Max Levchin

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Max Levchin (b. 1975) is a computer scientist and entrepreneur widely known as co-founder (with Peter Thiel) and former Chief technology officer of PayPal.

Originally from Kiev, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), he moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1991. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997 and co-founded two companies that made Internet-tools, NetMeridian Software and SponsorNet New Media. In 1998, he founded Fieldlink with John Bernard Powers, which was later restructured to become Confinity and eventually PayPal.

PayPal went public in February 2002, and was subsequently acquired by eBay. His 2.3% stake in PayPal was worth approximately $34 million at the time of the acquisition ^[1]. He is primarily known for his contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts [1] and is also the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA.

In 2004, Levchin founded Slide [2], a personal media-sharing service.

He also helped start Yelp, an online social networking and review service.

Levchin was an executive producer for the movie Thank You For Smoking.