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126 lines
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Subject: InfoWorld profile of Max Levchin
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From: Rohit Khare <khare@alumni.caltech.edu>
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Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2002 14:35:48 -0700
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Congrats, in the end...
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> "If they didn't have Max, they might have succumbed, because PayPal was
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> susceptible to fraud and money laundering, and Max tightened them up,"
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http://www.infoworld.com/articles/ct/xml/02/09/02/020902ctspotlight.xml
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Secure and at ease
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By<EFBFBD>Jack Mccarthy
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August 30, 2002 1:01 pm PT
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MAX LEVCHIN'S FASCINATION with encryption started when he was a teenager
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in Kiev, Ukraine, and continued as he immigrated to the United States
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where he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In
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late 1998, not two years out of college, he drew on his passion to
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co-found PayPal, the online payment system that has since attracted tens
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of millions of users and gained the reputation as the premier Internet
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transaction processor. Now online auction house eBay has acquired his
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company for a king's ransom.
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Not bad for a 27-year-old kid from Ukraine.
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A programmer since he was 10 years old, Levchin and his family moved to
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Chicago in 1991, and since then he has pursued security as if on a
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mission. He created a startup right out of college to build secure
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passwords for Palm Pilots. He met Peter Thiel, and the two founded
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PayPal to target online payment security. Thiel is now CEO of the
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company.
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"This company was founded on the notion of security value," Levchin
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says. "Peter Thiel and I shared that vision from the very beginning."
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Thiel concentrates on company business matters, whereas Levchin remains
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focused on security, which he says is the key to the company's good
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fortune.
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"I explain [PayPal] as a security company posing as a transaction
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processor," Levchin says. "We spend a lot of time designing security so
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it doesn't step on the toes of convenience and not the other way around.
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The trade-off is fundamental."
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Mountain View, Calif.-based PayPal allows businesses and consumers with
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e-mail addresses to send and receive payments via the Internet,
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accepting credit card or bank account payments for purchases. The
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service extends to 38 countries, with more than 17 million users and
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more than 3 million business accounts.
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Most of PayPal's users are participants in online auctions, which led
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PayPal to be closely linked with eBay, the leading Web auction site.
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Although they were once rivals, the relationship between the two
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companies resulted July 8 in eBay's tentative $1.5 billion acquisition
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of PayPal. The agreement is subject to regulatory review.
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Levchin says he will stay at PayPal as it merges with eBay. "There are
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areas of synergy and collaboration we can explore."
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Although security is a dominant feature for PayPal, the company's
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ability to carry out open communications among the millions of
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participants fits the growing Web services model, Levchin says.
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"This is a service that links people and allows them to send messages to
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one another," he says. Levchin is a panelist at InfoWorld's
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Next-Generation Web Services II conference Sept. 20
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PayPal, as an online payment system, is a natural target for fraud. And
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Levchin has almost singlehandedly saved the company from thieves bent on
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exploiting the system, says Avivah Litan, a vice president and analyst
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covering financial services at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner.
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"If they didn't have Max, they might have succumbed, because PayPal was
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susceptible to fraud and money laundering, and Max tightened them up,"
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Litan says.
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To combat criminals, Levchin established "Igor," an antifraud program
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that monitors transactions and warns of suspicious accounts. Levchin
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says building security and antifraud systems is a job he relishes. "The
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work I do is important to PayPal and to consumers in general because the
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work makes Internet shopping safe. It's the view that ecommerce has
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arrived."
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