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
...

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...

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...

Max Levchin 15
pack up and being replaced by these people that you’d fought all this time with.
The mothership has capitulated, and they’re replacing us with the people we’ve
been fighting against.
Livingston: What can big companies do to preserve a startup culture?
Levchin: I don’t know. Less PowerPoints. I think PayPal—even by the time we
were acquired—still felt really startup in a variety of ways. But not as much as
originally. People were definitely grumbling about how the startup culture was
being lost, even internally. But then, when we got...

much more prominently—and we had all these other ideas that we wanted to
do, which we later on threw out. But we started the board meeting basically
saying, “Hi, John. Hi, Pete”—the new VC guys—“We changed our business
plan.” And these guys were like, “What?” They just put down $4 million to see
something happen, and we said, “Sorry, we’re not going to do that; we’re going
to do this.”
To their credit, they were like, “All right, you guys are smart. Let’s do it.”
Usually VCs get freaked out by that, but...