Max Levchin Quotes

#1. Facebook is so ubiquitous now that it's like another manifestation of the web itself.

Max Levchin

#2. Think of Slide as a giant media network for people to transmit information. The content that's in there now has been provided by users - it's whatever they want it to be.

Max Levchin

#3. You're going to pull out your phone and try to use whatever is the most appropriate app on your iPhone or your Android device. Yelp saw that very early on. And when we launched the mobile product, we saw immediate growth, and we were stunned.

Max Levchin

#4. You are not designing for yourself, and shouldn't be. Most people using the Web don't understand (most of) what makes it work and don't want to. Design for those people. There are many more of them than you.

Max Levchin

#5. PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job.

Max Levchin

#6. Mobile is the perfect example of what is enabling economic growth in the technology sector.

Max Levchin

#7. If the game designer produces more content than he can consume per month, some fraction of the people will say more quests, more tests, more challenges, more whatever, and they will be compelled by it.

Max Levchin

#8. A classic engineering mistake and one I've made is confusing what is hard and what is valuable.

Max Levchin

#9. I've been developing mobile for years before anybody else really thought it was that important.

Max Levchin

#10. If we compare the two, Facebook is currently a superior place to market a product like Slide. Twitter is more like a general distribution agent. It's like broadcast radio.

Max Levchin

#11. I actually think Facebook made it their business to be close with all of the app developers. They couldn't have done more.

Max Levchin

#12. Having a highly homogeneous background, education, values, preferences, etc, in the very early team is better than not - cuts down on time-wasting arguments.

Max Levchin

#13. Ignore your mistakes. The number one thing to worry about is -Am I doing what I'm good at?

Max Levchin

#14. The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.

Max Levchin

#15. I have this massive notebook called IDEAS and another one called PERSONAL IDEAS and another one called CRAZY IDEAS.

Max Levchin

#16. The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good
is completely wrong. You should try to make the early team as
non-diverse as possible.

Max Levchin

#17. Facebook and Myspace are the U.S. audience, which is tried and true when it comes to being susceptible to ads.

Max Levchin

#18. Media is very different from financial services. People are very fickle and very vocal. They believe that things should be one way and not the other. It's still very rewarding to build products for huge audiences. It feels like you're making an impact.

Max Levchin

#19. Technology has come a long way since PayPal.

Max Levchin

#20. If you're building a social product, you're still living in the last century if your product doesn't work on Facebook.

Max Levchin

#21. The single most important top-level trend is the shift to mobile.

Max Levchin

#22. We're becoming slaves to our social networks - and that's not a bad thing. You like your favorite networks, so do you friends, and pretty soon you have market winners.

Max Levchin

#23. I'm trying to build something where people will go every day.

Max Levchin

#24. If you can work a brand successfully into the narrative of your product, then it's really cool. Then people actually take the brand up and say, 'My positive experience in your product is directly connected and influenced by this brand and that worked great.'

Max Levchin

#25. You can have successful teams where people hate but deeply respect each other; the opposite (love but not respect among team members) is a recipe for disaster.

Max Levchin

#26. You can't get married to any one particular plan. That is the biggest lesson I learned at PayPal.

Max Levchin

#27. We're all put on Earth for a limited amount of time. Am I using in a way that is great, or good enough, or wasteful?

Max Levchin

#28. For a long time, it was one of these things where - I was really much younger than now - my whole "brand" both to the investors and to our board members was this crazy Russian boy-genius who comes out and sprinkles magic dust on technology and things just work.

Max Levchin

#29. Right now, nearly all the apps on Facebook take a week to build. No more.

Max Levchin

#30. One of the things we did at PayPal was collaborative filtering and machine learning: looking at patterns of human behavior. We used it there to predict when people would try to cheat the system to get money. But you can predict pretty much any behavior with a certain amount of accuracy.

Max Levchin

#31. If I see what you're up to on Facebook but I don't see your updates on Flickr, I'll still care about Facebook.

Max Levchin

#32. Being an entrepreneur is not about being in love with an idea, it's about being in love with running a company.

Max Levchin