← The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: Affirm Max Levchin on Why Grading Talent by Letter (A or B) is Total BS | How to Create a Culture of Post Mortems and Writing | Why You Should Only Study Failure Not Success & The Biggest Surprises Scaling to $18.7BN Market Cap
01:02:25
Max Levchin is one of the great founders and technologists of our time. As the Founder and CEO of Affirm, he has built am $18.7BN monster in the buy no pay later space. Prior to Affirm he was one of the original co-founders of PayPal. Max is also the...
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- [00:00]
Max Levchin
I think opinionated is exceptionally valuable. The hard red line for me is always once I can't trust you. The story about knowing the letter grade of every person you hire in your company, whether it's 2,000 people, like a firm. But that's just silly.
- [00:16]
Harry Stebbings
This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings and today we have an incredible guest. Simply put, Max Levchin is one of the great technologists of our time. As the founder and CEO of a firm today, he's built an $18.7 billion monster in the Buy now pay. Prior to affirm, he was one of the original co founders of PayPal. Max is also the co founder and chairman of Glow, a data driven fertility company. He's also an extremely successful angel with a portfolio including the likes of Yelp, Pinterest and Evernote. Before we dive in today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collective $8 billion in total revenue. Wow. Second, Kajabi's users keep 100% of their earnings with the average Kajabi creator bringing in $30,000 per year. In case you didn't know, Kajabi is the leading creator commerce platform with an all in one suite of tools including websites, email marketing, digital products, payment processing and analytics for as low as $69 per month. Whether you are looking to build a private community, write a paid newsletter or launch a course, Kajabi is the only platform that will enable you to build and grow your online business without taking a cut of your revenue. 20 VC listeners can try Kajabi for free for 30 days by going to kajabi.com that's kajabi.com K A J-A-B-I.com 20VC and after building your online empire with Kajabi, it's time to scale your global team with Remote Seamless Hiring solutions. So every business is a global business in 2025. But how do you do payroll for your global business and team and comply with international labor laws? Well. Remote handles payroll, benefits, taxes, stock options and compliance to help companies of all sizes pay and manage full time and contract workers all over world. No matter where your team lives or works, Remote's global employment solutions keep your team, your finances and your intellectual property secure. Remote never charges hidden fees, just best in class global employment solutions for a low flat rate. The world's top Remote Companies love remote. GitLab, the world's largest all remote organization, trusts Remote to run their global team. Remote is funded by Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital and The host of the greatest podcast ever, Harry Stubbings and 20VC. Ready to learn more? Head over to remote.com 20VC. That's 20VC and begin hiring within minutes. Enjoy 10% off your first three months by using the promo code 20VC at checkout. Now that your team is up and running worldwide, make sure your finances work just as hard with Brex. The ultimate financial stack for startups. So when Brex was founded, it wasn't just about creating another financial product. It was about solving the really gritty challenges that founders face daily. Let's be honest, building something from the ground up is hard enough without dealing with clunky, outdated banks that pile on fees and leave your cash idle. Brex is different. It's the financial stack that scales with you no matter where you are in your journey. From corporate cards to maximising your Runway to earning yield on your cash. Brex was designed with founders in mind to make every dollar go further so you can focus on building. And here's what really stands out to me. Brex combines the best of checking treasury and FDIC insurance in one powerhouse account. You can send and receive money globally at Lightning SPE, earn yield from day one and still access your funds whenever you need. Plus, with 20x the standard protection through program banks, your cash is not just working harder, it's working safer too. It's no surprise that 1 in 3 venture backed startups in the US with companies like Anthropic, Coinbase and Robinhood. My God, these companies are incredible. Trust Brex to help them grow. If you want to join the smartest startups on the planet, head over to brex.com startups and see what they can do for you.
- [04:09]
Unknown
You have now arrived at your destination. Max, I am so excited for this dude. It has been a long time, so thank you so much for joining me today.
- [04:19]
Max Levchin
Thank you for having me.
- [04:20]
Unknown
Not at all. But I'd love to start with actually something that you said before. When it comes to hiring brilliant people. You said brilliant people have extreme personalities more often than not. And when I thought about that, I thought, do you want them in your team as a result of these extreme personalities?
- [04:38]
Max Levchin
You mostly do. Everything is a range and so you inevitably find yourself asking the question, how extreme is extreme? And what will it cost me if this person blows up or goes into some sort of a behavioral tailspin? But most of the time, truly brilliant people are worth the quirks and it's a hallmark of a good manager who knows how to bring out the best from the people, even if they are extreme.
- [05:05]
Unknown
When we think about extreme levels, often extremes are dislikable. They're not that amiable. They're very opinionated. How do we think about that being a pro versus a con?
- [05:16]
Max Levchin
I think opinionated is exceptionally valuable. The sort of pinnacle of teamwork achievement is to have really strong opinions, not hold them back, and yet manage to not so profoundly offend the person or the teammate that you're judging or providing feedback to the they choose to opt out, whatever that means, for the problem. But you want someone who can walk into a room and say, that is a pile of garbage. And I love all of you, you're amazing people. I'm proud to be part of this team. But what we've built here together is not going to ship because it's terrible. And now we're all going to regroup and rethink and build something better. That is the way of trying to couch the blow. But if you don't give the blow, you're going to ship garbage.
- [05:58]
Unknown
Teach me. I do that and people get offended, they get emotional and they get upset and I get told that I'm too direct. What do I do?
- [06:06]
Max Levchin
Empathy is important. Understanding that when you're judging someone's work, there's two possibilities. It's bad, they done the best and circumstances intervened and they can do better, but it isn't good enough. And they need to know, but you know they can do better. And the moment is about telling them, this isn't your best work, but I know what you can do. And this is just. It's an embarrassment, but it's not an embarrassment of your ability. It's the embarrassment of the time you had or the effort you've been able to put in. And that's okay. Like that we can fix. Sometimes you look at work and you say, wow, this person cannot do better, full stop. Don't worry about being direct. The conversation you're going to have with them at some point very soon is, I don't think you have a place on this team anymore. And that's a much harder conversation. But you have to have it too.
