PayPal: Max Levchin (June 2022)

Hey everyone, it's Guy here. So this week we're bringing you a potentially top episode from The Vault. It's my conversation with Max Levchin, one of the founders of PayPal, and of course, another one of those founders who founded a company called X, which then merged with PayPal, has been in the news a lot, and his name, of course, is Elon Musk. And you will hear some fascinating stories. about many of the founders involved with PayPal, including some about Elon Musk. Anyway, our conversation covered so much ground that we couldn't fit it all into one episode, so this is just part one. For part two, just go back to your podcast feed and type in Max Levchin or Affirm And you can listen to that one after. Okay, enjoy the show. 2001 for me was largely a year of trying to scale this thing as it was just blowing the doors off with its growth.

Every week the growth would just be so much more than the systems could handle. Every Monday when eBay auctions would settle. This would just go down for multiple hours. And at some point our head of database scalability, who was also a very accomplished blues singer and guitarist, brought his guitars. to the office and would play the Munda Blues because we all knew The site would crash.

Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. They built. I'm Guy Roz and on the show today, how Max Legend took an idea nobody cared about transformed it into PayPal.

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