Disclosure
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.”
Opinion
Levchin: Sundar Pichai was singularly the kindest person at Google
“Sundar, who is now of course the CEO of the whole thing was singularly the kindest person I met at Google.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Levchin: PayPal never used its purchasing data for credit scoring
“At PayPal, we had access to all this amazing purchasing data. We never once tried to use it for credit scoring.”
Disclosure
Levchin fronted $100,000 of his own money to launch Affirm
“The day we launched, I sort of said, well, we have no way of financing these loans, and it's going to be a negative cash flow business. And so I will put up a 100,000 dollars of my own money to front these payments.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Levchin: Grandmother bribed a Soviet official to secure family's US emigration
“She had to bribe a Soviet official to give her a new birth certificate. And suddenly we found ourselves on a plane to New York.”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Peter Thiel invested $300,000 on the spot in Levchin's Secure Pilot
“He asked me how much money I thought I needed to get this off the ground. And I said, I think I need about a half a million dollars. It's a great, I'll invest 300,000.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Every Sand Hill Road VC rejected Confinity's early pitches
“We ran out of venture capital, kind of the Sandhill Road, classic blue chip venture capitalist community very quickly. I think we were roundly rejected by 100% of those pitches. We drove up and down Sandhill Road and Got absolutely nothing.”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Assertion Supported
Levchin: In 1999, individual eBay sellers could not process credit cards online
“Back in 99, there really isn't a way to take a credit card payment online if you were trying to sell things. For a business, there were a couple of companies that kind of provided that service. But if you were a, like, a normal person just trying to sell somet…”
Assertion Supported
Luke Nosek created PayPal's legendary double-sided $20 referral program
“And then Luke came up with the original viral marketing idea where he had said, hey, what if we gave every new user who signed up 20 bucks, but not just 20 bucks for signing up, but 20 bucks to the person who invited them.”
Assertion Supported
PayPal faced massive Eastern Bloc fraud attacks in April 2000
“Sometime in April of 2000, we saw just this enormous attacks primarily from my former homeland or the general region, like all those were the Eastern block countries, basically realizing that this is a very loosely secured financial system.”
Assertion Supported
Levchin: PayPal and X.com copied each other and competed on eBay incentives
“They came at payments a little bit after we did, but they had some really good ideas that we didn't have. So very quickly, we start just looking at each other and going, oh, that's a good idea. We'll copy that, and vice versa. And we were in the market just be…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Levchin: PayPal crashed for multiple hours every Monday in 2001
“Every Monday when eBay auctions would settle, the system would just go down for multiple hours.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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 …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Levchin: College classifieds venture charged newspapers $1,200 annual SaaS fees
“And so we would actually charge them SAS fees, like 1200 dollars a year, I think.”
Assertion Contradicted
Levchin: Peter Thiel's 1998 hedge fund was roughly $10 million
“I think it was ten million dollars. It was very small.”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Max Levchin