Max Levchin
32 statements across 3 episodes · 8 bullish · 3 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Jun 24, 2019 by Jeremy Stoppelman · said 29 times in 2 episodes since 2019 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Max Levchin's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Guy Raz (17), Jeremy Stoppelman (12)
tap a year for its mentions
2022 3 mentions in 1 episode
2019 26 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Max Levchin, oldest first
Jun 24, 2019
Jun 24, 2019
Jun 24, 2019 neutral
Only top executives were obvious future stars at early PayPal
“I don't think you could have really predicted it. Obviously, Max was already pretty far along for a 24 year old, so it was obvious, you know, he was gonna be someone interesting in the industry, you know, Peter Thiel, same thing. So, you know, I'd say the top …”
Jun 13, 2022 positive
Reid Hoffman's advice on securing assets sparked PayPal's electronic wallet pivot
“Reid was one of the more prescient
Grains who was sort of like, hey, you can secure other things. Maybe you can like secure invoices or secure IOUs or, you know, secure something that kind of is valuable in and of itself. And that kind of pushed us close enou…”
Jun 13, 2022 negative
Levchin: Original PalmPilot lacked encryption and allowed open communication sniffing
“And then I looked at the security design of the Palm pilot and was sort of flabbergasted to know that there was no way to encrypt anything. You could communicate with other Palm pilots, but people could sniff the communication and just steal your secrets.”
Jun 13, 2022
Jun 13, 2022 positive
PayPal's makeshift web-to-web demo accidentally drove its explosive early growth
“And as a footnote, we had a Web to Web, very much a demo quality product that I threw together to just show how this works if you just don't happen to have any Palm Pilots around. And it's that demo that took off like crazy.”
Jun 13, 2022
Jun 13, 2022 positive
Early PayPal screened against frat culture in favor of rigorous intellectual debate
“One of the interesting accusations that sometimes is leveled against the early PayPal crew is that it was this idea of a frat culture. It's actually quite the opposite. You know, if anything, we were screening against this idea of sort of a self-righteous, pri…”
Jun 13, 2022
Jun 13, 2022 positive
Jun 13, 2022
Jun 13, 2022
Levchin: Mother tested food radiation in Ukraine before and after Chernobyl
“She was employed at the Food Sciences Research Institute, which sounds very boring, but she had a really cool job. She was measuring foods for radioactive contamination. And before Chernobyl, that was the very boring job. And then after Chernobyl, it became a …”
Jun 13, 2022
Levchin: Mobile payments must be easier and faster than cash and cards
“And if it's not easy, it's just not going to work with money. Money works pretty well when it's in paper form and it works Really well when it's a card form. So if you're trying to push it into an application or into a mobile device, it better be easier and qu…”
Jun 13, 2022
Levchin: Learned programming in Soviet Ukraine from bootleg CS translations
“And within a few months, I was a better programmer than my mom and then better programmer than her colleagues. And I was just gorging myself on all the knowledge that I could get from bootleg translations of various computer science books. And so by the time I…”
Jun 13, 2022 neutral
Levchin: Early startup failures came from building overly complicated software
“Most of my failures as a startup CEO, CTO, whatever I thought I was, or because I would build things that I thought were good and easy to use. And then I would show them to someone like the classified software and people were like, this is a really great But I…”
Jun 13, 2022
Jun 13, 2022
Levchin: Grandparents survived WWII due to Soviet defense physics work
“And the reason he and my grandmother survived, they were both physicists, and they were both involved in some defense-related work for the state. So as the Germans approached Kiev, they were both sent very far off into Siberia to help the war effort from Far a…”
Jun 13, 2022 negative
A 50/50 equity split caused the bitter internal battles at PayPal
“And then you merge, and it's a fifty-fifty merger, which means just no one knows who won. And that's, by the way, sort of the root of all complexity at paypalx.com story is that because we sort of settled on this, well, there's not really a senior partner. Equ…”
Jun 13, 2022 negative
Levchin took out startup frustration by ripping into founders' pitches at Sequoia
“And then I started noticing that I was really good at ripping into people's ideas. They would bring in this really cool concept. And of course it was half baked. It was just, you know, some bright eyed kid Freshly out of college thinking about here's what they…”
Jun 20, 2022 positive
Jun 20, 2022 neutral
Jun 20, 2022 positive
Jun 20, 2022
Levchin felt like a fraud building entertainment products at Slide
“And throughout the whole thing, I felt like a fraud. Like I never played video games growing up. I was not really into photography. I was not a photo sharer. And so this idea of building entertainment products was this sort of mask I took on.”
Jun 20, 2022 positive
Levchin: Startups need professional respect over collegiality during market downturns
“I over-indexed on this idea of, hey, we really have to have just a lot more collegiality, and that works really well if you are doing great as a company. But inevitably, every company goes through ups and downs, and sometimes downs take a long time, and, you k…”
Jun 20, 2022
Jun 20, 2022
Levchin: Capitalizing on luck requires relentless grinding and compromising work-life balance
“And what do you do after, once you see one of those, have one of those, it does come down to work ethic and just willingness to grind and, you know, sleep less and Compromise things like work-life balance, which have their own consequences. It's not free, and …”
Jun 20, 2022 positive
Jun 20, 2022
Jun 20, 2022
Jun 20, 2022