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
I actually think Facebook made it their business to be close with all of the app developers. They couldn't have done more.
Facebook and Myspace are the U.S. audience, which is tried and true when it comes to being susceptible to ads.
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.
I've been developing mobile for years before anybody else really thought it was that important.
Ignore your mistakes. The number one thing to worry about is -Am I doing what I'm good at?
A classic engineering mistake and one I've made is confusing what is hard and what is valuable.
I have this massive notebook called IDEAS and another one called PERSONAL IDEAS and another one called CRAZY IDEAS.
We're all put on Earth for a limited amount of time. Am I using in a way that is great, or good enough, or wasteful?
Having a highly homogeneous background, education, values, preferences, etc, in the very early team is better than not - cuts down on time-wasting arguments.
Facebook and Myspace are the U.S. audience, which is tried and true when it comes to being susceptible to ads.
We're becoming slaves to our social networks - and that's not a bad thing. You like your favorite networks, so do you friends, and pretty soon you have market winners.
You're going to pull out your phone and try to use whatever is the most appropriate app on your iPhone or your Android device. Yelp saw that very early on. And when we launched the mobile product, we saw immediate growth, and we were stunned.
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.
If you can work a brand successfully into the narrative of your product, then it's really cool. Then people actually take the brand up and say, 'My positive experience in your product is directly connected and influenced by this brand and that worked great.