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This article was taken from the June 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Glow, a smartphone app that Max Levchin launched last August, helps women track their fertility to optimise their chances of conceiving. "It's an existential need," he says when we meet at Munich's DLD conference in January, and one that directly affected his Glow cofounder Mike Huang. "I've seen what infertility does to a family -- it's a pretty -important problem to solve," says Levchin. So Glow tracks temperature, hormones and other data points to tell users when they should have sex. "We're now in the thousands of confirmed pregnancies," says Levchin, 38, who cofounded PayPal with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and served as its CTO. "But much as I'd like to tell you a story, the creation myth for Glow is very analytical: we arrived at infertility after looking at all the problems in healthcare, to see where we could develop data-driven quantified-self-enabled analytical insurance."
Glow has a non-profit insurance element called Glow First: couples can pay $50 (£30) a month, and if they don't conceive within ten months, the funds pooled from other couples help pay for their fertility treatment. The company plans to extend its remit to more general health -- part of his obsession, as a tracker of his own physical metrics, to use data to prevent illness. "We could provide cheaper, better health insurance not by figuring out who's going to get sick and who's not, but by trading off correction for prevention," he says. "Most people end up in hospital with a cardiac event because they don't track this information. But what if your connected Wi-Fi scales were telling your doctor, 'Hey, this guy is gaining weight very rapidly, this is probably oedema'?
Rather than suffer and have to pay $10,000 on ER admission, you could take a blood thinner."
Levchin is busy - and by his own data analytics, Glow (based in Shanghai, but with an office in San Francisco) takes around ten to 20 per cent of his time. He is also chairman of Yelp and Kaggle, on the boards of Yahoo!, Evernote and Quid among others, and a prolific investor in startups including Pinterest, Stripe, Kaggle, Misfit Wearables, SmartThings and AngelList. After PayPal, he built and sold Slide to Google in August 2010 for $182 million; the following year he started a business called HVF (Hard Valuable Fun) that sought opportunities in data analytics (the credit business Affirm is a significant spin-off; Levchin serves as CEO, "taking 75 per cent of my time"). "The thread through everything I've done is that I'm passionate about data," he says. "At my first startup [SponsorNet New Media] I had an epiphany when I discovered SQL. Data is increasing super-exponentially, everything is streaming out this information, and we will always lack the capacity to understand it. PayPal was about capturing transactional data, preventing fraud, underwriting risk; Affirm is basically that take two. We have a whole portfolio of investments
[about 100] where we bet on data and people who can make sense of it: Pinterest to me is a data play, a self-selected depository of people's tastes over time. It's probably the most valuable marketing database of all time."
He's still regularly in touch with the super-successful "PayPal mafia" ("I had dinner with Reid [Hoffman] in Menlo Park a week ago, and Elon [Musk] randomly walked up and joined the dinner"). But why have PayPal alumni created so many great companies, from YouTube to Yammer? "Everyone there had already started a company or was working on one well before PayPal," Levchin says. "We had this very high capacity for self-starting, innovation, risk-taking. The people we hired were similarly predisposed -- frequently resulting in interesting personality clashes. It wasn't all peaches and cream." Even now, Levchin has a data-led strategy for recruiting outstanding talent: "It's very simple. There are people that I consider to be aware, and people I consider to be unaware. Unaware people are not as animated, not as alive; but in even the most introverted aware people, you can tell by their muscle twitches, the way they look at the floor, they're just soaking up any input that's available and using the time to learn. If you see someone with a permanent spark in their eye, who is engaged, hungry for any bit of knowledge -- that's a really good predictor of an excellent employee. They're curious because they don't really believe the traditional rules. They secretly believe they might be smarter than anyone else."
Levchin was born in Kiev, and came to the US in 1991 under political asylum. "What's great about being an immigrant is you have nothing to lose -- you have the freedom to be anything you want," he says. "I failed time and time again, and it had almost no negative intellectual impact. There's no downside: if you win, you can win big; if you lose, there's nothing to lose. My advice to young entrepreneurs is always, if you're going to take a risk, do it young -- you have no savings, house, cars, no real losses to mope over. Just take a risk and see what happens."
But Levchin admits to a secret weapon that he thanks for his disruptive mindset: Frima Lukatskaya, his Ukrainian maternal grandmother. "She was this amazing 4ft-8in woman who was diagnosed with very aggressive breast cancer the year I was born," he recalls. "She was working on her second PhD in astrophysics, under the Soviet regime, while being Jewish. If you stack the odds against you, you get her. She basically said, 'I can't die. I have my grandson here.' So she willed herself to live for another 25 years. "She was responsible for extracting the family from the Soviet Union and moving us to America. I had this living example of someone who'd never surrender under any circumstances. I couldn't imagine letting her down. I started a computer-sciences scholarship at my university [University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign] that was going to be called something bland. But I decided that one test for the scholarship would be people having to pronounce her name.
So it's in her name. And people have to remember to spell Frima Lukatskaya correctly."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
