
Max Levchin's Early PayPal Photos - stevenj
http://levchin.com/paypal-slideshow/1.html
======
strlen
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.

~~~
palish
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.)

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hvs
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.

~~~
a1k0n
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.

~~~
relix
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.

~~~
a1k0n
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.

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dr_
Why didn't he use Slide to post these?

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ck2
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).

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wuster
Hey I work for these people! =P

~~~
mohsen
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.

~~~
sorbus
It adds no value to the discussion.

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

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speedracr
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> .

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

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

~~~
zabraxias
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.

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jodrellblank
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.

~~~
peterquest
sounds pretty web 3.0 to me.

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

~~~
freshfunk
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

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

[http://yourforum.gr/InvisionBoard/lofiversion/index.php?t463...](http://yourforum.gr/InvisionBoard/lofiversion/index.php?t46341.html)

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

