MAX RAFAEL LEVCHIN

Place of birth  : Kiev, Kievan Rus’

Places lived    : Kiev

Max Rafael Levchin, 34, is a Ukrainian-born computer scientist and entrepreneur widely known as co-founder (with Peter Thiel) and former chief technology officer of PayPal. After changing the company name to Confinity, they developed a popular payment product known as PayPal. After a merger with another company, X.com, the combined entity was renamed PayPal Inc.

PayPal went public in February 2002, and was subsequently acquired by eBay. Levchin worked there with Peter Thiel, Roelof Botha, and David Sachs. Levchin’s 2.3% stake in PayPal was worth approximately $34 million at the time of the acquisition.

He is primarily known for his contributions to PayPal’s anti-fraud efforts and is also the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA. In 2004, Levchin founded Slidea popular personal media-sharing service for social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Max Levchin the founder and CEO of Slide, which creates and distributes popular Web applications on Facebook, as desktop widgets, and elsewhere. He is also the chairman of local review site Yelp. Prior to Slide he was the co-founder and CTO of PayPal, which was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.

Levchin is now steeped in the dynamics of virtual goods and how to get people to pay for them, which he discusses at length in the interview. He makes a distinction between buying virtual goods as a “consumption decision” (because you want to level up in a game immediately, for instance) and an “investment decision” where you spend to improve your standing in a community.

PayPal was one of the first companies to use a “human verification system” by making users enter numbers from a blurry picture, a system now commonplace online; they may have been the first to develop the idea of such a system, and Levchin was the co-creator of their implementation of it. PayPal went public in late 2001, and was acquired by eBay a year later for $1.5 billion, having soundly defeated Bill point, the eBay-owned PayPal alternative. Most other PayPal competitors went out of business not long after eBay’s acquisition; many of those that remain tend to offer only some of PayPal’s services, keeping them out of head to head competition.