to prepare much more thoroughly. The whole boy-genius thing had to be discarded
for the much more serious attitude and language.
Livingston: Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
Levchin: No.
Livingston: You didn’t make any mistakes?
Levchin: There are all sorts of tactical decisions that we made here and there
that played out to be wrong, but it’s not like I could have predicted it. It’s not
one of these things that I’m now smarter and therefore I could have done it
even better. I think, given the...

Levchin: There are different segments to running a startup. Different people
taught me different things. A lot of the top management people at PayPal were
really good. It was very fun and meaningful to work with them and pick up their
various interests and skills.
I never really paid much attention in college in econ, and I never really took
any accounting classes. One night I came over to our CFO’s office, and I said, “I
really don’t understand a lot of the balance sheet math and all this stuff. I’m
pretty good...

are doing it completely alone, it’s really hard. It’s not impossible, in particular if
you are a loner and introverted type, but it’s still really hard.
One of the ways PayPal changed me is that I used to be really introverted,
and I sort of still am, but not anywhere near to the extent that I used to be. A
big part of it was that I had run a company before PayPal, alone, and I thought
it was fine. I could deal with it. But, you only can count on energy sources and
...

20,000 new active users every day. The transactional growth is exponential
because people are sticking around. It’s not like people came in, did one thing,
and left. They came in, did one thing, and stayed. And they kept doing more.
Livingston: Was the growth viral?
Levchin:We built the system to be viral from day one. The idea was: I can send
you the money, even if you aren’t a member. If I send you $10, you get an email
saying, “You have $10 waiting for you. Sign up, and you can take it.” That’s...

anyone with a substantial public visibility announcing that they are suddenly
bleeding out $10 million a month in fraud would send serious shocks through
the investor base. But I think, even if they did that, it’s likely they wouldn’t have
been successful because—we had talked to a lot of them both as a potential
acquirer and as partnership potential—none of them had actually ever gone to
the sort of stuff that we did for our anti-fraud work.
Max Levchin 11
The default of how you do these things is very powerful, if you’ve...