2011 Young Alumni Achievement Award

Max Levchin
Max Levchin

Max Levchin is the founder and visionary behind PayPal and Slide. Max is also renowned as the co-founder of PayPal, an expert in combating online fraud and one of the hardest working entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Before starting Slide, he incubated several other start-ups, including Yelp, where he is currently Chairman of the Board.

Max started PayPal in 1998, took the company public in 2002 and then sold it to eBay for more than $1.5 billion at the age of 26. 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 Levchin joined as Vice President of Engineering, until 2011.

Originally from Kiev, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), Max moved to Chicago at the age of 16 and later received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Max sits on the board of several other companies and is currently planning his next start-up project.