Max Levchin fascination with encryption started when he was a teenager in Kiev, Ukraine and continued as he immigrated to the United States.
He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and earned Bachelor of Computer Science. In late 1998, not two years out of college, he drew on his passion to co-found (along with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk) PayPal.
The company went through several ideas, including cryptography software and a service for transmitting money via PDAs, before finding its niche as a web-based payment system.
Levchin batted fraudsters before taking the company public in 2002.
In those days, it was called as Confinity. The aim of the company was to allow flow of money from one country to another, free from government controls.
It became so popular that the hugely successful online auction site eBay bought over PayPal in 2002 for USD$1.5 billion.
Max Levchin and PayPal
