Kind of like an interesting follow-up/contrast to my last post on the Samwer brothers, The New York Times has an article today focusing on Max Levchin, one of the founders of PayPal who’s worth about $100 million and is now in his second start-up. Levchin says that he will consider the new project, slide.com, a failure unless it’s ultimately worth at least $1.54 billion — the price that eBay paid for PayPal.

The focus of the article is to understand what drives under-35 tech millionaires in Silicon Valley who are already fabulously rich but still feel the need to create the next big thing.

Extraordinary success isn’t enough for them, if it only happens once and if it happens when they are still young. It’s almost like they have nothing left to live for after they’ve realised their dreams. So they dare to dream again.

Levchin explains why he didn’t enjoy his collaboration with Sequoia after he made his fortune. Or more appropriately, why he wasn’t a very good VC.

He explains: “I took this perverse pleasure in seeing if I could make someone cry.”

The thrust of the article is that in Silicon Valley, money isn’t everything. As Robert Sutton, a professor at Sutton explains: “In other parts of the country, things like a great estate are the symbols people most respect. But here, the greatest status symbol is a person’s ability [to] still bring out hot new companies.”