- [06:49]
Unknown
You always have said to me and.
- [06:50]
Harry Stebbings
Lish, you said this years ago, you.
- [06:51]
Unknown
Said, when there's doubt, there's no doubt. And I always loved it and I always think to that. But on the extreme element, where does extreme good transition to extreme bad? Have you had that before and what have your lessons been?
- [07:04]
Max Levchin
Any form of narcissism or selfishness? Self orientedness is probably the most important trigger of turning an extreme personality from Good to bad or said in the opposite way. You can be as great at throwing tantrums or as direct in your criticism as you want to be. If you maintain a good degree of humility and just remember that the second it becomes about you being better than everyone else, everyone else will start hating you. And if you're their boss, they're going to hate you quietly. And that's the worst possible situation. And so what do you really want is to constantly remember that you are but a part of this team. And when you're criticizing someone's work or you're telling them this has to be redone, you're always redoing the work together. Like maybe you're not going to personally move the bits, but you're going to have to be involved because they're not going to be happy with the second round of the well, this is still garbage. That's really important. I think there are many ways where extreme personalities flip into being toxic and so you just have to constantly watch out for it. But it is the price you pay. Brilliant people are often over the top and that's part of the ingredients that make them brilliant.
- [08:12]
Unknown
When they flip them to toxic, is there a redeeming route back or is that generally a one way road?
- [08:19]
Max Levchin
I believe in second chances in general, in life, except in matters of integrity. The hard red line for me is always once, I can't trust you. I can't ever trust you from that one. In my worldview, there is no walking back. It's not true with kids. Kids lie because they're exploring. But even with my own kids, I've had sort of very, very difficult conversations where I'd said, look, this is a thing that in my professional and personal world of adults, it's the hardest thing to come back from. And the fact that you just told me something that isn't true is really hard for me to hear. And saying that to a teammate, you're not going to talk to them like you're Talking to a 13 year old, you're going to say, look, I can't trust you ever again. Get out. So other than that, I think there is a way to walk back. A lot of the no matter how crazy toxic a situation could be, if it's a situation, the judgment you have to make as a leader is is the person profoundly toxic or did the situation turn toxic? Situations come and go. People don't really change that much.
- [09:13]
Harry Stebbings
You said earlier, has the person done.
- [09:15]
Unknown
All they can to execute on the task and to achieve what they want? To where I struggle is we have differences in expectations around what one should and can do. If you are a head of sales, listen, there's always more you can do. There is always another gift you can send. Like you can click thoughtful comment you can do additional resource you can send. I will do everything to fucking win. And people on teams don't always think quite as bluntly, obsessively as that. How do you think about that alignment between what is rational to expect.
- [09:49]
Max Levchin
So my brilliant wife frequently reminds me that more often than not, it's about incentives. The unlock for you, the reason you are so obsessed with fucking winning is because it's your company, it's your project, it's your passion. Like, you've been doing this since you were 14 years old and the only goal is to do more of you. And so you don't need motivation. Like, your incentives are aligned. Like you were were essentially born with a microphone in your mouth to just try to get bigger, literally. And I don't think it's, you know, nothing to be ashamed of. A drive and grit that is the other side of that coin are rare. And people who have it end up being entrepreneurs or something resembling entrepreneurship because it is such an unstoppable force, which is amazing. Like, if you don't have it, it's a thing you can't really teach. On the flip side, there's plenty of other people that you not just need, you require to achieve your goals. Like, no one is an island in pursuit of their entrepreneurial ambition and you have to figure out what it is that motivates them. And in many cases, the motivations are not at all relatable for you. Like, you had decided at some point that you're willing to work Saturdays and Sundays to succeed. And that's just it. And like, yeah, some people go to the pub and others go skiing and everybody has their thing and you decided, no, I'm just going to work and that's what I'm going to do. And having that conversation with someone who's just joined your team, like, hey, we're all going to work on Saturday and Sunday because I want to succeed, is not going to do anything for them. What you need to do is figure out what is it that they're looking out for and what is their goal. And if their goal is to go skiing three days a week instead of two, you may have made a hiring mistake. But if their goal is to feel great about their work, the investment you have to make isn't about beating them up about this work quality is garbage. Or telling them, go work harder to say, like, hey, I know you're motivated by quality. Let me spend all available time to just get to a place where you look at every pixel you put down or every sound you record and you're just falling out of your chair about how good it is and it can't really get any better. That's what motivates you. I know. And that's what we're going to do together. That's what team leadership is all about. The difficult part of leadership of teams is always deciding that this is irredeemable because you want people to have second, third, fourth chances. But at some point you're like, well, okay, you're great, but. But you are a hiring mistake and I'm so sorry.
- [12:05]
Unknown
At what stage are you forced to hire B team players? I find it absolutely absurd that we think we can only continuously hire A team players. A team players by definition are exceptions. And you can for the first 50, maybe 100. I still don't think so with 100. But when you are the size of a firm, it's impossible to only have 18 players. When are you forced to hire B team? How do you think about that?
