Max Levchin's Early PayPal Photos | Hacker News Reader

Max Levchin's Early PayPal Photos

levchin.com

118 pointsstevenj21 comments

I understand that the change is for the better, but as I miss the day when engineering in a start-up meant C/C++ hacking in a UNIX environment, as evidenced by Richard Stevens' books on Max's shelf:

http://levchin.com/images/PayPal/1840-yellow.JPG

Even though you no longer _need_ to be a C hacker to build a web application (and that's generally a good thing, as anyone at Paypal who still deals with the legacy C++ code, or anyone at Amazon who remembers OBIDOS can tell you), you should still work your way through Advanced Programming in UNIX Environment, and UNIX Network Programming: you won't regret it a bit.

If you want to learn low-level programming but aren't really enticed by networking / operating system hacking, I'd recommend writing a software rasterizer. It's a fun project, and it's satisfying at a visceral level to see your creation come to life.

And it will make you a better programmer for the rest of your life. If nothing else, you'll come away with a much more solid understanding of memory, CPU caching, etc.

Here's my (terrible) software rasterizer: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/programming/demos/viewer.zip (Windows only, sorry. But there's no reason why it has to be. All you need is the ability to make a pixel change color, and you can therefore write a software rasterizer.)

Russ and Max were the two smartest guys I went to college with and were also great friends. Everyone knew that they were both going to be very successful.

Fun fact: Russ was the coder for a Chicago 'burbs-based demo group when he was about 17 (I met him at NAID 1996, when I was also 17. He later described PayPal to me as a method for transferring money with your Palm Pilot, like at a restaurant, and I thought it was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard).

Group was called Beyond, and he went by Armitage. http://pouet.net/groups.php?which=881

Other guys in that group are also in the SF startup scene.

He went on to co-found Yelp.

I always wondered if people at the time thought it was a good idea or not, because with hindsight, to me it doesn't sound like a good idea.

In Founders at Work you can read how the web-part was an afterthought, quickly thrown together, but got really popular really fast because of eBay. Then they dumped the Palm Pilot part and focused on the web. Good pivot.

They also thought, at the time, that they would "make money on the flow of money", without charging any fees (presumably by investing it and having some sort of fractional reserve scheme going on). That didn't pan out either and they found they could just charge sellers 2% or whatever.

Why didn't he use Slide to post these?

If only paypal was still that personal and inspiring today.

Every new client I introduce to paypal these days I have to give them a lecture that "paypal is not your friend, do not trust them" (ie. they are not a bank and not a credit card company and will not help you, they are there to protect only themselves).

Hey I work for these people! =P

i genuinely have no idea why people would give a negative vote to this post. he's obviously just excited about having photos of his colleagues posted online.

It adds no value to the discussion.

It doesn't? The photograph has people in it, and the guy is talking about the people... I guess.

Great reminder of how valuable the right people at the right place & time can be. An aside: As per the explanation, this picture shows Steve Chen (YouTube) http://levchin.com/paypal-slideshow/3.html . Is this Chad Hurley standing next to Peter Thiel http://levchin.com/paypal-slideshow/11.html ? "Where is Waldo?" ... The interview with David Sacks on Venture Voice also has more on the early days of Paypal http://www.venturevoice.com/2006/05/david_o_sacks.html .

Nice post. Remnants of "maxcode" still creep up in our daily work so Max's name is well recognized at PayPal to this day.

Is Max's code considered to be good or bad?

I've heard nothing but good things about it but the actual "maxcode" framework that was in place is just an XML front-end abstraction (custom tags and loop/conditional logic in templates).

There are far superior templating solutions out right now but his work is definitely great for its time.

If I could time travel, I would make it a requirement of some web specification that "previous" and "next" buttons go above the content, at fixed widths, so they don't keep moving around.

sounds pretty web 3.0 to me.

Why isn't Elon Musk in any of these photos? I thought he co-founded PayPal?

Paypal was a merger or two companies very early on:

"The current incarnation of PayPal is the result of a March 2000 merger between Confinity and X.com.[10] Confinity was founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery, initially as a Palm Pilot payments and cryptography company.[11] X.com was founded by Elon Musk in March 1999, initially as an Internet financial services company. " per the wiki

i'm sorry, have you seen this ancient crazy IT party announcement?

http://yourforum.gr/InvisionBoard/lofiversion/index.php?t463...

(the guy second to left seems familiar, show it to Max)

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