Union Square Ventures funded Mark Pincus's casual games maker Zynga with $10 million not long after Max Levchin-founded widgetmaker Slide raised $50 million. Competitor RockYou wants a round of funding that would value it at $400 million. We like to scoff at these purveyors of online sheep-throwing tools, but that's…
Max Levchin, the cofounder of PayPal and the CEO of Slide, measures nearly everything, down to the optimum price to pay for an engagement ring. If he needs a metric for self-importance, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Sarah Lacy's new book about Web 2.0, provides one. He occupies 78 out of 294 pages, more than…
Hidden in Fortune editor Andy Serwer's stream-of-capitalism blog was this nugget: Slide CEO Max Levchin will soon wed longtime girlfriend Nellie Minkova. Minkova, pictured here with Levchin, works at Clarium Capital Management, the hedge fund of Peter Thiel, Levchin's cofounder at PayPal. For more of Minkova, see…
Worried about an upcoming recession, PayPal cofounder Max Levchin told News.com that his company, Slide, is "trying to shift away from advertising partially" and go "direct to consumers" for its revenues. "It cuts out one more party from the equation," Levchin said. "During a recession time you don't have to worry…
In January a pair of money managers, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price, bought 9.1 percent of Slide for $50 million. Fortune asks, "Are these widgets worth half a billion?" The mag doesn't come up with anything more than "maybe," but I'm willing to go a little further. Slide worth $550 million? No, despite its huge traffic…
Max Levchin's widget maker Slide just took on funding that set its value at $550 million. And the company's user base grew 142 percent in a year to 150 million users, giving it the ninth largest "reach" on the Internet. Maybe this means its worth paying attention to Levchin's ideas on "How to successfully launch a…
BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy has more details on Slide's new funding round: Max Levchin's Web widget factory is now valued at $550 million, after raising funds from the likes of Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price. While the company is mum on IPO prospects, such big institutional investors typically come in…
Serial entrepreneur and PayPal cofounder Max Levchin's widget maker Slide will take in a new round of funding, according to Boom Town. The deal, put together by New York-based Allen & Company, is said to propel Slide's value well past the $60 million to $80 million set just over a year ago.
UCLA prof Jerome Siegel discovered that the lack of a brain hormone called orexin A causes narcolepsy, Wired reports. So what'd he do? Have a bunch of sleep-deprived monkeys snort the stuff and see how they perform on tests, of course.
Here's the real takeaway from Fortune's long-expected profile of the PayPal mafia: "Peter Thiel has a butler." The former PayPal CEO is living large in Pacific Heights. But he's hardly idle. With PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, masterminding a wide array of startups founded by some of his star hires at the payments…
Sunday's New York Times profile of PayPal and Slide founder Max Levchin tackles the phenomena of serial entrepreneurs. What makes them start multiple companies after a multimillion-dollar IPO or sale? The short answer: Money, but not in the way that you think. Levchin talks about how Slide's exit needs to be more…
"Widgets aren't just about fun and games... This is a big step toward maturity for us." —Max Levchin, CEO of widget maker Slide, which Time Magazine thinks will go public next year. [Time Magazine]
Slide executive Keith Rabois, one of the many new converts to Facebook in Silicon Valley, asks how much a Facebook app user is worth. The increasingly popular social network lets other Web companies plant applications, like Slide's photo-sharing service, on its site. But it's not clear how much loyalty users of such…
After disappearing from the Sequoia homepage of fame, one-time Paypal CEO Elon Musk — see his take on his own backstory here — is back, with a new smiley portrait. Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, the mo' "real" founders of Paypal, are also still on the page of course. They're both wearing crowns as befits their royal…
Marketer and pro-blogger advocate Curt Hopkins is a good and reasonable man. Good because he's running the Blogswana project, in which students will help those affected by AIDS in Africa tell the world about their plight. Reasonable because when he asked the following Valley people — people known as good souls with a…
Hot-or-Not's James Hong has said it, other friends have hinted at it — Max Levchin is a cyborg. The ex-Paypal exec and Slide founder may be an early-model Cylon or a Soong-type android, or even a Gigolo Joe mecha. But he sure ain't human.
Two adorable San Fran dot-commers duke it out. Will Slide's Max Levchin pound Six Apart's Ben Trott into submission? Or will Ben win with that grin?
Votes are in! We're wrapping up the first four hotties contests and moving on to more Valley men. A reminder: After the ladies (and the gents of a certain persuasion) have their fun, we'll start "Hotties: Ladies of the Valley."
