I tend to sleep pretty little. I’m into endurance cycling at the moment, so on Monday and Wednesday I get up at 5.50 to go training, even though I might not have got to bed until 3am. Cycling long distances over challenging terrains is an excellent way to clear your head. At weekends I do rides of up to 80 miles north of San Francisco.

I’m not really into breakfast, but my wife, Nellie, is a huge breakfast fan. We’re both vegetarians and obsessively healthy eaters. Given the training, I tend to pound the protein, so breakfast will be some sort of yoghurt or an egg-white omelette with asparagus, which is very popular in California right now. Croissants are an occasional treat for us, perhaps on the weekend.

During the week I have various routines. I’m a bit of an obsessive-compulsive that way. If it’s not a training day I’ll get into the office at about 8. I’m the CEO of Slide, which lets people share pictures and movies with friends across social networks like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. I set it up after we sold PayPal to eBay in 2002. I was 26 then.

At work I don’t have a separate office. I just sit out on the floor with everyone else, so there’s lots of opportunity for people to come and talk to me. We have nearly 100 employees now.

My parents started teaching me English back in Ukraine at the age of two. I thought I’d find it difficult when we arrived in Chicago — I was 16 — but I discovered I was pretty fluent. My mother is a theoretical physicist, like almost every member of my family apart from my father, who writes poetry and plays which are quite avant-garde. When he was young he was in a student group in Ukraine which was relatively anti-government. Later, I discovered the KGB had tried to recruit him.

There was also a noticeable element of anti-semitism around us — someone painted a Star of David on our front door. I was approaching the draft age, and there’s a high mortality rate in the Russian army, but that number skews a lot higher for Jews. That was why we left.

I was already obsessed with developing software. I’d made a tiny amount of money selling my services to various contractors: I’d write some code for them for 100 roubles, for instance. On the flight to the US I wandered around, picking up magazines and newspapers and looking for ads for PCs, trying to find a good deal. At the time the entire family had $700 to its name, and there were six of us. My uncle, who had already moved to the States, gave me my first computer. He said: “If there’s one thing this family needs, it’s a computer for Max.”

In school I planned to be an academic and supported myself by working for the US army, because it paid better than other jobs on campus. But then the army found out I was not a US citizen and booted me out. I was hanging around on campus when two guys approached me and said: “You’re Max. You’re famous because you like to stay up and write code all night.” This was mid-1994 and the web was just starting up. We established a company providing online advertising. One minute I was writing code in my bedroom, the next I was vice-president of engineering. We failed, of course, because we couldn’t raise enough money. The others moved to California, so I packed up my stuff, put it in a truck and drove across there too. It took five days.

I met a guy there called Peter Thiel, who was giving a talk to some students at the time, and we set up PayPal, the web’s first secure online payment system. Within nine months of launching, it had 2.7m accounts.

After we sold it to eBay, I decided to travel the world, but soon I realised that all I wanted to do was to work. The Slide offices are next to an area of San Francisco called South Park. It’s very European, like the place I grew up in, with really good cafes and restaurants, so there are plenty of places to get a coffee and a sandwich for lunch.

I have more meetings in the afternoon. The time I finish normally depends on Nellie. She works in the financial-services industry, which is very stressful. We have a modestly regimented marriage. Thursdays, for instance, I’ll be home at 7.30pm and we try to spend quality time together. We might cook a healthy meal and eat it with a glass of wine or just enjoy a few Zen moments together. Sometimes we’ll go to the local ice-cream shop for fat-free frozen yogurt. We might watch a movie, or bond around our dog, a wheaten terrier, taking it for a long walk or a visit.

Other days I’ll be later. Tuesdays I’ll turn up between 8 and 10pm — that’s a mini-date. Monday and Wednesday I carry on until my work is done — it could be 3am. Typically, I fall into bed between 1am and 3. I’m so exhausted by then that when my head hits the pillow I’m gone.

Interviews by Simon Brooke.

Portrait by Jonathan Sprague

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming