Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose max levchin is here. He is a cofounder of paypal nld and one of the most creative entrepreneurs in all of Silicon Valley. In 1998 he started paypal, four years later the company was bought by ebay for 1. 5 billion. Levchin has since launched a variety of companies. He started the Customer Review site yelp of which he is chairman. In 2010 he sold his social Media Company slide to google for 182 million. His later project is the tech inge baitor h. V. F. Im pleased to have him for the first time here but this is not the first time i have met him. Welcome. Thank you. Rose yours is an interesting story so bear with me so i talk about biography for a second. Born in the ukraine . Correct. Rose your mother was a scientist, your father was a playwright. What a great combination theres a culture there. Theres both sides of your your brain have been full of d. N. A. From both parents. Id like to believe so. Rose and you had, in an interesting way, a series of doctors that predicted you would not live that much longer because of bronchitis. That is true. Im amazed at your level of information but that is true. My parents were apparently told several times that this guy was not going to work out for them until about two and then at about two they said maybe five and after seven they stopped listening to doctors and said hes going to be all right. Rose they stopped predicting your death. As mark twain said reports of my death are vastly exaggerated. Then your mother understood that chernobyl could be a danger and she said were leaving here. That was an amazing time. I have a vague recollection of it but the flashes of memory of being tossed on to a train head out of up to to get away from the first acid rain stuck with me. Rose and how many people died at chernobyl . The actual chernobyl accident killed Something Like 23 people if i remember correctly. Rose the poisoning and radiation the radiation poisoning has were still counting them up. The Thyroid Cancer rate in the area where i was born apparently in children, anyway, the children of the time is 20 times the norm. Definitely not a great place. Rose then when you got ready to at the end of the train ride they said wait a second. You dont test well from the Geiger Counter or whatever they had. Yeah, apparently i had a rose thorn in my shoe that was setting off a Geiger Counter of some sort and there was a brief moment where there were a bunch of local officials saying do we cut off the leg . And my mom said maybe you should take off the shoe. Rose laughs such a smart mom. They moved to chicago. Thats right. In 1991 we were finally allowed out of the country and weeks before the country collapsed so i left with a red soviet passport and a few weeks later i had a passport to a country that didnt exist anymore. Rose and do you feel what in terms of where are where your soul is . Is it american . Is it russian . Is it rose id loaf to have a clever answer to this but i think now i primarily find myself as an american immigrant. Im very clear about where i came from who i was, who i am. Im very much an american. My formative years were spent here, i met most of the people who matter to me here, minus my family. Most of my work has been done in this country but i know i wasnt born here and i know that my development is shaped by the immigration experience, by the experience of growing up in a country that didnt have the kind of freedoms we have here. This sort of political and business freedom. Rose and what immigration has meant to america, i assume youre among those who say is a proud part of the development and evolution of this country and somethat that we essentially must make sure we cherish and preserve absolutely. Im very fashion gnat about its divisive issue, theres lots of facets i cant hope to understand but just the fundamental notion of the melting pot, bringing people in have the ambition and the drive too better themselves, better their fate, better their childrens fate and pay back to the country that welcomed them is fundamental to who i am and its critical america does not lose that. Rose and not only do well for themselves but for the country by creating jobs, inventing things and doing a whole range of other things. I think that just cannot be understated. Rose so you made your way to the university of illinois at urbana, champagne. Right. Rose were you there when andreessen was there . We overlapped by a couple years. Rose did you know him . I certainly knew of him very well. I think we overlap add couple New York Times a hot dog place that he and i used to frequent. Rose laughs but he worked at the National Center for computing applications and when the famous six left to start netscape, a bunch of us undergraduates were hired rapidly to replace the holes created and in that sense i literally followed in his footsteps and then after i graduated i followed them to palo alto. Rose it was mosaic was the first thing they did. Exactly right. At that time it was an amazing place to be and i i dont like the idea of luck but just because i feel like i should be shaping my own fate as much as possible but as far as having luck in my life other than being allowed to come to america, being on the university of illinois campus in 1993 through 1997 was just a dream come true for a Computer Scientist. It fundamentally reshaped me from somebody who thought of myself first and foremost as a scientist futuring a d. E. M. Ic to someone who thought theres no better way to be than create businesses. Be an entrepreneur. Thats what its about. Rose when did you get that . I can tell you the exact moment. I was sitting in a lab around midnight and this guy walked in, his name is Scott Banister, and his friend luke, all these guys are very early paypal mafia members and they walked in and said you seem to be here all the time writing code into the wee hours of the night. Why do you do this . I said i do it because its fun i love building things. They said you should come with us