emily: founder, ceo, mad scientist. max levchin is one of silicon valley's most iconic entrepreneurs. he has played a role in some of tech lost biggest successes, from yahoo! to yelp. today, you can find him in his innovation lab, tackling issues like fertility, health care, and banking. many years ago, max levchin had no country to call home. he fled the soviet union, and ever an entrepreneur, built a new life in america. joining me today is paypal

cofounder, max levchin. thanks for joining us. max levchin: thank you for inviting me. emily: you were born in the ukraine. how much of a connection do you still feel? max levchin: anytime i am told -- oh, you are russian, i feel the need to say no, i am a jew who was born in ukraine. it is still a part of what defined me. on occasion, i miss it. emily: what do you miss? max levchin: the people are very genuine. emily: what would you be doing if you were still there today? max levchin: probably some form of coding. i probably would have started a company. emily: have you been following what has been going on their recently? are you worried about a civil war?

max levchin: yes, i am very worried. as an engineer, i always think through a solution -- it is not obvious that there is one. it seems to be at least somewhat contained, but it is horrifying. emily: how does that affect you? max levchin: i don't feel like i can help the situation. a shot of cold water in a sheltered, beautiful place to try and change the world. emily: do you worry it could escalate into another cold war? max levchin: i think the cold war was largely a product of mistrust and disinformation, the lack of clarity between people. and between social media and the internet, that is not possible today. i think the conflicts are unearthed very quickly.

we seem to be frequently resolve it with bullets, but there are less long-term passive aggressive interactions between states. emily: having lived there and here, who is to blame for the frostiness? max levchin: i feel like there is always -- we are the great democracy, we should be leading more. emily: you spend your days thinking about how to solve big problems. do you ever feel guilty for not trying to solve those problems there, and you are here instead? max levchin: i am a big believer in working to exhaustion every day. as far as my skills are concerned, i know how to do people, how to inspire and engage. emily: how does being an

immigrant impact what you do? max levchin: it impacts everything. in part because we come here with nothing to lose. we know that if we don't do it, no one else will give it to us. we work hard. we are used to discrimination, so we cast a wider net when we look for people to collaborate with. we don't take anything for granted. emily: do you feel discriminated against? max levchin: no, never. everything i have, i owe to the fact that the u.s. and the silicon valley is fundamentally pro-immigrant. my politics -- whatever it is, whatever i have contributed, i

very much open back to the u.s. i think we should be doing more. emily: tell me about your parents. max levchin: i grew up in a soviet scientist family. my entire family and generation, everyone but my dad -- emily: what was your father? max levchin: he was originally a chemist, but one day he became a writer. emily: who do you take after? max levchin: i took very much after my grandmother. she was in her 60's when she decided the family would be better served if we moved across the ocean. she single-handedly engineered the exodus of the family and brought us out here. all the while, she struggled with breast cancer throughout that entire time.

on her deathbed i asked, how did you pull it off? she said, things had to be done. emily: when you were very young, your parents were told you were going to die multiple times. what was wrong? max levchin: the soviet union -- a land untouched by modern medicine. i had some sort of a respiratory disease. bronchitis, some other stuff. every time i would breathe into a tube -- oh, the lung capacity -- any minute now you are going to pass out. my mom and grandma were like, well, that is unacceptable. do 100 push-ups, expand your lung capacity. i played a woodwind instrument. i somehow survived past the point where the doctors say i wouldn't survive.

i was pretty close to chernobyl. emily: you were there when chernobyl happened. max levchin: pretty close, within 90 miles. a couple weeks after it happened, it became giant. when it happened, it was a very sunny day. emily: and you escaped. max levchin: my parents found out through a friend of a friend in the government that something really awful happened. because i had a family full of physicists, nuclear power station accidents are no joke. she packed me and my younger brother onto a train and sent us off the next morning. you would get tested as you were coming off the train, a homemade

geiger counter. one of my feet was setting off a geiger counter. people were saying, we may have to cut off his foot. beeping means he's radioactive. apparently there was a rose thorn on the bottom of my sneaker. it was a pan-am flight. we were going to border control of russian soldiers. they said, you won't be allowed to come back -- my grandmother said, yes, we know. we were leaving the country with $700. emily: by the time you got here, the soviet union collapsed. max levchin: my passport was a passport to no country. emily: the paypal story is sort of long and legend. ♪

emily: you came to silicon valley with no job, no money, no real network except that you went to the same school -- why did you come here? max levchin: i started four companies on campus. every time we would fail, which we consistently did, the founding team would drop out, and up and go to this magical place where even though we failed, we could succeed. emily: the promised land. paypal is actually your fifth company. what happened to the first four? max levchin: varying degrees of hope-crushing failure. the one before paypal was almost not quite dead. emily: how did paypal get started? max levchin: it was really hot.

pretty brutal. i would go to stanford and sneak into summer lectures. i snuck into one because i recognized the name of the guy doing the guest lecture. he was doing a lecture on currency trading. it turned out to be a really small class. i just chatted him up afterwards. i was definitely not there to learn about currency trading, i was there to sleep and get air-conditioning. he was a really smart guy. he said, i'm going to start a company. i said, we should have breakfast. how about tomorrow morning? we met, and he had the red white and blue shake. we talked about companies.

