PayPal co-founder and CTO, founder and CEO of Slide, entrepreneur Max Levchin chats about his past successes and future strategies. Plus Om and Joyce rip through the Hitlines: Ringles, IBM Joins OpenOffice, Can Barcelona Save AMD?
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Slide CEO and Founder Max Levchin is interviewed by Kara Swisher about how the highly-valued Web 2.0 start-up, which makes social networking applications, is faring after the econalypse.
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Max met Peter at a free lecture on the currency market held in Terman. The lecture only had six attendees and Max approached Peter afterwards to tell him he was going to start a company. Peter had lots of friends that had been involved in startups, most of which had blown up catastroph...
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The founders of Paypal are often asked if they are a bank. They are not a bank because they are not involved in fractional lending, nor are they backed by the Federal Reserve. Peter likens Paypal to a money market fund.
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To mark the first major funding round, the Paypal founders staged the famous Beaming at Bucks, where the Paypal money encryption technology was used to send the funding money from one PalmPilot to another across the room in a publicity demonstration. There was a mad rush before the demo...
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Peter’s advice to eBay for the future of Paypal is to keep scaling the business. At the beginning, it made sense to integrate Paypal's product closely with eBay, but now they are starting to develop applications outside of eBay and these should be vigorously promoted.
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Entrepreneurs generally describe themselves as either unlucky or brilliant, depending on whether or not they were successful. Since the company can never be founded again, Peter Thiel says it is hard to know whether they were in fact brilliant or merely lucky with Paypal. He does say th...
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Paypal was the first company to file for IPO status after 9/11 and consequently faced much-stricter-than-normal scrutiny. Additionally, the night before a deadline the founders found out that they were being sued for patent infringement. After a sleepless night and rushed meeting with a...
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In the beginning, the company had three points of focus: recruiting people, selling investors, and selling the products to customers. Selling the company to investors was initially the most difficult of the three and Peter discusses how difficult it was to secure funding.
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The negotiations with eBay were difficult because eBay did not originally recognize Paypal as an essential part of their business model. After a year-and-a-half long negotiation (and a few marketing ploys by Paypal), eBay recognized the Paypal’s value and the two companies were able to ...
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The founders soon realized that a major part of the high burn rate was due to fraud. They admit to being very naïve about fraud when they started the company. They had to either find a way to beat fraud or the fraudsters would beat them. They were able to successfully stay ahead of th...
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