1 Articles for 'Max Levchin'

  1. 2008/04/16 Conversation with Slide.com CEO Max Levchin (2)

Conversation with Slide.com CEO Max Levchin

Other | 2008/04/16 00:12 | Web 2.0 Asia
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Though not that widely known in Asia, Max Levchin is actually a Silicon Valley celebrity entrepreneur. Originally from Ukraines, Max was the co-founder and CTO of Paypal. He's now running his own shop, Slide.com. Slide is essentially a hosted photo slideshow service, but perhaps a more meaningful fact is that it's grown to become one of the largest widget service providers in the world now. Slide recently received funding ($50m) at a rumored valuation of over $500m. Max was also recently featured on the New York Times.

The meeting was set up by Jung J. Hwang, a VC at Blue Run Ventures (Blue Run Ventures invested in Slide.) Max is currently visiting Korea to learn the Korean/Asian market. It's an exploratory trip, I guess.

I showed our product to Max and he liked it - though he didn't sugarcoat on anything (I like that) and said plainly that in the US, there's a very good blog product in Wordpress, and therefore our product, despite kicking some ass in the Korean market, might have difficulty breaking into the US market. I totally agree - that's why we're building a new, killer blog serivce now. I've been spearheading this project myself for the past several months and I can tell you that this one will just rock.

Fitting his technical background, we engaged in some serious techical discussions during the meeting. We talked about open social, about which Max wasn't too excited. He believed the whole open social thing, despite being a noble concept, is probably too early and might potentially slow down innovation for those who try to embrace it in the early stage. Hey, it's a problem that even Google has some difficulty solving anyway, says Max.

Overall, it was great to meet Max in person and had a chance to talk about technology with him. Funny that on the same day, I encountered this great article by another Ukrainian, Alex Iskold: The American Dream. Well, they must put something in the water there in Ukraines.
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