and well start a company and you can do things that matter. I thought what a foreign concept why not . Im going to be here anyway. And that was the pivoting moment. From that point on i never thought about becoming an academic. Rose so it wasnt just ideas for ideas sake it was ideas that can be implemented to make a difference and create something that has products and people and purpose. It went from building things for me to building things for others. Rose so you made your way to california. Uhhuh. Rose and what brought you to california. Probably the bester answer is why didnt you make it to chra ca sooner . Rose why didnt you make it to california sooner . So m an immigrant and i have a very immigrant family and they said if you do not graduate college it will kill the family. Rose you better get that bachelors degree. We had to haggle over the p. H. D. Or masters. Rose so it had to be a bachelors . So i got my bachelors in Computer Science and as soon as i could i packed up my belongings and left for california. But i got here primarily because as evidenced by andreessen and many people after him starting companies in Silicon Valley was the thing to do. Late 90s, just the fabric of the time, the place, the idea being a Computer Scientist and not building things for passion sake but to make the world a better place. To bring we all used the internet well before the web became sort of public domain, Public Knowledge but as we saw things like yahoo and netscape, it was just amazing and you had to be a part of it somehow and where do you go . I dont know Silicon Valley existed then it became the only place for me to be. Rose your story is interesting because its part of that fabric. Whether its an individual contribution you make. But you represent, i think, what it is that is the essence of there. Young people who do understand who wantnt to work crazy hours who are always looking for the smartest person and the best idea and to who want to do things that change the way people behave. Why what thigh buy, what they use, all of that. Thats why im interested in biography. So you meet out there and you two, how did you you came together, you knew each other. Much more pedestrian story. I was squatting at Scott Banisters apartment rose who is Scott Banister . Hes a brilliant, brilliant guy. He was the first board member of paypal, went on to start iron port require bid cisco for just under a billion dollars. He had everything, a very, very small apartment and a mattress and he didnt have air conditioning. So i spent time sneaking into free lectures at stanford. Just to stay cool. Summer of 89 8 was ridiculously hot. So id look up a seminar for this it was summer, so i would generally just chill and somebody said theres this young brilliant hedge Fund Currency trader you should get to know him. He was, at the time, i guess well known for some clever ideas around currency trading and he ran a very small hedge fund and i knew his name when i showed up looking far place to cool off i saw peter teal giving a lecture on currency trading. Well, i know practically know this guy, i should see him. So i went in, maybe nine other people or six other people in the room and i parked myself in a nap and i fed is its boring ill get to know these guys. I said hi, we should have breakfast. So we had breakfast the next day and he said what do you do . I said i start companies. And i showed up for a w a bagful of ideas and he said i like that one. Literally that one evolved into paypal. But it started theres more to this story. Conformity was your company . So there was no company. We started together. He originally was going to back one of my crazier security schemes and Computer Security and he thought it was cool and difficult and my background was inn security so i had some advantage and as we got to know each other a little bit better we hung out plenty and sort of liked each other plenty and fascination, their intellectual curiosities were similar and at some point i basically said i think im going to try to talk this guy into being the c. E. O. Of my company. And so i started it had slow campaign to talk him into becoming the c. E. O. Of my company and as he he eventually pretty quickly agreed and as we sort of evolveed as Business Partners he started pushing for whats a bigger vision, whats a bigger business model, whats a more interesting thing to do and we involved from security for hand held devices do audio use for hand held devices to a wallet that ran on a palm pilot, a very defunct technology and ultimately became paypal. Rose but at one time very promising technology. Oh, yeah. Interestingly enough, these days anybody who has a smart phone will tell you that its an indispensable technology. At the time there were maybe a grand total of one million palm pilots in existence and people were looking between saying why do you want to have a brick in your pocket. I had one. I had many rose so then elon musk comes in and he has excel . X x. Com. So he was building one of the very early online banks and we basically proceeded along parallel paths and then merged. Rose and paypal was, as i remember, went public pretty early 2002 . We originally filed in late 2001, in september 11. Rose this is about the time go ahead. Literally prevented us from going public. 