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 world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.
One of the things we did at PayPal was collaborative filtering and machine learning: looking at patterns of human behavior. We used it there to predict when people would try to cheat the system to get money. But you can predict pretty much any behavior with a certain amount of accuracy.
Facebook and Myspace are the U.S. audience, which is tried and true when it comes to being susceptible to ads.
I actually think Facebook made it their business to be close with all of the app developers. They couldn't have done more.
I'm trying to build something where people will go every day.
Technology has come a long way since PayPal.
If we compare the two, Facebook is currently a superior place to market a product like Slide. Twitter is more like a general distribution agent. It's like broadcast radio.
If the game designer produces more content than he can consume per month, some fraction of the people will say more quests, more tests, more challenges, more whatever, and they will be compelled by it.
As I was getting interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, or some big pub guy, all I remember was that he went off to the bathroom for a second, and they brought out my omelet. The next thing I remember, I woke up, and I was on the side of my own omelet, and there was no one at Buck's. Everyone was gone. They just let me sleep.
Right now, nearly all the apps on Facebook take a week to build. No more.
Mobile is the perfect example of what is enabling economic growth in the technology sector.
If you're building a social product, you're still living in the last century if your product doesn't work on Facebook.
If I see what you're up to on Facebook but I don't see your updates on Flickr, I'll still care about Facebook.
Facebook is so ubiquitous now that it's like another manifestation of the web itself.