Max Levchin 15...
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 to eBay, which was three
times the size, it was even less so. But, as you grow larger, you need more structure
and coordination and meetings.
My theory is that you sort of subdivide, and you make smaller units and you
give them a lot of power and responsibility. You let them make it or break it. But
I have no practical knowledge as to whether this works or not.
Livingston: Was there anything that was misunderstood about what you were
trying to do?
Levchin: No, because I think we didn’t know what we were doing. 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. We had six
different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.
If that one didn’t work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously
we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business
model and done something else. I don’t think there was ever any clarity as to
who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we’d figured out our PR
pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding
and the actual PayPal, it was just this tug-of-war where it was like, “We’re trying
this, this week.” Every week you go to investors and say, “We’re doing this,
exactly this. We’re really focused. We’re going to be huge.” The next week
you’re like, “That was a lie.”
One of the interesting moments was after we got funding from Nokia
Ventures, the first VC firm that funded us. The beaming at Buck’s was still done
under this, “We’re doing this handheld device thing and there’s some payment
component, but it’s really handheld device, share your lunch bill with your Palm
Pilot.” By the time we had our first board meeting a month later, we had already
realized that that wasn’t going to work and that we had to do the web stuff
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