Max Levchin on how Peter Thiel reacted to losing his entire investment in his co-founder’s startup

I was certain that Luke and Peter would not get along because Luke had just lost all the money. Peter invested in a startup, and I was like, what's that startup? Smart Cal. Of course, Smart Cal. It was a calendar. Remember the whole wave of calendar companies? It was one of those. I didn't work for much for anything as far as I remember, but I remember hanging out in his office and kind of watching how a startup was shutting down. It was really sad. So as lukewarm down SmartCal, I told Peter, kind of with trepidation, hey, but I never had investors up until this point, so I was really not familiar with this relationship you have with your investors if you lost their money. So I was telling Peter, hey, so Luke is a really bright dude. He's really worth trying to maybe work with again. I understand, Smart Cal. You must. He's like, oh, of course, of course, yes. I should have thought it was myself like, oh, so you're not pissed at. He's like, no, no, no. He's brilliant. And so he recruited Luke while I went back to Illinois and recruited the two brightest kids I knew in college. So the first. First founding crew of PayPal was Peter and I, Luke and Kenny on the business side, and this guy, Russ Simmons, and another guy named Yupan Upan was the first engineer at YouTube. Russ Simmons was co founder and CTO of Yelp, which was one of the ways I got involved with that's. The makings of Paper Mafia are in that list.