One day in 1998, Thiel was guest lecturing about currency trading at Stanford when a young Ukrainian engineer named Max Levchin sneaked in to, as he told me, “sleep and get some air-conditioning.” Instead, he wound up listening. At the end of class, Levchin introduced himself to Thiel and mentioned that he wanted to start a company. He had already started four that had failed, but he wasn’t about to give up. The next day, the two men had breakfast and hatched the idea for PayPal over a Hobee’s “Red, White, and Blue” smoothie. Suddenly a former securities lawyer with no technical background was
...more