- [12:28]
Max Levchin
So I think at any given time you're hiring the story about knowing the letter grade of every person you hire in your company, whether it's 2,000 people, like a firm. But that's just silly. Like you don't know people are these days coached and trained and fine tuned to be exceptional interviewees. And so somebody coming in and telling you their life story, like, you know, they have watched probably an interview you conducted with someone who's a professional interviewer who spelled out what it looks like when you're hiring an A player. You know someone's going to be like, extreme personality is very important. Max Lovchen said. So how do I get myself more extreme? What I need. And so I don't think you can really judge A or B overall grade at hiring time. I think you can assess someone's coding ability. But a really, really good assessment test requires a take home because like you can implement Quicksort on camera very quickly, but so can a C player these days. And so you have to give people a lot of time. And giving people a lot of time, they will inevitably stray from the rules of whatever the test is. So anyway, the point is you can filter out C players, you can definitely filter out D players. Differentiation between B and A is what happens once you've brought them in. You're like oh, my God, that is a brilliant hire. And more often than not, you say, I thought this was going to be a great hire. It's a good hire. I'm happy we have them. And the question there is, what do you do to get the absolute best work from this person? And will they have the Steve Jobs quote? A players hire A players, B players hire C players is profoundly true. There should be an asterisk explaining why this is true. And the reason for it is fear. A players love working with other A players because they know the demands of the job and the team dynamics just make them better. So you want to have people who challenge you and tell you, hey, I know you're an A player, but that just wasn't good. Let's go redo this together. Or you go redo it, whatever. So A players just want to escalate away or accelerate away from the pack. B players frequently say, look, I'm a worker B, and I know I'm not an A player, and that's okay. I am just going to grind out good code, art, sound, whatever. But some of them are fearful and say, well, if I have too many B players around it, let alone A players, I will look terrible. It will be very obvious that I'm just not that good. There are people here who are a lot better than me. So the way to fix this is for me to become a manager and for me to hire a bunch of people who aren't very good at all, like, much worse than me, and then I'll look like the tallest mushroom, and that'll be great. And so that is the real danger of B players. Like, having people who are perfectly willing to do good work day in and day out is not the worst thing in the world. There's plenty of things that A players will turn their nose from because it's just not that challenging. It's not accelerating them out of the apac. And these are very, very good for that. And a lot of B players over time grind their way to being A player. So you're investing in their future and they know it. So that's also positive. But B players who have fear of being found out are the ones that you have to watch out for in.
- [15:29]
Unknown
Terms of, like, the actions that they take. I love the statement you said. You said, we take calculated risks, do the calculating. And what I wanted to ask that was, when you review the journey, what was the biggest calculated risk that you took? And success or fail, what did you learn from it?
- [15:46]
Max Levchin
When I started the company, I sat down with a bunch of bankers and said, hey, I'm going to start a company where I'm going to do away with this imbalance. I'm going to eliminate fine print so consumers do not have to read fine print to find out what the business model is and so on. Many other sort of ideas like this, several of them, including some very well known people whose names will not be revealed, laughed at me and said, like, you're insane. Like, this is not just like the way you make money in this industry, it's the way you make money. It's the only way this all been competed down to. The only money you have is in the form of things that the customer doesn't understand because everything else has been wiggled out. And I said, you know, I don't think so. And I don't actually have a full model in Excel or in my head or on paper proving that I'm right. So this was not a calculated risk, But I think it's not really worth running a company that fits neatly into the mold of screw the customer, make some money. Like I want to run the one that says never screw the customer. Let's see if we can make some money. And like at this point, we're public, our financials are visible, we do very well financially and so it was totally possible. But this was a non calculated risk. At the very beginning of the mission that I just sort of decided like, we're going to do it. And so the calculus of the first bet was like not a calculus at all. It was just like, I think it's going to work, but I'm okay finding out that I'm wrong.
- [17:06]
Unknown
What highly calculated risk did not work out where your process was right, but the outcome was wrong?
- [17:12]
Max Levchin
We have a whole culture of postmortems at a firm where we record every decision we make. Especially I'll give you a very retail one because now that I said postmortem, postmortem culture comes from engineering. And obviously I'm an engineer by training and past and so it's easy to reason in those terms, but years ago we had decided to very rationally scale our infrastructure because we expected a giant launch with just a crazy amount of transactions and it was all going to be 10x bigger than what we were at the time. And so we were prepping at breakneck pace and scaled up every part of our backend infra and then our front end infra and everything, everything. And then the day off it just fell apart massively because we basically overloaded our backend with our front end. And so we were all dressed up with no place to go and the entire database data layer of a firm was just in shambles for several hours while we were cleaning it up. But it really was a self inflicted wound where we were like, well, we just don't know how big it's going to be, so let's assume it's going to be super huge. It was very modestly sized at launch and turned out to be.
- [18:20]
Unknown
What do you learn from that?
- [18:21]
Max Levchin
Do the calculating. This was not an unforeseeable error. Someone should have sat down and said, all right, so we're scaling the frontier faster than we're scaling the back tier. At some point, given the architecture of the system, you will have what's called an oversubscription of front end connections to the backend and the backend will start choking. Because even if front end doesn't do anything, just holding these connections is expensive. If you have like a 10x mismatch, you're going to bring down the database. And that is what happened. So someone should have done that work. That would have been a calculated risk that did not, would not have backfired. But this time it did.
- [18:52]
Unknown
You mentioned the postmortem culture there. People always say you learn so much from your failures. Do you learn more from your successes or from your failures?
- [18:59]
Max Levchin
Failures for sure. It's boring to analyze success like, well, we did well, it's good, I'm tired, we're going to go to sleep. Is kind of the natural, like your oxytocin.
- [19:09]
Unknown
Do you not think that you can actually learn the same thing? We just don't analyze success because it's successful. It's like, yeah, move on. And actually if we analyze why you were successful, it's because we actually were really thoughtful around, you know, tack over time.
- [19:23]
Max Levchin
Problem is that with successes, the texture of each individual decision is much harder to detect. If you look at the world as a funnel analysis, which is a really good way of thinking about a lot of things, you start over here, become aware of a thing, start thinking about it, start considering it, start deciding it. Deciding, succeeding or failing. There's a real kind of a blur between the first five steps. And this is true of web apps and checkout funnels and advertising and all kinds of other things. If everything has gone pretty well, there's a lot of effort that has to go into like, all right, well that step to this step of the funnel, the conversion rate was 95% and the next one is 95%. The next one is 95. 95%. Well, which one did the best? I don't know. They all seem like 95%. It's pretty good. Now you should ask the question, well, could it have been 96? Like, why did we do better? And so you're inevitably asking the question in terms of failure again. You're not really saying, how were we so good and smart that 95 was? You know, that's really high. It's really good. Should we have done 94? Would that have been enough? Like, those questions are kind of boring and pointless to ask. I really believe in asking the question in terms of what should we have done better? Even if it's the most successful thing ever, it's nice to take a victory lap and sort of high five the team. But ultimately the question has to be like, this is a friend who grew up in a very managed parenting environment where his parents would ask him when he showed up home from school with a 98% result in a test, like, what happened to the other 2%? And I'm not sure it's a great way to have a childhood, but it's a great way to run a company.
