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
support sources from yourself. There’s really no one else who you can go to and
say, “Hey, this thing is going to fall apart any minute now. What the hell are we
going to do?”
The thing that kept us going in the early days was the fact that Peter and I
always knew that both of us would not be in a funk together. When I was like,
“This fraud thing is going to kill us,” Peter said, “No, I’ve seen the numbers.
You are doing fine. Just keep at it. You’ll get it.” On the flip side, when Peter
would be annoyed by some investors or board dynamics or whatever, I was usually
there trying to support him. That sort of sounds touchy-feely, but I think
you have to really have good people. If you have a good team, you are halfway
there. Even more importantly, perhaps, you have to have a really strong
cofounder. Someone you can rely on in a very fundamental way.
Max Levchin 13
Livingston: Did you feel that way about Peter when you started?
Levchin: We hit it off really quickly. I have this IQ bias—anybody really smart,
I will figure out a way to deal with.
It was very positive. Both of us are really competitive and really—not mistrusting,
but not willing to assume that the other guy knows what he’s talking
about. When we met, we sort of hung out socially, and then one night we had
this showdown where we sat around in this caf? for like 8 hours and traded
puzzles to see who could solve puzzles faster—just this nonstop mental beating
on each other. I think after that we realized that we each couldn’t be total idiots
since we could solve puzzles pretty quickly.
We would constantly try to come up with ones that the other person wouldn’t
be able to solve. I’m really into puzzles. I’m not a very quick solver, so I tend to
take a long time. Not always, but on occasion, I will take a lot longer than an
average time to solve it, but I almost always will succeed.
I think in a big way, the reason for PayPal’s success is that I got very lucky
with Peter as a cofounder, and I’d like to think he got pretty lucky with me.
Livingston: Who did you learn things from?

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