Quotes from Max Levchin

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.

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

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

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.'

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

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

I never wear suits.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Technology has come a long way since PayPal.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.