Max Levchin Quotes

'Instagram' is an app that only took 8 weeks to build and ship but was a product of over a year of work.

A rational model of software is to design it quickly - the economic pressure to improvise presents an interesting challenge.

Move fast with stable infrastructure.

Technology has the benefit of being easily scalable. A few weeks or months of coding can result in solutions that reap huge benefits. The global success of Facebook, Twitter, and Google are all triumphs of technology.

Internet and mobile product development cycles are measured in months, not years. And the capital required to get a product built and into the market is less than $1 million. And the returns, when things work out, can be enormous.

In just six weeks from the time the design was started, we had the motor on the block testing its power.

It only took me two weeks to build the first version of Facebook because I had so much stuff before then.

One of the things I've been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface.

Not only because the product wasn't a great product, but remember it took us five or six years to ship it. Then we had to sort of fix it. That was what I might call Windows 7.

The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.

Software touches all of these different things you use, and tech companies are revolutionizing all different areas of the world...from how we shop to how farming works, all these things that aren't technical are being turned upside down by software. So being able to play in that universe really makes a difference.

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'.

Each stage of cosmic development proceeded more quickly than the stage which preceded it.

We've changed our internal motto from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infrastructure."

In the software business there are many enterprises for which it is not clear that science can help them; that science should try is not clear either.

Whether we're fighting climate change or going to space, everything is moved forward by computers, and we don't have enough people who can code

Computer science is the operating system for all innovation.

Developers, developers, developers...

The only people who don’t love apps are pundits who don’t understand that apps aren’t really in opposition to the open Internet. They’re just superior clients to open Internet services.

It's funny, these days, if you want money, you can create an App or some kind of tech thing and make a billion dollars.

Developers, developers, developers, developers.

The Waterfall Model is wrong and harmful; we must outgrow it.

I believe good software is written by small teams of two, three, or four people interacting with each other at a very high, dense level.

From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it.