late 1990s. Thiel’s cultivation of Levchin, the technical genius behind the
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Counter,” PandoDaily, August 17, 2017, https://pando.com/2017/08/17/i-almost-lost-my-leg-crazy-guy-geiger-counter-max-levchin-and-other-valley-icons-share-their-stories-luck/. “How about tomorrow?”: Max Levchin, interviewed by Jason Calacanis, This Week in Startups, 4‒6, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e48aSjtg1ds. “One day
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,” he told Thiel: Max Levchin, “A Fireside Chat with Max Levchin,” PandoDaily, July 17, 2004, 50:00‒54:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYSFoml6CtY. boasted to a reporter: Steve Bodow, “The Money Shot,” Wired
Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson · 11 Sep 2023 · 562pp · 201,502 words
by email. That became wildly popular, especially on the auction site eBay, where users were looking for an easy way to pay strangers for purchases. Max Levchin and Peter Thiel As Musk monitored the names of new customers signing up, one caught his eye: Peter Thiel. He was one of the founders
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Confinity that had been located in the same building as X.com and was now just down the street. Both Thiel and his primary cofounder Max Levchin were as intense as Musk, but they were more disciplined. Like X.com, their company offered a person-to-person payment service. Confinity’s version
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the product managers should lead the team. Arm wrestling with Levchin Peter Thiel drifted away from active involvement in the company, leaving his Confinity cofounder Max Levchin, a low-key and super-sharp Ukrainian-born software wizard, to be the chief technology officer and counterbalance to Musk. Levchin and Musk soon clashed
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bullshitter or goofball.” 13 The Coup PayPal, September 2000 The PayPal mafia Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, David Sacks, Peter Thiel, Keith Rope, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Roelof Botha; Max Levchin Michael Moritz Street fight By late summer of 2000, Levchin found Musk increasingly difficult to deal with. He wrote Musk long memos outlining how
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2002 and was acquired by eBay that July for $1.5 billion. Musk’s payout was around $250 million. Afterward, he called up his nemesis Max Levchin and suggested they get together in the company parking lot. Levchin, a small and wiry guy who had occasionally harbored vague fears that Musk might
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life multiplanetary.” There was something exhilarating, and also a bit unnerving, about Musk’s ability to see his endeavors as having epoch-making significance. As Max Levchin drily puts it, “One of Elon’s greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a mandate from heaven.” Los Angeles Musk
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of CEO eight years earlier. Musk had taken his ouster with unusual calm, and he stayed friendly with the coup leaders, including Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. The old PayPal mafia, as they called themselves, were a tight-knit crowd. They helped finance their former colleague David Sacks—the friend who took
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, who was born in Poland, had been a dedicated libertarian since his days at the University of Illinois, where he had had long discussions with Max Levchin. They would become cofounders, with Musk, of PayPal, along with the even more ardent libertarian Peter Thiel. Nosek had been one of a handful of
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. Andy Krebs. Former director of Starship civil engineering, SpaceX. Joe Kuhn. Mechanical engineer, The Boring Company and Tesla. Bill Lee. Venture capitalist and Musk friend. Max Levchin. Cofounder of PayPal. Jacob McKenzie. Senior director Raptor engineering, SpaceX. Jon McNeill. Former president of Tesla. Lars Moravy. VP of vehicle engineering, Tesla. Michael Moritz
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, “I Was a Starter Wife,” Marie Claire, Sept. 10, 2010. 12. X.com: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Mike Moritz, Peter Thiel, Roelof Botha, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, Luke Nosek. Mark Gimein, “Elon Musk Is Poised to Become Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing,” Salon, Aug. 17, 1999; Sarah Lacy, “Interview
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Jackson, The PayPal Wars (World Ahead, 2003); Chafkin, The Contrarian. 13. The Coup: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Mike Moritz, Peter Thiel, Roelof Botha, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, Justine Musk, Kimbal Musk, Luke Nosek. Soni, The Founders; Vance, Elon Musk; Chafkin, The Contrarian. 14. Mars: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk
The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby · 1 Feb 2022 · 935pp · 197,338 words
scientist who had arrived in the Valley after studying at the University of Illinois a bit after Marc Andreessen. This Max—his full name was Max Levchin—was a product of the same computer science course. They were all libertarians. Levchin told Thiel he had an idea for a security company. It
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to back the next entrepreneurial cohort, and they promised to treat this new generation with the respect that they themselves had wished for. Luke Nosek, Max Levchin’s old friend and another PayPal alum, was a founding partner; soon, none other than Sean Parker joined them. “Largely because we were all founders
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. But when he encountered a potential grand slam, Thiel was ready to pile his chips onto the table. In 1998, his $300,000 bet on Max Levchin had been three times bigger than Andy Bechtolsheim’s bet on Brin and Page, even though at that time Bechtolsheim had more money to play
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experience. The idea of coaching founders was not original, either. When Michael Moritz helped to turn Jerry Yang into a celebrity, or when he persuaded Max Levchin of PayPal not to sell his firm prematurely to eBay, he was coaching technical founders to be business leaders. Nor was it even clear that
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; David Sacks, founder of Yammer; Thiel; Keith Rabois, a senior executive at LinkedIn and Square and later a venture capitalist; Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn; Max Levchin, cofounder of Affirm; Roelof Botha, a top investor at Sequoia; and Russel Simmons, Stoppelman’s cofounder at Yelp. Musk is conspicuous by his absence. For
