Bio
Max Levchin
Max Rafael Levchin is a Ukrainian-born computer scientist and entrepreneur widely known as co-founder and former chief technology officer of PayPal.
Originally from Kiev, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), he moved to the United States with his family, under a political asylum, and settled in Chicago, Illinois in 1991. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997 and co-founded two companies that made Internet-tools, NetMeridian Software and SponsorNet New Media. In 1998, he founded Fieldlink with John Bernard Powers (who left the company shortly thereafter) and Peter Thiel. After changing the company name to Confinity, they developed a popular payment product known as PayPal. After a merger with another company, X.com, the combined entity was renamed PayPal Inc.
In 2004, Levchin founded Slide, a personal media-sharing service for social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Slide was sold to Google in August 2010 for $182 Million and, on August 25, Levchin was named Google's newest Vice President of Engineering.
Brad Stone
Brad Stone is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.
Peter Thiel
American entrepreneur, hedge fund manager, and venture capitalist. With Max Levchin, Thiel co-founded PayPal and was its CEO. He currently serves as president of Clarium Capital Management LLC, a global macro hedge fund with more than $6 billion under management, and a managing partner in The Founders Fund, a $275 million under management venture capital fund he launched with Ken Howery and Luke Nosek in 2005. He was an early investor in Facebook, the popular social-networking site, and sits on the company's Board of Directors.
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
- investment
Process of exchanging income for an asset that is expected to produce earnings at a later time. An investor refrains from consumption in the present in hopes of a greater return in the future. Investment may be influenced by rates of interest, with the rate of investment rising as interest rates fall, but other factors more difficult to measure may also be important—for example, the business community's expectations about future demand and profit, technical changes in production methods, and expected relative costs of labour and capital. Investment cannot occur without saving, which provides funding. Because investment increases an economy's capacity to produce, it is a factor contributing to economic growth.
- investment on britannica.com
© 2010 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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