Max Levchin Quotes

I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is that you’re not really going to build one specific company. The goal – at least the way I think about entrepreneurship – is you realize one day that you can’t really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn’t matter what that thing is.

Having a highly homogeneous background, education, values, preferences, etc, in the very early team is better than not – cuts down on time-wasting arguments.

If you’re building a social product, you’re still living in the last century if your product doesn’t work on Facebook.

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.

PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job.

Facebook and Myspace are the U.S. audience, which is tried and true when it comes to being susceptible to ads.

If I see what you’re up to on Facebook but I don’t see your updates on Flickr, I’ll still care about Facebook.

I actually think Facebook made it their business to be close with all of the app developers. They couldn’t have done more.

If we compare the two, Facebook is currently a superior place to market a product like Slide. Twitter is more like a general distribution agent. It’s like broadcast radio.

The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.

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?

Technology has come a long way since PayPal.

A classic engineering mistake and one I’ve made is confusing what is hard and what is valuable.

You are not designing for yourself, and shouldn’t be. Most people using the Web don’t understand (most of) what makes it work and don’t want to. Design for those people. There are many more of them than you.

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.

One of the things we did at PayPal was collaborative filtering and machine learning: looking at patterns of human behavior. We used it there to predict when people would try to cheat the system to get money. But you can predict pretty much any behavior with a certain amount of accuracy.

Being an entrepreneur is not about being in love with an idea, it’s about being in love with running a company.

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.’

If the game designer produces more content than he can consume per month, some fraction of the people will say more quests, more tests, more challenges, more whatever, and they will be compelled by it.

I never wear suits.

Right now, nearly all the apps on Facebook take a week to build. No more.

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.

I’m trying to build something where people will go every day.

I have this massive notebook called IDEAS and another one called PERSONAL IDEAS and another one called CRAZY IDEAS.

Mobile is the perfect example of what is enabling economic growth in the technology sector.

Media is very different from financial services. People are very fickle and very vocal. They believe that things should be one way and not the other. It’s still very rewarding to build products for huge audiences. It feels like you’re making an impact.

Ignore your mistakes. The number one thing to worry about is -Am I doing what I’m good at?

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.

Think of Slide as a giant media network for people to transmit information. The content that’s in there now has been provided by users – it’s whatever they want it to be.

The very first company I started failed with a great bang. The second one failed a little bit less, but still failed. The third one, you know, proper failed, but it was kind of okay. I recovered quickly. Number four almost didn’t fail. It still didn’t really feel great, but it did okay. Number five was PayPal.