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
by Jessica Livingston · 14 Aug 2008 · 468pp · 233,091 words
the information contained in this work. For Da and PG Contents FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii CHAPTER 1 MAX LEVCHIN PayPal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 CHAPTER 2 SABEER BHATIA Hotmail. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 CHAPTER 3 STEVE WOZNIAK Apple Computer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 CHAPTER 4 JOE KRAUS Excite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 CHAPTER 5 DAN BRICKLIN
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were once just like me. Maybe I could do it too.” C H A P T 1 E R Max Levchin Cofounder, PayPal PayPal was founded in December 1998 by recent college grad Max Levchin and hedge fund manager Peter Thiel. The company went through several ideas, including cryptography software and a service for
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. I basically emulated the whole thing on a Palm Pilot so my friends were able to throw out their stupid devices and use my thing. Max Levchin 3 I posted it on the Web, which was young and silly then, and I got hundreds and then thousands of downloads, and people were
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this thing working.” It actually wound up working perfectly. The beaming was at 10:00 a.m.; we were done at 9:00 a.m. Max Levchin 5 It was one of these things where you can’t just be done. With crypto, if you are one bit off, nothing’s going
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a side effect. We had this merger with a company called X.com. It was a bit of a tough merger because the companies were Max Levchin 7 really competitive—we were two large competitors in the same market. For a while, Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X
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worth of losses.” “Well, that’s a lot of money, but it’s taken you clearly at least a week to print this stuff out.” Max Levchin 9 We realized that the way we were attacking these things was just fundamentally flawed. So Bob and I built this system that was part
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to do the sort of stuff we did, where they would basically say, “Bad guys over here. Let’s get all the bad guys out.” Max Levchin 11 There are tools to just say, “Give me your social security number, give me your address and your mother’s maiden name, and we
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the seller would get infected, and the seller would say, “Oh, this is really simple, so I only accept PayPal.” Livingston: Any other turning points? Max Levchin 13 Levchin: Peter and I like to reflect on the fact that we got lucky so many times. Pick any one episode in the company
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time, it was one of these things where—I was really much younger than now—my whole “brand” both to the investors and to our Max Levchin 15 board members was this crazy Russian boy-genius who comes out and sprinkles magic dust on technology and things just work. So for a
Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
by Emily Chang · 6 Feb 2018 · 334pp · 104,382 words
: WHEN “MERITOCRACY” MEANS “PEOPLE LIKE US” One day in 1998, Thiel was guest lecturing about currency trading at Stanford when a young Ukrainian engineer named Max Levchin sneaked in to, as he told me, “sleep and get some air-conditioning.” Instead, he wound up listening. At the end of class, Levchin introduced
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partners at Founders Fund invested in their old PayPal buddy Elon Musk’s space venture, SpaceX (Musk also co-founded Tesla). Founders Fund, along with Max Levchin and Keith Rabois, invested in the workplace chat company Yammer, which was founded by former PayPal-er David Sacks. Yammer was ultimately sold to Microsoft
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hard to overstate. Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons (both in the Fortune photo) started Yelp, which went public with a $1.43 billion market cap. Max Levchin funded Yelp and later joined as chairman. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim came up with YouTube, which sold to Google for $1.65
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partner at Khosla Ventures. Between his stints at LinkedIn and Square, Rabois also became executive vice president of the social app company Slide, started by Max Levchin and backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund. It was at Slide that Levchin learned the hard way that having a male-dominated team like PayPal
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’s wasn’t always a recipe for success. MAX LEVCHIN’S DIVERSITY AWAKENING Tres, a Mexican bar and restaurant, is located on Townsend Street, in San Francisco’s tech-heavy SoMa district, and the staff
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of this book. These include interviews with Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer, Susan Fowler, Niniane Wang, Ellen Pao, Katrina Lake, Reid Hoffman, Evan Williams, Dick Costolo, Max Levchin, Stewart Butterfield, John Doerr, and so many more. I also spoke on background to many sources who helped inform and shape what became Brotopia. INTRODUCTION
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, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-10-18/zenefits-ceo-on-closing-the-chapter-on-compliance-issues. “sleep and get some air-conditioning”: Max Levchin, “PayPal Co-Founder Max Levchin: Studio 1.0 (02/05),” interview by author, Bloomberg, Feb. 6, 2015, video, 27:34, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-02
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-06/paypal-co-founder-max-levchin-studio-1-0-02-05-. “they must work quickly”: Thiel, Zero to One, 122–23. Except for the office manager, who was female: Jodi Kantor
The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
by Eric M. Jackson · 15 Jan 2004 · 398pp · 108,889 words
I’ve never met a more thorough or trustworthy adviser than Hank Terry. I would also like to thank my PayPal compatriots, including Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, David Sacks, and Paul Martin, for providing me with their time and feedback; while the conclusions reached in this book are ultimately my own, I