2002 is when we went public. Right around valentines day. Rose who was there . Everybody makes a whole lot about the paypal and a half yoo and theres a famous Fortune Magazine picture and there you are, some of you some didnt come for whatever reason. Its aing by the group so pewter, you, elon jeremy. Steve chen. And chet hurley, the three guys. Rose if you had to describe the one quality you all shared, what would it be . Lets assume intelligence is given. Um we all knew we wanted to start companies. We came to entrepreneurship from different parts in our lives but i think all of us were either starting this company and peter and elon and i were starting this company and everyone else knew that this was basically their last job. They were going to do their own thing next and this was training ground. The. Rose ill just do this and then ill do my own thing and ill make money and do Something Else. I think thats what you think then but when you wake up after the pilot money part you kind of go the only thing i want to do is more of this. Rose exactly thats such an interesting process. Paypal created you guys, sell it to ebay and its a very successful acquisition for ebay and most of you left. There was like, boom, explosion out of there. Uhhuh. Rose was the drive at that time to create companies and make a lot of money . Or simply create Successful Companies . The here is i can do it. Theres a lot of that. I think it is untrue to claim that we never counted any dollars. Not at all. I think as a capitalist rose it wasnt to go out well, maybe it was. Tell me, you wanted to buy yachts and planes and 17 homes and fancy jewelry and clothes. No, i dont think any one of us ever measured our success in terms of the number yachts. I think it was all about making an impact and leveraging the success into bigger better things. Rose so you sell paypal and you leave. This should be the best time of your life it was the worst time of my life. Ros why . I had spent so much time being very stressed and working very hard that the vacuum of not having to work, not having the drive i was always overbooked there was 10 hours to do 20 hours worth of things. I would wake up and say i have 12 hours and i can read some magazines. It was terrible. It was a very, very depressive time and my now wife basically kicked me out of the house and said go start a company. Rose this is nellie saying get the hell out of here you can drive yourself crazy but youre not going to drive me crazy i think i was driving both of us pretty far up the wall. Fortunately i got better. Rose so what did you do . You started an incubator . Yes, so in part driven by my wifes planning out that im much happier when im working, well, i dont know what im going to go on next. Rose and she is, too. She said go rent an office and get out of here and think about what you really want to do. Organize yourself around going to a place of work and think and invent, thats what you do best. And i did. But im better in a group of people than alone. So i set up this Little Office and we my friends and i would get together and brainstorm what could be and be as big and interesting as possible. From those brainstorms, thats when slide was founded that i ultimately ran and got acquired by google and yelp was created there. Its definitely it was a great time, very unstructured but it was a year of creativity and it was a when you build these companies are you always assuming you will sell them or is it going to be like facebook . I very rarely in fact never think of what is the terminal point, what does the exit strategy look like . I dont like doing that because youre inherently limiting the outcome. Youre always assuming how its going to end. Ideally i love the notion of a forever company. Rose a forever company . Yeah. Theres not that many of those but the ones that exist are pretty impressive. Rose you know, they always say some companies are better if the founder stays with it. Its good. Steve jobs and apple, you think of larry and sergei at google, you think of mark at facebook. They add something and sometimes they need talent to come in to do certain kinds of things in terms of management. But in the end their presence makes a difference. I think so. I fundamentally agree with that. I think the this is a borrowed concept but theres a real notion of the king d. N. A. The founder of the Company Makes sure the d. N. A. Does not decay. Rose and thats its always changing. You never rest on your laurels. Do you know anybody who has been had all the qualities you have and everybody we might mention in this conversation but who has said theres Something Else i want to do. Now i know a couple of people who went into foundations, i can even think about bill, he spent a lot of time on his foundation. But to walk away from it it seems to me the majority impression i have is theyre like you. I think my guess that what happens is that you find a passion for everyday and you wake up in the morning and you say the reason i get out of bed, the reason i exist is for this. And for a lot of us, maybe for as long as we live, that passion is fundamentally from the business were building, the impact on the customers we ear creating. For some, like pierre, when it comes to a higher calling, i can leverage this success to make the world a better place. Bill gates is another example. I think of someone who took a much longer time, he ran a company thats extraordinarily successful but ultimately walked away from it to cure the world literally. Which is amazing. Sy hope to do Something Like that one day. But im pretty business focused for now. Rose you dont even know when you might not be business focused. I do not know. Theres nothing else thats a magnet for you at this point even though im sure you have philanthropic causes that you contribute to but nothing says get the hell out of dodge and go do Something Else. The finer point on it is that there are many interests i have that. So i used to be too young to care about health care and these days i care about health care a lot. And in many different ways, but the tool i know how to leverage most and best to fix things, to make things to make the world a better place are through business. I dont know yet and i may never understand how the do this through charitable interests beyond donating doing things with my own hands and what i understand how the do really well. And ive learned how to do it through business and im excited to do that everyday. Rose among the paypal mafia theres peter. Peter is often called the don of the mafia and youre often called the con singh lee areary of the mafia. I like that rose youve heard that before, too. I have. Rose how old are you now . I just turned 38. Rose 38. When you look at what youre go