Latest ex-PayPal story: Max Levchin and Slide

Max Levchin

Just when we thought we were done chronicling the exploits of the founders of PayPal, the online payments service used by eBay, here’s another one.

The Chron catches up with co-founder Max Levchin, 30, who has started Slide, in San Francisco.

The piece is best for the anecdotes about Levchin’s Ukranian roots, how he linked up with Peter Thiel in the early days to start up the precursor to PayPal (later sold to eBay for $1.5 billion), and how he’s an obsessive worker.

But it has more details on Slide, too, which has been around for several months. An analyst, when asked his view on Slide, says it is an interesting idea but adds politely that PayPal is a mighty tough act to follow. Nevertheless, Thiel has invested, and we hear the familiar refrain that “it’s the old PayPal gang together again.”

Here’s the skinny on Slide:

Slide enables people to either visit a Web site or download an application to their desktop with a series of images crawling across the screen. The images could be personal photos, the top Google News items, or ads or other pictures selected to match your preferences.

The main idea, Levchin says, is to organize the Internet’s vast array of information into something like the tickers that stockbrokers rely on, or the news crawl across a cable TV channel. It will make money by including some sponsored pictures in the crawl.