- [20:50]
Unknown
Can I ask you if I'm a founder listening to this and I'm going, wow, I really want to have a post mortem centric culture, but I don't really know how to do that as of today. Implementing that. What advice would you give to me on how to implement and start a post mortem centric culture?
- [21:05]
Max Levchin
So for everything, create a document space. So every time we have a blip for whatever definition of in our systems or in our processes or in our models, anything, a separate conversation is carved off on Slack, a separate conversation is documented in a Google Doc or a notion or whatever tool we're using for this topic. But it's segregated. It's very difficult to peel away details having to do with event one, if you're coming along it with event two. And so first sort of most important thing is make sure you have separation of data streams. Because if you get good at postmortem culture, you will gather a lot of data and a lot of it will be irrelevant. Like people will say, well, this also happened at the same time. I see it in the logs like something just went down. And inevitably, like, no, that's unrelated. This was because of whatever something else. And so you want your data plentiful. You want as much of it segregated into a separate pipeline of raw content as soon as possible. You want preservation of this information in a special place. You want someone responsible for writing it up and distilling it from pages and pages of kind of raw data into a, essentially a white paper. And then you want the entire team to go and comment on it. And the most important thing you can do about the entire process is you have to completely separate any form of apologizing, responsibility taking, you know, we should do better next time. Like, you have to be clinical about it. Like, this happened, it wasn't good. Here's why. You have to give people who were feeling directly responsible for the flop, whatever the flop was, to feel very free to comment on what happened. Like, you need to encourage them to speak to the fact that they screwed up, yet without any sense of like, well, I need to make myself look better or I need to create a, cast a certain light on the decisions that I made. Like, just get rid of all emotion. Exactly. Describe what happened.
- [23:04]
Unknown
Do we have a structured time for these postmortems? This is like, hey, we have a weekly postmortem on what happened last week. How do we make sure that we don't just go, yeah, it's a really nice idea and then actually not do it.
- [23:14]
Max Levchin
You have to give people responsibility to do them. You have to have a very directly responsible individual for authoring and presenting the post mortem. That's very important. You need to make sure their manager knows that their list of responsibilities has now been enhanced by this postmortem and they're on a hook for it. We typically try to say, hey, it's a week, maybe two weeks. That's the most you're allowed to take to generate a real postmortem. And then there is a weekly review that takes place within the teams that are post morteming. Something basically going through like, hey, this happened. The post mortem has been prepared. And then someone even more senior will say, that's a reasonable explanation, I buy it. Or like, you know, this is not quite deep enough. Like we need a better analysis of what down or I don't actually think these are accurate. And, and this is where you need your A players in the room because they will have the experience and the intuition and the past knowledge of how these things go to kind of say that that's a deep enough postmortem. Or this is just like, you describe what happened but you didn't explain it.
- [24:11]
Unknown
Outcome. We're highly differentiated in opinions these days.
- [24:16]
Max Levchin
The ones that I see are very matter of fact. It is never about the individual, it's always about the events. Always come down to a. This happened. This choice was made either by a program or a human. And if it's a program, it's a bug or a poorly calculated outcome. If it's a human, it can be a judgment error. Like I thought I would flip the switch and the lights would go on. It turned out to disable power for the entire city. That's a conversation we've had here, but it's never controversial, it's in the past. We need to do better. What do you do? Like you add a big guard on the switch that says before you go to turn off the lights for the entire city, please read this to light warning.
- [24:51]
Unknown
And speaking of kind of the decisions that lead to the post mortems, you said before make reversible decisions fast. And kind of makes me think of the one way, two way doors. Honestly, I think everything's really a one way door. I mean there are very, very few things that are two way doors. How do you respond and think about that?
- [25:07]
Max Levchin
I don't agree. Things that change your reputation, things that change relationships with partners, decisions that do that sort of thing are basically irreversible once you.
- [25:18]
Unknown
But two things when you look at. I always use this in example when you look at the transience of news and reputations. You know, Chamath on All in said about the Uyghurs and it being below his line. A week later he was number one on Spotify and Chamath is Chamath. And honestly, it has not impacted his reputation one bit.
- [25:39]
Max Levchin
There are probably some people who disagree with you on that topic. I don't know exactly who they are, but I think we can guess. But I agree that superficial statements, even explosive or incendiary, even fall off the newsline faster than you would expect them to. I think people's reputations recover and get managed and manipulated and maybe it's true for companies too. But I think rational people have long memories and do not forget, are not easily persuaded by Spotify. Top 10 or whatever is the front page of the Wall Street Journal today. The decisions that probably I care about a lot more are architectural decisions. You can decide to invest a year into rebuilding your systems in some new fashion and if that's a bad decision, you're going to look back and say, well, we're too far in. It was a terrible call. But you know, it's just, you know, it's so far and like what do. We can't just uproot this. So many people will be upset. Or you agree to a deal that is economically non viable and you have you're staring at a giant black hole and you want to get out of it, but you signed a contract and you can't. And maybe it's not that much money and so you don't care, but sometimes it can be a lot. So I believe in one way doors. And part of the postmortem culture is all about identifying one way doors that you thought were two way doors and saying we shouldn't have done that because that turned out to be not a thing we could easily come back from. I agree that a lot of decisions that seem like one way doors are not. That's probably a very fair statement.
- [27:04]
Unknown
Is there a decision that you thought was really reversible? Make it fast. And it turned out not to be so reversible?
- [27:10]
Max Levchin
I think for every 10 of the ones that I thought were not reversible, only one, maybe two were irreversible.
- [27:18]
Unknown
You've also said something that I love, which is care about how we make things mind the quality of the invisible parts. I really like that and I'd love for you to expand on it.
