The Soul of the Serial Entrepreneur

Last week I met a really special person. His name is Max Levchin and he was one of the founders of Paypal. At the age of 27, he sold the business to eBay for over a billion dollars. But Max didn’t buy a huge yacht and sail around the world; he rented some space in San Francisco and started an incubator for other new business.

Max Levchin

Since then, his incubator has turned out the fabulously popular review service yelp and also slide.com. After I first met Max, I found a couple of stories about Max and the “Paypal Mafia” that literally blew me away:

“The eBay deal, remarkable only because it happened in the bleakness of 2002, wasn’t so much an exit as an explosion. Most of PayPal’s key employees left eBay, but they stayed in touch. They even have a name for themselves: the PayPal mafia. And the mafiosi have been busy.

During the past five years they’ve been furiously building things – investment firms, philanthropies, solar-power companies, an electric-car maker, a firm that aims to colonize Mars, and of course a slew of Internet companies. It’s amazing how many hot web properties can trace their ancestries to PayPal.

Besides Facebook and Slide, there’s Yelp, Digg, and YouTube. Thiel and Levchin, the don and consigliere of the mafia, figure that all told, there are dozens of enterprises worth a total of roughly $30 billion – and that value is growing rapidly, as evidenced by Thiel’s good fortune with Facebook.”

These guys turn out billion dollar businesses like cotton candy.

Guys like Max are the life blood of the US Economy. Their big ideas and grand execution plays create huge new employers that drive great careers and send trainloads of tax money to Washington DC.

I really think this week’s episode of The Career Mechanic nails this critical component to the US economy.

It is my tribute, of sorts, to the soul of the serial entrepreneur.

This Week’s Career Mechanic — The Soul of the Serial Entrepreneur
Click HERE to Listen

The Wall Street Journal has finally cried foul to Obama’s claim that “saving” jobs is the same as creating them. And people everywhere are starting to point out that “The Stimulus” is not creating any new jobs at all. Unemployment has hit 9.4% and doesn’t look like it will be slowing down soon. But there is still hope as long as we have Entrepreneurs in America. This week, Dave and his guests will look inside the soul of the entrepreneur. Dave will be joined by venture capitalist Bob Fleming, entrepreneur and author Jon Yates, and Max Levchin — the brilliant young entrepreneur who cofounded Paypal and sold it to eBay for billions.