In His Own Words: The Story of Max Levchin [video]

Here's another good interview of Max Levchin with Bob Cringely back in 2005: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/guests/#l

This is worth watching because it's pre-Slide.com acquisition and just barely post-Google IPO.

The interesting comment to me is his comparison at the time of Google to Alta Vista, specifically how Alta Vista was the huge search engine of its day and then just kinda faded away.

If you follow a few people closely and read every article you can find about them, some characterizations in the press tend to be a bit dubious. I don't know Levchin personally, but every indication goes to him being a workaholic, and not exactly a "family man", as Malik writes.

I really don't like how many interview posts start.. It's often something like "Oh, look, this guy has it all and now he's coming clean on my interview! Watch him spill it all", which is obviously link-bait and just not true.

I found it particularly interesting that Max created an incubator primarily to initiate an environment of creativity.

How do you come up with the best ideas possible? Easy! Just setup an atmosphere where great ideas are pooled together, then pick the best ones.