Max Levchin
Max Levchin
Maksymilian Rafailovych "Max" Levchynis an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is the Chief Executive of digital lending start-up Affirm. He is also the former chief technology officer of PayPal, which he co-founded in 1998. As CTO he was primarily known for his contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts and is also the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA challenge response human test...
NationalityUkrainian
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth11 July 1975
CountryUkraine
If you can work a brand successfully into the narrative of your product, then it's really cool. Then people actually take the brand up and say, 'My positive experience in your product is directly connected and influenced by this brand and that worked great.
Media is very different from financial services. People are very fickle and very vocal. They believe that things should be one way and not the other. It's still very rewarding to build products for huge audiences. It feels like you're making an impact.
PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job.
You are not designing for yourself, and shouldn't be. Most people using the Web don't understand (most of) what makes it work and don't want to. Design for those people. There are many more of them than you.
You're going to pull out your phone and try to use whatever is the most appropriate app on your iPhone or your Android device. Yelp saw that very early on. And when we launched the mobile product, we saw immediate growth, and we were stunned.
We're becoming slaves to our social networks - and that's not a bad thing. You like your favorite networks, so do you friends, and pretty soon you have market winners.
Think of Slide as a giant media network for people to transmit information. The content that's in there now has been provided by users - it's whatever they want it to be.
Facebook and Myspace are the U.S. audience, which is tried and true when it comes to being susceptible to ads.
A classic engineering mistake and one I've made is confusing what is hard and what is valuable.
I've been developing mobile for years before anybody else really thought it was that important.
Being an entrepreneur is not about being in love with an idea, it's about being in love with running a company.
You can't get married to any one particular plan. That is the biggest lesson I learned at PayPal.
We're all put on Earth for a limited amount of time. Am I using in a way that is great, or good enough, or wasteful?
I have this massive notebook called IDEAS and another one called PERSONAL IDEAS and another one called CRAZY IDEAS.