emily: the paypal story is sort of long and legend. looking back, was selling at the right thing? max levchin: the team was very tired. probably the right call. on the emotional front, it was very difficult. on the business front, the right thing. emily: what was difficult? max levchin: it was your baby. this gamely teenager. emily: after you sold paypal, you could have retired. you didn't. i know it was a hard time for you. max levchin: turns out i am much happier when i am working. and i am not working i am a bummer. i bum people out. emily: so you started -- max levchin: i started a bunch of things. as i found out, not the thing i deeply cared about. i was not in love, but ultimately was not nearly as successful. strictly because the products

didn't get me out of bed. emily: to google, $182 million, what was it like working at a company that you didn't start? max levchin: i have never worked for anyone before. i was very close to the very top of that company at a founder level. they are as brilliant, they are awesome. it was rewarding intellectually, it was fun. it felt a little bit unreal, like i was in a later gear than i should be. i ultimately missed that, being in a higher gear. emily: let's talk about your innovation lab, where you are the mad scientist. max levchin: i am not that mad. it is awesome.

it is basically the intellectual outlet for everything that comes up in my overactive brain. it is the consolidation of all my intellectual activity, investing activity, startup activity, coding, hacking, prototyping -- anytime i have a wacky idea, i can gather the troops and say, we are going to build something crazy. it is a bit of a tyrannical democracy where lots of people are excited. when we have an idea, we start sketching something on the wall. we say, it is amazing, no one is doing it. we start a company. it is like a generator, a factory for projecting companies. emily: this is an app that you hope will help women get

pregnant. max levchin: it is. we are probably -- we're probably going to have 50,000 confirmed pregnancies by the end of the year. emily: you are doing some creative things that you hope will help revolutionize health care. max levchin: we are helping women conceive naturally, or stay out of conception if that is their goal, or helping them carry healthy babies to term across any form of health care. the number one cost is complicated pregnancy. they can cost upwards of $100,000. just carrying multiple babies to term is an incredible expense that employers bear. it has been the source of some controversy. aol was the last one to talk about million-dollar babies that are too expensive. i don't think it is in any way

reasonable, but if we can prevent those costs by addressing the cause early, that is a lot of money saved, and a business model. emily: let's talk about where you are spending most of your time, trying to become the modern bank. max levchin: it is going really well. the best question to ask is your atm is literally a green screen. if you are buying something online and you don't want to put your credit card online, we will let you split your purchase into several monthly payments. emily: will there be an affirm score? max levchin: there already is. we are helping to push credit scoring and underwriting into the 21st century. emily: you spend a lot of time thinking about big problems that you can solve and you have been

pretty outspoken about the lack of -- why aren't you working on flying cars and rocket ships? max levchin: i try to find places where i can add value. i don't know much about jet propulsion and engines. i am not sure rocket ships are my forte. i really like math. my idea of a good time, until very recently when i had kids, was still curling up with a book on probability theory. applying that passion and that love for numbers, to places where numbers can make a huge difference, such as consumer finance, health care. emily: you mentioned your kids. you are very passionate about your work and your hobbies. what kind of parent are you? max levchin: i hope i am a good parent.

my number one worry these days is if i am as good a father as i can be. my wife has now determined that not only am i a nerd, my son is a nerd. i am very happy about that. he is a four-year-old that loves arduino. he already knows how to code. he is four and a half. he likes playing blinking light games. emily: how much phase do you have that yahoo! can be turned around and that marissa is the one to do it? max levchin: i have lots of faith in marissa ♪

emily: if you could master one skill that you haven't mastered yet, what would it be? max levchin: parenting. emily: what would you title your autobiography? max levchin: "drive."

i am not sure that is a good title, but one of the things i keep on my back as i age, i always come back to where did it all begin. what is the one thing that makes me who i am? i am 100% sure it is drive. that i got from my grandmother. i remember thinking to myself, she is 5'1", that is the one thing i have to pick up from her -- the drive to succeed is unstoppable. emily: what did you do with your first big paycheck? max levchin: nothing. i remember the day i earned my first million dollars. i was in a shower. someone else's apartment. i just didn't have time to get my own apartment. i thought to myself, remember the day -- you are a twentysomething millionaire. you should probably go out and

do something to commemorate it, do something nice for yourself. emily: you have been on the yahoo! board for how long? max levchin: couple years. emily: how much faith do you still have that yahoo! can be turned around and that marissa is the one to do it? max levchin: i have lots of faith and marissa. she has the drive. she is probably, pretty certainly a harder working person than i am. emily: there are obviously not enough women in high places, especially in technology. as someone who likes to solve problems, how can that problem be solved? max levchin: i am going to solve it personally for one woman by making sure that my daughter is as technologically and nerd-enabled as possible. it has to start really early. the problem is that you can't

just slam dunk, everybody hire more girls. you have to begin when they are babies. you have to make sure they are exposed to everything and anything they are told they can't do. that is one weird thing that the soviet union got right. when i was going up, the idea of girls, boys being equivalently intellectually gifted -- it was not important by the government. of course girls are smart, boys are smart, it was never an issue. the fact that my grandmother was a double phd in astronomy wasn't that big of a deal. here it is -- how did you do it? emily: how do you want to be remembered? max levchin: that i was around or at least helpful. emily: thank you for joining us today. great to have you. ♪

♪ >> he's a modern-day silicon valley renegade. chamath palihapitiya is unafraid of breaking the conventional rules, vowing to take bigger risks, solve the bigger problems, and make money big-time. from putting chips in our clothes to starting a university. he is best known for supercharging facebook from 50 million users to 750 million users. but the tech growth legend started on the likely path on the countrip