The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.
Max Levchin
Technology has come a long way since PayPal.
One of the things we did at PayPal was collaborative filtering and machine learning: looking at patterns of human behavior. We used it there to predict when people would try to cheat the system to get money. But you can predict pretty much any behavior with a certain amount of accuracy.
You can't get married to any one particular plan. That is the biggest lesson I learned at PayPal.
I'm trying to build something where people will go every day.
Facebook and Myspace are the U.S. audience, which is tried and true when it comes to being susceptible to ads.
If we compare the two, Facebook is currently a superior place to market a product like Slide. Twitter is more like a general distribution agent. It's like broadcast radio.
The single most important top-level trend is the shift to mobile.
Right now, nearly all the apps on Facebook take a week to build. No more.
If the game designer produces more content than he can consume per month, some fraction of the people will say more quests, more tests, more challenges, more whatever, and they will be compelled by it.
I never wear suits.
I've been developing mobile for years before anybody else really thought it was that important.
You're going to pull out your phone and try to use whatever is the most appropriate app on your iPhone or your Android device. Yelp saw that very early on. And when we launched the mobile product, we saw immediate growth, and we were stunned.
Mobile is the perfect example of what is enabling economic growth in the technology sector.
If I see what you're up to on Facebook but I don't see your updates on Flickr, I'll still care about Facebook.
We're becoming slaves to our social networks - and that's not a bad thing. You like your favorite networks, so do you friends, and pretty soon you have market winners.
Think of Slide as a giant media network for people to transmit information. The content that's in there now has been provided by users - it's whatever they want it to be.
I actually think Facebook made it their business to be close with all of the app developers. They couldn't have done more.
If you're building a social product, you're still living in the last century if your product doesn't work on Facebook.
Facebook is so ubiquitous now that it's like another manifestation of the web itself.
Media is very different from financial services. People are very fickle and very vocal. They believe that things should be one way and not the other. It's still very rewarding to build products for huge audiences. It feels like you're making an impact.
If you can work a brand successfully into the narrative of your product, then it's really cool. Then people actually take the brand up and say, 'My positive experience in your product is directly connected and influenced by this brand and that worked great.'