- [27:28]
Max Levchin
Yeah, that's another reference to Steve Jobs. He's obviously such a brilliant product guy and I aspire to be a good product guy myself. I think the notion of. So it's an oft repeated story where they signed the insides of the motherboard on I think the first Mac or something like that, and so the team put their signature on it. And the narrative around it was if you built something beautiful and amazing, you don't mind. In fact, you take pride in signing the insides because if anyone ever looks, they will be blown away by just how beautifully the whole thing is designed. And so that's where you want your artist's signature. There's definitely an natural and very healthy tension between shipping fast and building things beautifully. And building things beautifully requires design and time and consideration of what the next version would look like so you don't have to rebuild from scratch. There's not a hard and fast rule to know what matters so much that you want to do a great job. And therefore you will always have a team cleaning up or refactoring code or dealing with tech debt like that. That's a property of every startup that's been a startup for a decade. But there are parts that are obviously going to be important and valuable and could be as simple as some basic UI decision or something as complicated as a machine learning model that deals with credit underwriting, which is one of our sort of crown jewel type achievements. We have some very, very Very advanced ones. Those things, you know, matter. You know, you cannot let them be anything but the absolute best you can possibly produce. When somebody tells me we're doing X and it's going to be a month late, my natural reaction is to sort of jump up from my chair like, you know, how can you possibly, how dare you be so late with this thing? Like, why can't we ship it yesterday? I absolutely make exceptions for things that I know are going to be crucial for months and years to come. That's where you have to mind the quality of the invisible parts. A lot of times these are in the back end, be it credit or scalability or infra, etc. It doesn't make me, doesn't make it any easier to cope with to you hear someone say, yeah, it's slipped by a month because we found something that has to be redone, but, you know, it's important and sort of try to cope.
- [29:32]
Unknown
How do you feel about the concept of like the lean startup and MVP ship? When it's ready, just like the first thing you can get into customer sounds ship. Does that lead to a generation of shit software or is it actually a great way to get customer feedback?
- [29:45]
Max Levchin
I think there are definitely things that you want in hands of the customer as quickly as you possibly can. Like we have a prototyping team at a firm that is trusted, slash empowered to ship stuff that is not really beautiful or production quality even to get customer feedback. Because it's really important to find out if something, some crazy idea that we have has any sort of odds of success. Once it's out there and you get data and you think the data tells you that this is great, you don't just say, cool, let's leave it out there and go to the next one. We basically pull down the feature, pull down the product and say, okay, now we're going to do it right. We're going to make it scalable, we're going to make it beautiful, we're going to make sure that it actually stands the test of time. The idea of finding out of the idea was really important. But if you believe that ideas speak for themselves so much that it can be garbage, you will end up with a collection of garbage and generation of garbage software. And you just have to know when the moment is to say, actually that really does have traction. Someone will build a better version of this if I don't do it myself. And that's what you have to do now.
- [30:50]
Unknown
Do you think speed is the most important determinant of success in Startups.
- [30:53]
Max Levchin
It's one of the most important. It's very rare that I cannot think of more than fewer than a handful of companies who had gotten to huge success, huge scale by just kind of rolling along. I'm sure I don't know the inside story and what seems to me like rolling along is probably not rolling along. In fact, they were probably feeling like it's breakneck pace on the inside. They just didn't show it very well. There's some founders and some CEOs who have the duck foot property where they're like placid above water and the feet are going at crazy pace below water. I am not one of those. You can always tell if I'm trying to go faster from the feet up. But they're people who are capable of maintaining composure and maybe their teams are composing themselves too.
- [31:34]
Unknown
That's interesting. You said we are a writing culture. Favor short, pithy one pagers to novels or live rants. I personally like a live rant being born with a microphone in my hand, as you kindly suggested. What does a writing culture truly mean to you, Max, and why do you think it's optimal?
- [31:52]
Max Levchin
So it feeds back into that notion of postmortems, right? If you have a depository and we literally have a postmortem depot where people can go and review every major or minor thing we did going back to the beginning of a firm time and learn from it, it's really valuable. We have a library of case studies that are internal to the company saying, well, that was a screw up. The great outage of xyz. What happened there? Oh, we managed to overload the back end with the front end and so on. So it's just very valuable to have these things not in a form of oral tradition, but like written down. And then to do that, well, you have to have writing culture where people are typing up random words that come into their mouth and are in their minds and basically say, all right, well read this makes sense in my head, but maybe you'll make sense of it too. So you have to have some baseline quality requirement for writing. And basically the most important thing about technical writing and business writing is simplicity. Like if you're reading a 12 page thing describing a feature, you're probably going to miss details. And so if it's a feature that's meant to be confined to like 25 by 25 pixels, the description should be two pages, maybe three. You should not have many, many, many pages of prose describing the impact on the world you expect to have. And how this relates to world hunger, et cetera. Pithy is important. Live rants are good as motivation. Sometimes they're good at sort of aligning the team around a story and a strategy that the story represents. In my experience and I host and all hands meeting at least once every two weeks, more often than that, usually you end up saying 12 things and people remember two. So the shorter the better. Like just, just being short and pithy is way more valuable even, even spoken. But in writing people just run out of time. We have distractions, notifications are popping up like you have a 12 page to read and you're like oh man. And some people are very good at focusing, but I think majority of people are less focused than they'd like to be and less focused than they think they are.
- [33:51]
Unknown
Mai so you back in the office now.
- [33:53]
Max Levchin
It's quite hybrid and it really depends on the geo. So we have offices now worldwide and by offices I mean places because some places do not have an office. Our world headquarters notionally is still San Francisco. So that's where I'll be today. And I think it'll be on the order of half full, maybe a little bit more than half full. Our other coast office in New York will have standing room only. There will be not enough seats, not enough cubbyholes to hide in because people will be there in such quantities and everything in between. It's not true that we are fully back. We have not.
- [34:26]
Unknown
Would you like to be fully back if you could? Every CEO I speak to says I wish we were fully back or we are fully back.
