At PayPal Max was a member of the board of directors and chief technology officer, responsible for the areas of technology development, network and information security, and the fight with transaction fraud and identity theft. Prior to PayPal, Max cofounded and ran NetMeridian Software and SponsorNet New Media, which built some of the early Internet marketing services and tools.
Since leaving PayPal late last year on the fourth anniversary of its founding, Max has been contemplating his next startups and re-acquainting himself with the world he has ignored for the last four years.
Max graduated from University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1997 with a degree in Computer Science, specializing in computer security and music. Sometime earlier, he was born in Kiev, Ukraine, when it was still part of the Soviet Union, and moved to Chicago in 1991. His interests include cryptography, math, music, modern art, online crime, and meeting smart people.
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Lecture 1: Lucky or Brilliant?
Entrepreneurs generally describe themselves as either unlucky or brilliant, depending on whether or not they were succes…
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Lecture 2: Paypal Cofounders Met in Terman at a Seminar
Max met Peter at a free lecture on the currency market held in Terman. The lecture only had six attendees and Max approa…
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Lecture 3: How We Attracted Our First People
The founders built the initial team of six by recruiting people they knew and trusted. Though it some took convincing, t…
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Lecture 4: Selling Employees, Selling Investors, and Selling Customers
In the beginning, the company had three points of focus: recruiting people, selling investors, and selling the products…
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Lecture 5: Selling Investors: Beaming at Bucks
To mark the first major funding round, the Paypal founders staged the famous Beaming at Bucks, where the Paypal money en…
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Lecture 6: Selling Customers -- Getting the Product Out
Technology companies face four major development hurdles along the path to success: basic concept, the product, getting…
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Lecture 7: Exponential Growth
The customer growth following the free-$10 plan was exponential. Since each new customer cost the company $10, this caus…
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Lecture 8: Coping with Fraud
The founders soon realized that a major part of the high burn rate was due to fraud. They admit to being very naive abou…
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Lecture 9: The Initial Public Offering (IPO)
Paypal was the first company to file for IPO status after 9/11 and consequently faced much-stricter-than-normal scrutiny…
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Lecture 10: Viral Marketing
There is no set formula to make viral marketing successful. Rather, it depends on the situation. It worked with Paypal b…
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Lecture 11: Changing the Business Model
Though Paypal launched the Palm model and the internet model at roughly the same time with roughly the same number of cu…
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Lecture 12: Beating Competitors - and the Conventional Wisdom
The concept of digital cash had been around long before Paypal. Paypal was unique in that it was successfully able to cr…
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Lecture 13: Negotiating with eBay
The negotiations with eBay were difficult because eBay did not originally recognize Paypal as an essential part of their…
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Lecture 14: Advice to eBay (the acquirer)
Peter's advice to eBay for the future of Paypal is to keep scaling the business. At the beginning, it made sense to inte…
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Lecture 15: When and Why to Merge With a Competitor to Dominate a Market
The early merger with the competitor created a unified front that helped convince people that there was a large market w…
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Lecture 16: Paypal is Not a Bank
The founders of Paypal are often asked if they are a bank. They are not a bank because they are not involved in fraction…
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Lecture 17: Looking Ahead to Their Next Venture
The world is headed in the direction of a global, inter-connected economy in which enormous amounts of money are transfe…
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