PayPal cofounder Max Levchin: “Brilliant people have extreme personalities more often than not”

After working with extreme personalities like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk at PayPal, Max decided that in his next venture he would optimize for a more collegial office environment:

“That was fun when I was 23, but now that I'm 33, maybe I can just tamp it down a little bit. And it turns out that really brilliant people actually have extreme personalities more often than not. I built the original teams of Slide to have much more of a collegial, friendly, warm, home-like feel, which made for a great place to be when things were going well. But when things were not going well, you would have groupthink, where everybody in the back of the bus would be singing a song. But the bus wasn't moving very quickly.”

After Google acquired Slide for $182 million, Max decided he’d go about building his next company, Affirm ($13 billion market cap today), more like PayPal:

“As I started Affirm, I went back to this idea. Crazy personalities are just fine with me. In fact, I want more of them. But the filtering function is, do I respect the person, the intelligence and the talent so much that… even if they have vastly different views on topics that don't matter to me or for this business, you have to respect that about them because you respect their intelligence and their talent.”

Building and structuring that team was a lot of effort, but Max believes the team he built at Affirm using this principle is now even better than the early PayPal team.

Full video: Khosla Ventures “Roller Coasters! | Max Levchin & Keith Rabois“ (Aug 2024)