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Max Levchin Bio, Founder of PayPal

Born in 1975 in Kiev, Max Levchin moved to Chicago in 1991, where he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earning his Bachelor's degree in computer science. After graduation he founded several companies that developed internet tools, including Fieldlink, a company that restructured to become Confinity. Confinity was concerned with cryptography and with managing the beamed payments from Palm Pilots; in March 2000, it merged with financial services company X.com. Both companies included email payments as a feature of their services, and this would be the focus of the new merged company, PayPal.

PayPal was one of the first companies to use a "human verification system" by making users enter numbers from a blurry picture, a system now commonplace online; they may have been the first to develop the idea of such a system, and Levchin was the co-creator of their implementation of it. The skyrocketing popularity of online auction site eBay created a need for online payment systems, and especially for individuals without merchant accounts with credit companies to be able to accept payments without depending on checks sent through the mail. PayPal went public in late 2001, and was acquired by eBay a year later for $1.5 billion, having soundly defeated Billpoint, the eBay-owned PayPal alternative. Most other PayPal competitors went out of business not long after eBay's acquisition; many of those that remain tend to offer only some of PayPal's services, keeping them out of head to head competition.

With his PayPal co-founded Peter Thiel, Levchin co-produced the movie Thank You For Smoking. He also founded the media-sharing service Slide and the social networking/review site Yelp.

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