Max Levchin Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Technology has come a long way since PayPal.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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