PayPal: Max Levchin (Part 1 of 2)

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 June 2022

⏱️ 90 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

During its formative years in the late 1990's, Paypal attracted an extraordinary group of young entrepreneurs, who then went on to build some of the best known companies in tech. They became known as The PayPal Mafia—and Max Levchin was one of the leaders. A computer genius from Soviet Ukraine, Max joined Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and others as they grew PayPal into a massively successful online payment service. Along the way, they encountered almost every start-up challenge imaginable, including the emotional ouster of Elon Musk as CEO. After PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, Max couldn't sit still, so he launched a startup lab that eventually led to another successful fintech company: Affirm. Guy will talk to Max about Affirm next week, in the second episode of this two-part series.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	2001 for me was largely a year of trying to scale this thing as it was just blowing the
0:17.2	doors off with its growth.
0:19.4	Every week the growth would just be so much more than the systems could handle every
0:23.7	Monday when eBay auctions would settle.
0:26.5	This would just go down for multiple hours and at some point our head of database scalability
0:32.0	was also a very accomplished blues singer and guitarist brought his guitars to the office
0:37.5	and would play the Monday blues because we all knew the site would crash.
0:42.7	Welcome to How I Built This.
0:50.4	A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:00.3	I'm Guy Raaz and on the show today how Max Levcchan took an idea nobody cared about and
1:05.9	transformed it into PayPal, a brand that embodied startup culture with its rapid rise,
1:12.2	hairpin turns and world famous founders.
1:20.6	There are just a few companies in tech whose overall impact went a lot further than just
1:27.2	the products they produced.
1:29.2	Fuelid Packard is a classic example.
1:31.6	It's not the computers or printers they made that matter but the fact that David Packard
1:36.6	and Bill Hewlett were pioneers who laid the foundation for what is now known as Silicon
1:41.8	Valley.
1:42.8	Atari is another one.
1:44.4	Sure Nolan Bushnell's video games and consoles were cool but what matters more is how Atari
	...

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