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discuss an issue he knew well. The animated speech Peter delivered inspired a twenty-four year old programmer in the audience to introduce himself afterward. Max Levchin had good reason to show interest in Peter’s remarks. Growing up as a Jew in the Soviet Union, he and his family faced limits
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, convenient attire when the occasional water gun fight broke out in the hallways. A ratty couch with sagging cushions sat next to the entrance of Max Levchin’s office, which he shared with two other coders. Could anything but chaos come out of such a setting? I had plenty of time during
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or dotBank catching PayPal, they concluded, exceeded the risk of eBay punishing us for the ‘bot. The project took on an air of importance when Max Levchin claimed direct ownership of it. Confinity’s CTO, who typically spent his time focusing on security and network scalability issues while leaving specific features to
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’s ability to innovate in jeopardy. What I didn’t realize at the time was that V2 would trigger that same outcome with or without Max Levchin. The entire V2 initiative remained in the background for several weeks before Julie Anderson began an otherwise routine product staff meeting with a bang: “We
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some protection. In addition to overhauling the buyer and seller protection programs, the rest of the company searched for other ways to drive down costs. Max Levchin took the lead in developing an anti-fraud system to track down suspicious account activity that looked like stolen credit card transactions. Sacks sought to
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come down on our young company, fined PayPal $313,600 for having excessive credit card chargebacks.3 After his return to the helm, Peter asked Max Levchin to make the construction of anti-fraud measures his primary focus. With his typical quiet intensity, our Ukrainian CTO threw all of his energy into
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$19 in late June. With morale in danger of sagging under this crop of newfound risks, departmental re-orgs, and declining share prices, Sacks and Max Levchin mustered the troops for a Patton-esque performance. Sacks, never one to mince words, peered intensely through his wire glasses as he told employees that
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Peter would leave after the completion of the acquisition and return full-time to the hedge fund he managed before his fateful first meeting with Max Levchin. Although he denied that he was planning such a move, those of us who knew Peter prior to PayPal concluded otherwise. While his leadership had
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’s departure opened the floodgates. Within a few months an exodus of talent followed him out the door, most notably the senior executive team of Max Levchin, Roelof Botha, and Reid Hoffman. And they were just the beginning. Vince Sollitto, our grizzled head of PR; Ken Howery, my Stanford friend; Mark Woolway
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to dupe hundreds of unsuspecting users into turning over their passwords in a number of highly publicized incidents.9 Without the fraud-fighting savvy of Max Levchin, in one instance the company was reduced to distributing panicked warnings (“Your account may be a target for deceptive emails”) to customers it thought might
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like a page out of Who’s Who. Peter Thiel renamed his hedge fund Clarium Capital, relocated it to San Francisco, and expanded its staff. Max Levchin does technical consulting for corporate investors. David Sacks started a movie production company named Room 9 Entertainment. Reid Hoffman is the CEO of LinkedIn, a
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the Internet Economy,” Red Herring, August 2000, no longer available online. 5. For an excellent profile on Luke and Max, see Computer Science Alumni News, “Max Levchin and Luke Nosek: Pals and PayPals,” Winter 2001, http://www.cs.uiuc. edu/news/alumni/jan01/lev.html. 6. EBay, Inc. 2002 Annual Report, 22
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some use, after all, in techniques for slowing things down. < Chapter 6 > 10X, Rock Stars, and the Myth of Meritocracy In the annals of coding, Max Levchin is considered something of a colossus. Levchin is the programmer who almost single-handedly willed PayPal into existence, in a frenzy of programming. He’d
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/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia. CHAPTER 6: 10X, ROCK STARS, AND THE MYTH OF MERITOCRACY a frenzy of programming: This section on Max Levchin draws from several sources, including Adam Penenberg, Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves (New York: Hyperion, 2009), 158
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. It was a hot day and around six people showed up. One of them was a twenty-three-year-old Ukrainian-born computer programmer named Max Levchin. Just out of the University of Illinois, he had come to Silicon Valley that summer with a vague notion of starting a company, sleeping on
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of monetary policy. The ultimate goal was to create an alternate currency online that would circumvent government controls—a libertarian goal. The summer he met Max Levchin, Thiel read a book published the previous year, The Sovereign Individual by Lord William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson. It described a coming world
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Publishing, 2010). David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). Jessica Livingston, “Max Levchin,” in Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (New York: Apress, 2008). Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook (New York: Anchor
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era, yet even its young, innovative founders almost fell prey to the status-quo bias. In 1998, at age 23, a recent college graduate named Max Levchin cofounded PayPal. At that time, the company had nothing to do with online payments. Rather, it made security software for handheld devices. In college, Levchin
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, Jack L. Knetsch, and Richard Thaler (1990), “Experimental Tests of the Endowment Effect and the Coase Theorem,” Journal of Political Economy 98: 1325–48. 6 Max Levchin cofounded PayPal. PayPal was actually first called Confinity, and it produced a product called PayPal, but it was later renamed PayPal after a merger. To
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