What Does A Tycoon Do After He’s Made His First $100MM? Try, Try Again

A few years ago, Mr. Levchin, one of the young princes of Silicon Valley, bought his first home, a 12-room Edwardian high atop a hill here, for $3.4 million. But Levchin, who made a fortune at age 27 selling PayPal, the online payment service he helped start in 1998, never moved in. He sold it two years later without having slept there for even one night.

Levchin, 32, is typical of a new generation of junior titans in Silicon Valley who might be called the prematurely rich — techies worth tens of millions of dollars, sometimes more, at an age when many others are just starting to figure out what to do with their lives. They are happy to be wealthy, of course, but many of these baby-faced technology tycoons often seem indifferent to the buying power of their money. Instead, nearly all of them have chosen to throw themselves back into a start-up, not so much because they want a spectacular new home or a personal jet — though many of them do — but because they are in a competition with themselves and one another.

Even among this jittery group of overachievers, Levchin stands out. In part that is because outdoing PayPal may be an all-but-impossible goal. Levchin acknowledges that he has already earned more money than he could ever spend. But he said he would not consider Slide.com, the photo and video sharing site he founded in 2005 that is still in its start-up phase, a success unless it is ultimately worth, in real dollars, “at least $1.54 billion”— the price eBay paid for PayPal. “Otherwise,” he asked rhetorically, “what have I learned?”

These days, despite the phenomenal success of PayPal, which gave him the bulk of a fortune worth around $100 million, Mr. Levchin continues to work an average of 15 to 18 hours a day. So committed is Mr. Levchin to seeing Slide.com succeed that he keeps a blood-pressure monitor on his desk. “I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t start companies,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/business/28invent.html?em&ex=
1193803200&en=a37ec3773b496f0e&ei=5087%0A