- [34:33]
Max Levchin
I think there's a ton of value in being fully back. Again, like everything else, there's texture to this value. If you have a C level team, one way of pushing them into the B level is you make sure they all sit together and are surrounded by a players who are constantly telling them like hey, go better do to do more if you have a great team. Some people are actually more productive when they are able to cut out all distractions and so they can hide themselves in their spare bedroom and just Write code for 12 hours or design product for 12 hours or whatever it is. And so I care a lot more about output and productivity than I care about where you are physically. But the thing that I'm completely non compromising about, there has to be enough together time. And so the notion of everybody back in the office, even if all of your meetings are on zoom because you're talking to our team in Madrid from San Francisco, it's hard to make that argument it's just not a very productive use of commute time. If you live in the East Bay and you need to get in BART and you ride across and you get to the office and you get into a cubbyhole and then you're on Zoom for 12 hours or 5 hours or 6 hours or whatever it is, it's hard to make the argument that you should have been in that BART train, coming in and coming back. The argument of I've never met my team but I'm as productive in person, I only see them on Zoom is a stupid argument. That's just not true. You form relationships, you understand each other's decision making style, you break bread together, you form camaraderie. That has to happen. That is entirely not optional. And I think everyone who's saying I can be fully remote and these people don't ever have to meet in person is kidding themselves.
- [36:01]
Unknown
When was morale lowest in the company and what did you learn about leadership from that period?
- [36:06]
Max Levchin
We had to do a layoff two years ago. That was morale lowest point for me. And I think everyone around me and those are never easy. And I've had to do more than one in my life. And every time it doesn't get any easier. It's always brutal. And no matter how did you learn.
- [36:25]
Unknown
Anything about messaging from the first time taken to the second time?
- [36:29]
Max Levchin
Very first time I had to do it was certainly not affirm which. And every time I have done it, I said I hope to never do it again. But the very first time I did it, I didn't know what I was doing and I was terrified of owning the responsibility that I screwed up. I was the CEO. Every single time I had to do a layoff and the first time you feel like everyone's going to blame me, it's my fault. I just want to run and hide. This is terrible. I have to go through with this, but I can't wait for the moment to be over, for the day to be over. I just need to not be here. Actually, a good friend of mine who was at the time an exec at that company took me aside and said, hey, this sucks for all of us. You are the leader. Like, you have to be out there helping people pack their boxes. Like, you have to be part of the goodbye. This is not a death sentence. It's a professional event. It sucks. No, no less than any other really major trauma. But you can play this from the comfort of your office or in the middle of the floor that's crying and like, go be with the people, it'll feel better in the end, and they will feel better in the end. And so that's what I did. It was sort of between cathartic and therapeutic. And I. That was a really important lesson to learn. You cannot hide from the grief that a layoff is. And then the other thing that I learned over the years of watching my friends, having to do it and certainly having to do it a couple times myself, empathy is really important. The other thing that you will find if people actually, if you've built a great culture, this isn't the thing you can fix in the moment. But if the culture of the company is great, the blow is much softer than you think it'll be because people understand that you had tried with every possible strategic or tactical idea to not have to go through this. And so this is the decision. It was the last decision of a long list that he could have taken. And they are inevitably more understanding and less hard on you than you are on yourself. Like, one of the more amazing and sort of emotional events for me of the affirm layoff a couple of years ago now was every single person I talked to had said, hey, I get it. This happened. We grew too fast. We overhired. I understand. I even understand why me and not the next person. I hope there's an opportunity to come back. I really love this place. I want to come back.
- [38:39]
Unknown
Is over hiring a calculated risk?
- [38:41]
Max Levchin
Yes, it certainly is. That's a good answer, in retrospect, to your question about calculated risks that did not pan out. You decide that you want every incremental engineer to build more features while the fundraising is good, and then suddenly it's not. And what do you do? And there's nothing you can do other than to say, so, sorry, but some of you cannot have a seat anywhere.
- [39:00]
Unknown
And so the theory was, hey, the features will pay off and that will return cash. Good. And it didn't. Or it was like, hey, we will have a continuous cash tap of fundraising. That didn't happen.
- [39:11]
Max Levchin
The analysis is typically about how fast something will grow, how well you can have the market protect your cash flow if it doesn't, how profitable something will be. It's roughly what he said, but the calculus is a little bit more complicated. You're typically estimating more than a few variables. One of my favorite internal lines at a firm is affirm is a constant multivariate analysis. Problem solving. Like, it's very rare. It's like, well, that thing, do we think it's 5? Or is it 10? Or is it be is going to be 500. Like those are very easy to estimate. It's like well we have nine variables and they're all non linearly distributed and some of them multiply with the others and some of the other ones we don't really know how they relate to the first pack. We're going to have to estimate all of them and predict the outcome based on that. And so it's hard problem to solve not just for a firm but for any company. You're inevitably evaluating a bunch of variables concurrently.
- [40:02]
Unknown
Matt, you said about growth there. Can I ask a blunt one? Is Klarna growing faster than the firm and how do you think about that in terms of Klarna's US expansion?
- [40:12]
Max Levchin
I think they announced that they grew 32% last quarter. I think we announced that we grew 35% in the last few quarters. And their numbers aren't public, they're about to go public. So it will be a little bit easier to track their numbers I think for all involved. But for the last several quarters from estimates we have been taking share in the market against all competitors, not just them. That's a good sign for us. We offer more services though. Majority of our competitors specialize in, in paying for or something very, very specific. We made the decision from day one to provide every possible service from the 45 day super short term loan all the way out to four years. Very, very few people do everything and so it should be a natural consequence of our ability to serve all that we would take disproportionate share.
- [41:00]
Unknown
That entrance into the market is pretty well done. Is that the size of the market? Is that the not grabbing the opportunity from your side? How do you analyze that?
- [41:10]
Harry Stebbings
Because it's a, a big task to.
- [41:11]
Unknown
Go after the US market from Sweden of all places. Respectfully, how do you think about that?
- [41:17]
Harry Stebbings
Is that like fuck, we dropped the.
- [41:18]
Unknown
Ball or like fuck it's a massive market?
- [41:21]
Max Levchin
Are you asking me to analyze their strategy? That's a postmortem. They will have to write for themselves. I'm not sure I'm qualified. I don't have all the information. Also I think it's very healthy incidentally for CEOs of startups to spend very, very little time on other people's strategy. The competitive analysis is valuable at the product level and sales strategy level and sort of like what do they do that we could do better? Is a really good question. To ask what is their strategy? Is like asking what weather will be 12?
