PayPal cofounder Max Levchin: “Brilliant people have extreme personalities more often than not”

At PayPal, we had extreme cast of characters. We had sort of giants of intellect like Peter and lots of other people like that who were just outlier, crazy, like a lot of the times. And they would have these outlandish ideas, and yet all of us respected each other deeply. We would hear the crazy idea of the day, like, all right, you're a total nut job, but I'm going to take you entirely seriously because you're brilliant and I've seen you be right about things that others just couldn't conceive of. And so we're going to go do or at least explore the thing you're proposing to do. When I ran Slide, one of my initial ideas was, you know, the rollercoaster was a lot, and part of it was due to the extreme personality. That was fun when I was 23, but now that I'm 33, maybe I can just tamp it down a little bit. And it turns out that really brilliant people actually have extreme personalities more often than not. I built the original teams of Slide to have much more of a collegial, friendly, warm home like feel, which made for a great place to be when things were going well. But when things are not going well, you would have groupthink where everybody in the back of the bus would be singing a song, but the bus wasn't moving very quickly. And so as I started a firm, I sort of went back to this idea. Crazy personalities are just fine with me. In fact, I want more of them. But the filtering function is, do I respect the intelligence and the talent so much that even if they have vastly different views on topics that don't matter to me or for this business, you have to respect that about them, because you respect their intelligence and their talent. And structuring that building, that is a lot of effort. If you are successful, if you're at least diligent at it, you end up with the team that I have at a firm, which is stunningly good. I think it's, with all due respect, better than the early PayPal team. And that was something else to beat. And a big part of it is just relentless desire to build people that can put up with a roller coaster and we'll all get out of the bus and push it the second the bus slows down.