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
The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong. You should try to make the early team as non-diverse as possible.
Ignore your mistakes. The number one thing to worry about is -Am I doing what I'm good at?
Having a highly homogeneous background, education, values, preferences, etc, in the very early team is better than not - cuts down on time-wasting arguments.
I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is that you're not really going to build one specific company. The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what that thing is.
The single most important top-level trend is the shift to mobile.
The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less, but still failed. The third one, you know, proper failed, but it was kind of okay. I recovered quickly. Number four almost didn't fail. It still didn't really feel great, but it did okay. Number five was PayPal.
You can have successful teams where people hate but deeply respect each other; the opposite (love but not respect among team members) is a recipe for disaster.