By Greg Kline
Monday, October 23, 2006
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Max Levchin arrived Friday morning and spent, more or less, every waking minute over the weekend in demand, especially by University of Illinois students.
"I had him booked every half-hour from 11 until 10 Friday and then Saturday was pretty much the same thing," said Tammy Nicastro, director of development and alumni relations for the University of Illinois Computer Science Department.
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Jawed Karim packed the auditorium at the UI's Siebel Center for Computer Science Saturday night, the Siebel lobby cafe where his talk was streamed live, and the biggest upper-floor lecture room in the building.
If it seems odd that a couple of engineers – one of whom, Karim, just graduated in 2004 – could draw crowds like rock stars on a college campus, keep two words in mind: "PayPal" and "YouTube."
Levchin, who graduated in 1997, was a founder and chief technologist of the near-ubiquitous system for moving money via the Web. Auction giant eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002.
PayPal's ranks were loaded with former UI computer science students, in part because of Levchin's affinity for his alma mater.
Two of the UI recruits for PayPal, Karim and Steve Chen, went on to help found YouTube, the Web video wonder Google is in the process of buying for $1.65 billion.
"For PayPal, I actually recruited literally dozens of U of I grads," Levchin said in an interview Sunday.
Levchin could be describing Karim, or himself, when he talks about the kind of students the UI computer science program attracts: smart kids who nonetheless have to work hard to meet the department's heavy demands and can't be afraid of working long hours.
He and Karim were back at the UI in conjunction with the campus Association for Computing Machinery chapter's 12th annual student computing conference and the UI Computer Science Department's engineers in residence program.
Among other things, they held "office hours" to meet one-on-one with students and discuss the business ideas floating around in the heads of what could be the UI's next round of famous entrepreneurs, Nicastro said.
Levchin also was on the lookout for talent to staff his latest venture, Slide, which he described as "a publishing and discovery tool for consumers" aimed at doing for Web-based photo albums what YouTube has done for videos.
Karim even attracted a decent crowd late on a lazy Sunday afternoon, in a Siebel lecture hall heavy on students looking for insight into how he got from their position to high-tech millionaire in a half dozen years.
Maybe his best answer was that he just wanted to build interesting products people would use.
The soft-spoken 27-year-old certainly doesn't come off as having expected to end up an international story, not to mention in a tax bracket just a rumor to most of us.
"Right now, I'm a little overwhelmed by all this stuff that's going on," he said.
After selling PayPal, Levchin, 31, thought he would like to spend time traveling, maybe learning to paint, doing nature photography and other stuff he'd always wanted to try.
"I tried not doing anything for a year and it was a very boring year," he said. "I think part of my personality is I actually feed off stress."
He described happy days spent at the UI – the ones with tests and projects piled up and all-nighters necessary to get them done.
He has a particular soft spot for the Association for Computing Machinery, chapter, where buddies Scott Barrister and Luke Nosek, later part of the PayPal gang, got him into the chapter's Webmonkeys group and interested in the possibilities of the Web.
Karim came to the UI because of its role in the development of the graphical Web browser.
When he found out the core creators of Netscape were from Illinois, he made the university his college choice. He ended up working at the UI-based National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which spawned the Netscape team.
"NCSA was definitely pretty cool because I learned a lot," he said.
Levchin, whose family immigrated to Chicago from Ukraine when he was a teen, came to the UI with the idea of earning his doctorate and becoming a college professor and scientist.
But he caught the startup company bug here. One of a series of ventures he started locally made him enough money to move to California's Silicon Valley, where former UI colleagues had been urging him to set up shop. Within weeks of his moving, they had PayPal in the works.
Karim, on the other hand, is a student again. He's working on his master's at Stanford, aiming at a doctorate and thinking about research in the kind of large computer systems on which the Googles, Amazons and eBays of the world run.
Such systems are generally custom jobs now, requiring the wheel to be reinvented every time a new one is needed.
Karim, who was born in East Germany and whose family immigrated to Minnesota in 1992, wants to work on ways to streamline the process.
"I enjoy taking complex problems and simplifying them," he said, whether it's designing large computer systems or explaining how YouTube happened to students.
He plans to become a college professor, like his mother, a research biochemist at the University of Minnesota, and do "entrepreneurial stuff when the opportunity presents itself."