Max Levchin: Daily Routine

With a 5.30am start, no wasted motion, and two hours of deep work daily, Max Levchin treats time like the most important currency he’ll ever manage.

“I tend to be more organized the busier I am, and I think that’s true for a lot of other people,” Max Levchin told Fast Company in 2017. Between 1998, when Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek first launched Confinity which would later become PayPal, to 2002 when the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion, the team was working seven days a week for four years straight.

After the acquisition and with an estimated payout of $34 million, Levchin left the company, but admitted he felt lost and would regularly go back to the offices to hang out with his former co-workers. It got to the point where PayPal’s head of HR would have to remind Levchin that he no longer worked at the company, and his girlfriend, Nellie Minkova, briefly broke up with him.