BY LINDSEY TAUB
Max Levchin will be a guest speaker at the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center for their Founders’ Leadership Series. Tune into the live broadcast of the interview here on October 11th, 6:00 pm PDT.
Max Levchin is not afraid to take risks. After moving to America from Ukraine as a teenager — attending the University of Illinois in 1998, Levchin joined friends in Silicon Valley with the intention of breaking into the cybersecurity industry.
While living on a friend’s floor in Silicon Valley, Levchin attended a lecture by investor Peter Thiel at Stanford University. Levchin immediately connected with Thiel and within 48 hours of the lecture, Thiel was a committed investor for Levchin’s new project, which sought to create a “digital wallet.” Thiel acted as a mentor to an inexperienced Levchin, teaching him the ropes of pitch decks and investors.
Levchin soon asked Thiel to act as the CEO of his company, which gradually transformed into PayPal. The two teamed up with what Fortune dubbed jokingly as the “Paypal Mafia,” a group of 50 entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman who would go on to make PayPal a global success.
In 2002, Paypal was acquired by Ebay for $1.5 billion. All but 12 of the original startup’s members left the company, including Levchin.
But Levchin wasn’t done. After leaving Paypal in 2004, Levchin founded Slide, a personal media-sharing service for social networking sites, such as Facebook. Slide was sold to Google in August 2010 for $182 million.
In late 2011, Levchin founded HVF (“Hard, Valuable, and Fun”), to support projects leveraging data, such as data from analog sensors. In early 2012, Affirm was spun out of HVF. Affirm is a consumer lending startup that provides consumers with a payment alternative to credit cards, in an attempt to provide transparency, control and fairness. Levchin is CEO.
Levchin also had his hand in a number of other companies and was one of the first investors in Yelp, which he was Chairman of until 2015, and Evernote.
Join us on October 11 to hear from Max Levchin. Learn how Levchin approaches finding opportunity within heavily regulated markets and learn how he’s been able to outmaneuver the competition. He will also explain why he believes that entrepreneurship is an endurance sport and that having a passion for the problem is paramount to the longevity of any startup founder. This inspirational and educational discussion is one not to be missed.