- [41:53]
Unknown
Nobody could say hey, they've been really smart in this part of that go to market or their partnerships.
- [41:57]
Max Levchin
Yeah, we do lots of that. Like we tear down all competitor products, all their sales products, sales efforts. Like everything we can get our hands on, we learn from because it's like someone is making mistakes for us. We should learn on those too.
- [42:09]
Unknown
Is regulation a friend of buy now, pay later or an inhibitor to growth?
- [42:14]
Max Levchin
I think we're always on the record as pro thoughtful regulation. I think you shouldn't be paying any late fees. But late fee cap I was very happy about because I think that's a good development. People should not be building their profit models based on I'll just raise the amount of late fee.
- [42:28]
Unknown
Do you like being a public company CEO?
- [42:31]
Max Levchin
Some days yes, other days no.
- [42:34]
Unknown
I think what are the days where you're like, yes, and one of the days you're like, no.
- [42:38]
Max Levchin
Days when it's yes is when it's not very different from being a private company CEO. Being a public company, generally speaking, gives you access to more capital, exposes you to really smart investors you get engaged with. So there's lots of things to like. There's some investors out there that will only invest in public equities and they are brilliant people. Like they've seen it all before. They could write books about what a great public CEO looks like. And you want to go spend a half an hour with them and ask them them, teach me how to be as good as blank. If you're a private company CEO, they might take your meeting, but they're probably busy. If you're a public company CEO, they might own your stock and then they want to talk to you because they want to assess you as much as they want to help you. And so that's a cheat code to access some of the best brains out there. The days where you're like, oh man. Is inevitably when you're like, well, I now have to go read this filing that we have to make because it's part of my responsibilities to make sure I understand everything we're putting out there in the public and. And can't avoid that. And those are small prices to pay. But you do have added responsibilities that were not what you thought you'd be getting into when you were getting a computer science degree.
- [43:41]
Unknown
Is your mentality tied to the market cap of the company? It's so difficult to detach yourself from the valuation of your company. What have been your biggest lessons on that?
- [43:52]
Max Levchin
The short answer is I'm sure it is, but I'm sure I put an enormous amount of effort into Making sure it's not. And so it's a balance you're constantly trying to strike where the thing that is hard, harder is when you think you're doing a fantastic job and you can look at the internal numbers and you look at the external numbers, you're like, I am absolutely crushing it. And so sometimes it's very tempting to say, well, by now the market should know and they should just give us high marks. And that means the stock goes green, green, green. And more often than not, you have a temporal mismatch where you're doing great, you know you're doing great and the market thinks you're not. And if you're a startup or fairly high volatility stock, you end up with, well, I did great. Why am I getting punished? And the short answer is, it's the market. You just don't get to tell it when to react to good news or bad news and how so the more you sort of convince yourself that in the end there's a great. I think it's attributed to Warren Buffett, but it's actually from Graham, his mentor. In the short term, the market is a voting machine. In the long term, it's a weighing machine. I take great comfort in saying this to myself whenever the market I think misjudges me. But I will say I've gone through some great lengths, by the way, to make sure I don't accidentally stumble on my ticker. So, you know, my Apple desktop, if I click in the top right corner and stocks drops down, I cannot see my stock ticker. So I, I don't accidentally discover that today's a red day or a green day. Just to make sure I stay focused. You have to think long term if, if you are catching yourself thinking short term, and by short term, I mean let's have an amazing quarter. And like, you're, you're in trouble.
- [45:27]
Unknown
Do you see a dip in employee morale though, when stock go down?
- [45:30]
Max Levchin
I don't, but I think I make it my business. Every time I talk to our outcomes as a company, I take great pains not to talk about the price of the stock. The only time I talked about the price of our stock to our employees at length, when it was flying very high after the IPO. And so the heady days of 21, I'd actually repeatedly said, look, do not get accustomed to whatever numbers you're reading on the screen today. Like, we will not know what this company is worth for years. Just like, if you think it's too low, good for you. If you think it's too high? It may well be. Like, just do not look, do not get conviction that this is actually correlated to some tangible metric. Like first we have to get profitable, then we have to show revenue growth rates, then we have to show net income growth. And that's what, you know, long term, the weighing machine. That's what that weighs. It's not weighing sentiment. It should not be weighing sentiment.
- [46:27]
Unknown
Max, we're going to do a quick fire round. So I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?
- [46:32]
Max Levchin
Sure. But sometimes I will take a very long time. He'll have to edit out the awkward silences.
- [46:37]
Unknown
It's the joys of podcasting. What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?
- [46:41]
Max Levchin
I have this conviction that I can learn anything very, very quickly and 8 out of 10 times I'm right and 2 out of 10 times I'm completely wrong. I decided two years ago that I was just going to read the attention paper and become an expert in LLMs. Just read all the papers after that and I'm still in the process of getting anywhere near expertly status. I try to keep up. It's a lot of really interesting stuff happening in AI.
- [47:04]
Unknown
I just had Mark Banning off on the show about 12 hours ago and he said we're getting to the upper limit of LLM efficiency. Agree or disagree?
- [47:11]
Max Levchin
Agree. But I don't think we are going to stay with LLMs forever. I think we're going to expand the systems that use LLMs. Reasoning models already are not pure LLMs. They have some iterative processes within them. I think we'll invent more really interesting things with that.
- [47:28]
Unknown
Like what?
- [47:29]
Max Levchin
An obvious idea which I know has been explored and will be explored more is a notion of multiple competing LLMs basically debating each other for the right answer. That's not a pure LLM model. You can amplify intelligence of humans by having three smart people in a room instead of just one person.
- [47:45]
Unknown
As a public company CEO, do you have to have an AI story today?
