by

Tim Ferriss

Max Levchin, PayPal and Affirm — The Path from The Soviet Union to Building Multi-Billion Dollar Companies (Plus: Real-World Socialism vs. Capitalism) (#869)

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Max Levchin (@mlevchin) is a serial entrepreneur, computer scientist, philanthropist, and active investor in more than 100 startups. He is the founder and CEO of Affirm, the payment network that empowers consumers and helps merchants drive growth. He is also the co-founder and chairman of Glow, a data-driven fertility company. Both companies were created and launched from his San Francisco-based innovation lab, SciFi VC (formerly HVF [Hard, Valuable, Fun]). Max was one of the original co-founders of PayPal, where he served as the chief technology officer until its acquisition by eBay in 2002. In 2002, he was named to MIT Technology Review’s TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world as well as Innovator of the Year.

Prior to HVF, Max founded, and was CEO of, Slide, a personal media-sharing service, which was acquired by Google in 2010. Max also helped create Yelp, where he served as chairman of its board of directors from its founding in 2005 until 2015. He served on the board for Yahoo! from 2012 to 2015.

Max was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, before moving to the United States and settling in Chicago in 1991. He holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he founded and led four other technology startups.

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Max Levchin, PayPal and Affirm — The Path from The Soviet Union to Building Multi-Billion Dollar Companies (Plus: Real-World Socialism vs. Capitalism)

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Transcripts

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Max Levchin

Website | SciFi VC | Affirm | Twitter

Relevant Resources

Relevant Episodes of The Tim Ferriss Show

Books

Films

People

Companies & Organizations

AI Tools

Coffee Tools & Products

Concepts & References

Timestamps

  • [00:00:00] Start.
  • [00:02:50] The Ronin line that rewired how Max makes every decision.
  • [00:06:09] Paprika-style brain-computer interfaces.
  • [00:09:09] PayPal’s founders lived inside a Neal Stephenson novel.
  • [00:19:21] Transformation via Neuromancer and Snow Crash.
  • [00:23:40] The book that found Max his wife.
  • [00:29:24] The real secret to a great marriage.
  • [00:38:29] What’s worth tracking, and what’s not.
  • [00:44:13] A scrawny kid, a clarinet, and a Kyiv velodrome.
  • [00:46:55] What going all-out on a bike actually gives you.
  • [00:51:02] The mantra by which Max rides.
  • [00:53:02] A Soviet kid’s fear of socialism.
  • [01:02:48] Making a profit without destroying society.
  • [01:04:31] What is Affirm, and why did every banker say it would fail?
  • [01:20:18] Why the best mathematicians eschew the lending industry.
  • [01:23:50] Does agentic commerce break Affirm, or supercharge it?
  • [01:28:01] A PhD-level financial advisor in everyone’s pocket.
  • [01:29:58] How close are we to buying anything through one AI chat?
  • [01:36:32] Improving your coffee: cheap, intermediate, and Bugatti options.
  • [01:44:33] The books every first-time founder should actually read.
  • [01:48:08] Claude Shannon, Ed Thorp, and the joy of playful genius.
  • [01:51:00] Why physical books still beat every digital reading experience.
  • [01:51:44] Parting thoughts.

Max Levchin Quotes from the Interview

“The attempt to impress your mate on a daily basis is the secret to the best marriage.”

— Max Levchin

“The best recipe we’ve discovered as humanity is capitalism, a force for constant creative destruction where you build the next thing better than the other guy.”

— Max Levchin

“It’s okay to make a little bit less money if you are able to create something that’s societally more successful, more important…”

— Max Levchin

“If you tell an entrepreneur over and over again, ‘This thing will never work unless someone does X,’ the natural response is, ‘Well, I will do X and see if it works.’”

— Max Levchin

“The job apocalypse people are proclaiming is so goofy. There’s so much opportunity to build so many exciting things for everyone, not just a Silicon Valley startup.”

— Max Levchin

Want to hear another conversation with a mathematician who aimed his big brain at real-world money? Listen to my first conversation with legendary blackjack player, quant pioneer, and hedge fund manager Edward O. Thorp, in which we discussed beating blackjack and roulette with the first wearable computer, his friendship with Claude Shannon, what convinced him Warren Buffett would become the richest man in the world, spotting Bernie Madoff’s fraud 17 years early, mental models like externalities and the tragedy of the commons, long-term thinking, knowing when enough is enough, and much more.

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