Max Levchin

Paypal was the first company to file for IPO status after 9/11 and consequently faced much-stricter-than-normal scrutiny. Additionally, the night before a deadline the founders found ...

Entrepreneurs generally describe themselves as either unlucky or brilliant, depending on whether or not they were successful. Since the company can never be founded again, ...

Max met Peter at a free lecture on the currency market held in Terman. The lecture only had six attendees and Max approached Peter afterwards ...

The founders built the initial team of six by recruiting people they knew and trusted. Though it some took convincing, they got the other members ...

In the beginning, the company had three points of focus: recruiting people, selling investors, and selling the products to customers. Selling the company to investors ...

To mark the first major funding round, the Paypal founders staged the famous Beaming at Bucks, where the Paypal money encryption technology was used to ...

Technology companies face four major development hurdles along the path to success: basic concept, the product, getting it to customers, and making money. Focusing on ...

PayPal Co-Founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin discuss the connections between growth and burn rate during their company's early days. The co-founders also describe why ...

The founders soon realized that a major part of the high burn rate was due to fraud. They admit to being very naïve about ...

The world is headed in the direction of a global, inter-connected economy in which enormous amounts of money are transferred around the world. Currently, there ...

There is no set formula to make viral marketing successful. Rather, it depends on the situation. It worked with Paypal because customers were able to ...

Though Paypal launched the Palm model and the internet model at roughly the same time with roughly the same number of customers, the internet model ...

The concept of digital cash had been around long before Paypal. Paypal was unique in that it was successfully able to create a compromise between ...

The negotiations with eBay were difficult because eBay did not originally recognize Paypal as an essential part of their business model. After a year-and-a-half long ...

Peter's advice to eBay for the future of Paypal is to keep scaling the business. At the beginning, it made sense to integrate Paypal's product ...

The early merger with the competitor created a unified front that helped convince people that there was a large market with real growth. Though there ...

The founders of Paypal are often asked if they are a bank. They are not a bank because they are not involved in fractional lending, ...