Meet the People Who Make Your World

After ten years of conducting interviews with many of the greatest innovators in modern technology, I'm proud to offer these discussions as no one has ever seen them before. When these talks first appeared in CPU magazine, they had to be sliced down for space. But now, thanks to ebooks, I've been able to go back to the source material and replace the gems and fascinating tangents that were formerly lost. Moreover, most interviewees have generously contributed follow-up discussions.

These people aren't locked in the past. They're still here, still changing the world, and (usually) still giving us glimpses showing that the best is yet to come. I'll share some great passages from the "Architects of Tomorrow" series below. If you like what you see, grab the complete books here:


Good reading, and prepare to be inspired!

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

PayPal Co-Founder Ready to Code Through the Revolution

I interviewed PayPal co-founder Max Levchin just as he was getting social media company Slide off the ground. Of the 75 people profiled in Architects of Tomorrow, Levchin has one of the most compelling stories in his rise to success. At first, I supposed that by the time he'd blown through PayPal, passed Yelp, and reached Slide, the entrepreneur routine would have become old hat. However, the truth turned out to be (as always) more complex.



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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