WVW: You’re an engineer and a coder by background, but you keep turning yourself into a corporate executive. Do you have any identity crises during these conversions?
Levchin: A little bit.
WVW: But you keep remedying it by starting something new?
Levchin: Pretty much. I wrote a lot of the original code in the Slide server and a lot of the original code in PayPal. All the security code, all the crypto stuff was coded by me. And I stayed on some of the tasks over time in PayPal to make sure that my skills stayed sharp. When we started Slide, I was very happy to be back in the programming saddle. For the first half of the year, I was writing lots and lots of code and tried to move the programming needle personally. At this point, the company has 30 people in it, so I don’t get that much time for programming, but I spent most of yesterday writing something that we’re going to use in Slide.
I have an occasional fear that— Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night and I can’t remember exactly how old I am. I try to think, “What’s my skill set? What can I do if everything goes to absolute crap? What can I offer to society that will provide me with food and clothing?” The thing that I generally fall back on is, “Well, I can still code really well.” Yeah, I came up with some decent ideas, and I can manage people, raise money, and I understand financial models pretty well now. But all that stuff seems very intangible. The thing that’s very tangible is I know how to code pretty good.
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