(come on peeps, get your minds out of the gutter)

I am always in awe of the entrepreneurs who in their brilliance create a movement that touches millions and millions of people every single day. And they literally change the world in doing so. Seriously, I love what I do for a living, but come on…I hardly impact millions of lives on a daily basis. While I play in the Web 2.0 sandbox, I’m not the one who built it and I know my place in its ecosystem. We all know the cache entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Marc Andreessen of Ning. But it’s the lesser known, mild-mannered entrepreneurs who go about their daily lives in a below the radar screen manner whom I put on pedestals. People like Max Levchin, the founder, CEO and chairman at Slide. If you have ever thrown a sheep, or posted on a FunWall, you have Levchin to thank for it. Slide is like the “Intel Inside” of social networks. Sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Friendster have companies like Slide to thank when it comes to their stickiness.

We have all heard many self-anointed individuals refer to themselves as “serial entrepreneurs,” but I think Levchin is king of that crib. Slide is the world’s largest publisher of social entertainment applications in the world. Over 170 million peeps interact with Slide products every month. Slide apps reach 200+ countries and 100 SuperPokes are thrown every second! Prior to Slide, Levchin incubated Yelp, a company that became synonymous with the new category called City Guides. Levchin was also the founder of PayPal…hmmmm…yeah, I think you’ve heard of those guys. Levchin sold PayPal to eBay for an estimated $1.5 billion at the age of 26. At 26 I would have been out of my mind to get $150 for something I sold at a garage sale.  

Yet if you go to Google News and search Max Levchin, you only get 23 results compared to a similar search for Mark Zuckerberg that yielded 522 results. Given the wildly successful ride Levchin has had at such a young age, it is absolutely amazing he is not all over the media, but once you hear him speak, you might understand why. I heard Levchin interviewed recently at a Web 2.0 conference. He was so modest, boyish, soft-spoken and thoughtful in his responses, he looked like he would be more comfortable raising sheep than throwing them. The audience fell in love with him because he was just a nice guy who happened to launch a handful of kick-ass businesses – which he completely down-played throughout the conversation. His persona was more impressive than his accomplishments and therein lies my love for him.

What entrepreneurs do you admire most and why?