Max Levchin, PayPal and Affirm — The Road from the Soviet Union to the Creation of Multibillion-Dollar Corporations (Also: Real-World Socialism vs. Capitalism) (#869)

Max Levchin (@mlevchin) is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, philanthropist, and active investor in over 100 startups. He is the founder and CEO of Confirma payment network that empowers consumers and helps merchants drive growth. He is also the founder and chairman of Glow, a data-driven interest company. Both companies were created and launched at his San Francisco-based innovation lab, SciFi VC (formerly HVF. [Hard, Valuable, Fun]). Max was a co-founder of PayPal, where he served as chief technology officer until it was acquired by eBay in 2002. In 2002, he was named MIT Technology ReviewTR100 as one of the world’s top 100 innovators and 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 inception in 2005 until 2015. He served on the board of 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 BS in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he founded and led four other technology startups.

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Transcript

SELECTED CONNECTIONS ARE IN THE SECTION

Connect with Max Levchin

Website | SciFi VC | Confirm | Twitter

Appropriate Services

Appropriate episodes of The Tim Ferriss Show

• Jason Portnoy of PayPal, Palantir, and more | The Tim Ferriss Show #600
• An Interview with Peter Thiel, Billionaire Investor and Company Creator | The Tim Ferriss Show #28
• Kevin Kelly – AI, Virtual Reality, and the Inevitable | The Tim Ferriss Show #164
• Edward O. Thorp, The Man of All Markets – Beating Blackjack and Roulette, Beating the Stock Market, Spotting Bernie Madoff Early, and Knowing When Enough is Enough | The Tim Ferriss Show #596
• Expert Investor Ed Thorp on How to Think for Yourself, Mental Models for the Second Half of Life, How to Be Internally Directed, How Fundamental Statistics Are Powerful, and the Dangers of Investing in Fads | The Tim Ferriss Show #604

Books

Movies

People

Companies and Organizations

AI tools

Coffee Tools and Products

Concepts and references

Time stamps

• [00:00:00] Start.
• [00:02:50] I Ronin a line that recaps how Max makes all the decisions.
• [00:06:09] Paprika-A brain-computer interface.
• [00:09:09] The founders of PayPal were living inside a Neal Stephenson novel.
• [00:19:21] A change with The Neuromancer again Snow Crash.
• [00:23:40] The letter that Max received from his wife.
• [00:29:24] The real secret to a great marriage.
• [00:38:29] What should be followed, and what should not.
• [00:44:13] A scrawny kid, a clarinet, and the Kyiv velodrome.
• [00:46:55] What cycling gives you.
• [00:51:02] The mantra with which Max rides.
• [00:53:02] The Soviet child’s fear of socialism.
• [01:02:48] Making a profit without destroying society.
• [01:04:31] What is Affirm, and why does every banker say it will fail?
• [01:20:18] Why leading statisticians are fleeing the mortgage industry.
• [01:23:50] Are agent exchanges breaking Affirm, or charging you too much?
• [01:28:01] A PhD-level financial advisor in everyone’s pocket.
• [01:29:58] How close are we to buying anything with a single AI conversation?
• [01:36:32] Upgrading your coffee: cheap, mid-range, and Bugatti options.
• [01:44:33] Books every startup should definitely read.
• [01:48:08] Claude Shannon, Ed Thorp, and the joy of acting genius.
• [01:51:00] Why physical books still beat all digital learning.
• [01:51:44] Separate thoughts.

Max Levchin Quote in Interview

“The effort to please your spouse every day is the secret of the best marriage.”

— Max Levchin

“The best way we’ve found as a human being is capitalism, the power of creative destruction where you build the next thing better than anyone else.”

— Max Levchin

“It’s okay to make a little money if you can create something that is successful in society, which is very important…”

— Max Levchin

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

— Max Levchin

“The apocalypse of jobs that people are announcing is terrible. There’s a lot of opportunity to build a lot of interesting things for everyone, not just Silicon Valley startups.”

— Max Levchin

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