Max Levchin's New Plan: To Get You Pregnant (And Improve Health Care in the Process)
When I called PayPal co-founder Max Levchin last week, we talked about ovulation cycles, not payment cycles. — That's because Levchin's newest start-up involves an iPhone app aimed toward helping women get pregnant.
Context & Ripple Effects
Levchin has spent two years defining himself against what he called the sorry state of American technology innovation, saying at a 2013 TechCrunch conference appearance that U.S. tech was 'between dire straits and dead' — so his first major move since PayPal matters as a thesis statement about where founders should build.
The answer is not payments: it is an iPhone app aimed at helping women get pregnant by tracking ovulation cycles. The breadth of same-day pickups — GigaOM, Business Insider, The Verge, Valleywag, WSJ's Digits among them — signals how much attention attaches to a PayPal co-founder choosing consumer health data over his native fintech turf.
First-order effects
- Women trying to conceive gain a smartphone-native tool for timing conception, putting cycle data on iPhones rather than in clinics or paper charts.
- Levchin re-enters entrepreneurship outside payments, trading on the PayPal name while deliberately breaking with the payments identity built through card.io-style mobile work at his old company.
Second-order effects
- A founder with Levchin's credibility validating fertility-tracking gives other data-driven entrepreneurs permission to treat women's health as a serious venture category rather than a niche.
- Apple's iPhone ecosystem gains another high-profile health-data app, strengthening the case that the phone is becoming a personal medical instrument — and raising the stakes for whoever controls that data.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, intimate reproductive data migrates to consumer startups before clinical systems, forcing regulators and platform owners to decide who governs sensitive health information held outside HIPAA-bound institutions.
- Serial payments founders applying big-data methods to the body points toward a structural shift: Silicon Valley's next wave competing on personal-health platforms instead of social or financial networks.
The trend: Prominent fintech founders are turning big-data techniques on consumer health, making body-generated data the next platform battleground after payments and social.