Entrepreneurial wizards Max Levchin: Startups should try more subversive projects

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Editor's note: Max Levchin is an entrepreneurial genius, and his founder, Slide, was bought by Google in 2010 with 200 million dollars, and he became a member of Google. In addition to slide, he also co-founded the Paypal,linkedin,youtube,yelp,yammer,spacex. In 2011, slide services were shut down by Google, and Levchin left Google as an angel investor. Recently, foreign media Marvell review an interview with him (Max Levchin has won the TR2002 year "annual Creators" award) to explore how entrepreneurs innovate. Levchin says he wants to see more startups doing something more subversive.

Levchin recently wrote a book with PayPal founder Peter Thiel and former chess champion Garry Kasparov, named Blueprint (Blueprint). The book discusses why startups try to do something more challenging and how to solve the problems that will come with it. Levchin says there are too many talented people working for companies with no future prospects and doing things that are not disruptive.

TR: What do you think of today's entrepreneurial culture?

Levchin: I think our founders should set higher goals. At the moment, some of the entrepreneurs I've come into contact with have little ambition, they just want to start a company and wait to be bought by a big company. The purchase price, though not the most important measure, can at least reflect the size of a start-up and its future.

TR: What's the downside of an entrepreneur's ultimate goal of being acquired?

Levchin: Then you can't expect a truly revolutionary or groundbreaking company. In the case of Silicon Valley, it is not good to have more and more companies producing similar products.

TR: What do you think of the great innovations of recent years, such as smartphones and social media?

Levchin: There are a lot of disruptive technologies in these two industries. It can be seen that the pace of human innovation has not stopped. But at the same time, there is a lot of money and money being wasted on projects that have not been successful. And the immediate priority is to get those talented engineers to use their resources.

For example, while some entrepreneurs are looking to invest in their projects to potential investors, his story may sound like this: "I'm looking for a good video app, I'm going to replicate it, but my app will be cheaper ..." Under normal circumstances, investors should not give him half a dime, why not develop some new, interesting things?

But in fact, in Silicon Valley, many of these startups have been invested in recent years, leading to more companies of the same kind, who don't like the pie in the sky? Innovation is a thing.

TR: In many ways, slide seems to belong to such companies. Do you think the time spent on slide is a waste?

Levchin:slide actually has some innovation, but the final development results are indeed unexpected. And the lesson I've learned is that I should focus on what I'm good at--science--instead of thinking about changing the world through technology that I don't do.

TR: What kinds of startups have you ever invested in that you call "disruptive"? For instance.

Levchin:kaggle (Predictive modeling and analysis competition platform, known as the 2012 years of the most noteworthy cloud computing platform.) Any enterprise that needs to solve the problem of data analysis can publish the relevant data on the Kaggle to offer a reward. Anyone can participate in and propose their own solutions, the entire competition through the bulletin board to show the contestants in real-time rankings, the amount of money from 1000 to 3 million dollars. The platform, in collaboration with several well-known agencies such as NASA, has already made a number of breakthrough successes, including Microsoft's Kinect product Improvement Program. )

Via Technologyreview