- [47:49]
Max Levchin
I generally really dislike stories that have no substance. So I think you have to ask yourself, are we taking full advantage of the best available tools? And the most interesting available tools tools right now are AI. So if you sort of look through your closet and say, we're not really using any of this stuff, I gotta have a story for the market, you're doing two things wrong. You're telling a story that isn't true and you're not using the most interesting available tools. If you're Using the most interesting available tools. Your investors might be happy if it told the story, but if you didn't, I don't think they should really care that much. Like, as you go public, a lot of this becomes are you growing at the right scale? Are you taking appropriate risks? Are you managing to profitability? The storytelling hour of like, oh, by the way, we have this shiny item that we're so excited about that feeds the voting machine and I'm sure some of it is important, but I spent a lot more time feeding the weighing machine.
- [48:38]
Unknown
Max, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?
- [48:40]
Max Levchin
Basically do exactly the same thing I do now. So before affirm was a thing, I made a list of difficult problems that I thought required solving. I decided that financial services are money at the core, is one that I am well suited to solve just given my past and experience that I bring. But if I knew I couldn't fail at anything, I would revisit my list of hard problems and that inevitably had things like food, water, shelter, energy. Just solve them all.
- [49:10]
Unknown
If you could start a company with only one member of the PayPal mafia again, who would it be?
- [49:15]
Max Levchin
Peter.
- [49:16]
Unknown
Why?
- [49:17]
Max Levchin
He's amazing. He's brilliant.
- [49:18]
Unknown
More so than like, Elon.
- [49:20]
Max Levchin
Elon is brilliant too. If I could have a choice between starting company with Peter or starting a company with Elon, it'd be a very hard choice to make. I think Peter is a more known quantity for me. That's why I answered the way I did. So we started the company together and Elon's company merged into PayPal to form the modern PayPal. So I know exactly what he's like under pressure and stressed out and trying to raise money and not succeeding for a time and dealing with personal life issues. And so I've seen him go from, you know, mid-20s to older. And so the.
- [49:55]
Unknown
How has he changed over time?
- [49:57]
Max Levchin
When you observe someone closely for a long time, you don't actually notice the change. You see the episodes, but you don't know how the person really changes. We've all grown up. We've all become probably more measured and slightly more careful, slightly less crazy, maybe slightly more crazy, easy. I don't know. He hasn't changed very much. The thing that makes Peter is and by the way, actually very similar to Elon in that sense. So there's a really interesting echo between the two. They both have this amazing quality that I spent as much time absorbing as I could over times that I worked with them where they bring out the best effort in people around them, they somehow make you feel that you can and should do better work. The conversation with Peter always left me thinking the problem that I thought was really too hard to solve, I should go give it another try. Like, I think I can. I think this, this is actually doable. And he is genuinely excited about you solving this problem through the capacity that you have. And I think that's an amazing thing to work with someone on anything because they're just fueling your desire to stay late and, you know, do more work.
- [51:02]
Unknown
What's your favorite consumer brand and why them?
- [51:05]
Max Levchin
I love Airbnb less so because the overall brand is amazing and obviously it's a super successful company. But their tagline, at least the one they promoted for a while, was belong anywhere. I think it's such a profound two word brand statement. Like, you know exactly what it means, you know exactly what they stand for. It's evocative. You imagine yourself in all kinds of crazy places. You're in Himalayas or in the Amazon and you're like, that is an amazing story told with two words. Back to my brevity. Love of brevity. I think kind of the old world. The probably my favorite brand that I look at every morning. So I'm a huge fan of coffee and bicycles. Not at the same time frequently, but sometimes at the same time. So every morning I roll out of bed, I stumble downstairs and make myself an espresso. My favorite espresso machine brand is La Marzocco. It's this, like, I don't actually know that much. They're an informed customer, so I have to fold it. Full disclosure, but they were a huge favorite of mine long before I convinced them to give a firm a try. It tells this amazing story of Italian manufacturing and someone with a mustache smelling the coffee fumes, going, oh, this is a perfect espresso. And it's this sort of story in a cup that you just think has to go. Hundreds and hundreds of years back, they must have been making coffee in Venice with mortar and pestle or something. I don't think it's nearly that old. I think it's maybe on the order of 60 to 100 years old. But it's just this timeless coffee awesomeness that I love and I use it every day and every time I look like, yes, yes, my coffee machine. I love it so much.
- [52:38]
Unknown
You can be CEO of any other company for a day. What company would you be CEO of?
- [52:44]
Max Levchin
I have all these unfulfilled dreams of running a much smaller company that makes widgets. I spend My entire life making things out of bits. I would love to make things out of atoms. One of my favorite executives came up with a brand name for a company that would sell pickles called Lethal Pickles. This has to do with a story in the very early days of a firm where I try to teach people how to make pickles because I love pickles too. And I managed to screw it up badly enough where they eventually turned toxic and grew mold. And it was terrible. And I was briefly trying to persuade people that it's fine. It's actually not a problem. You should eat them. And almost single handedly wiped out the entire firm team. But unfortunately no one ate any and we threw them away. But the story of Max's Lethal Pickles survives in the annals of the firm postmortem history. Someone said, well, you should eventually go fulfill your dream of making things out of atoms and molecules in this case, and sell pickles online. Call it Lethal Pickles. So one day I'll start lethalpickles.com I.
- [53:42]
Unknown
Have the domain we're going to name the show Max's Lethal Pickles. Final one for you. You're asked questions by employees, by investors, both private and public, by a lot of people, everyday journalists. What question are you? Never asked. It'd just be nice to be asked. It'd be interesting to be asked if.
- [54:02]
Max Levchin
You are a careful student of my shareholder letters of which I have now written, it cannot possibly be 16, but I think it's 16 or 15. You will see that every single one of them contains a reference to the movie Big Lebowski. You have to look sometimes hard to find it, but no one's ever asked me, what's with the Big Lebowski? In your shareholder?
- [54:23]
Unknown
What is with the Big Lebowski?
- [54:26]
Max Levchin
I'm a huge fan of movies. When I was freshman in college, all I wanted to do is take computer science classes. And I came into my university thinking I'm just going to take every possible computer science class and nothing else because everything else is stupid and boring and I just want to write code. And I still love writing code. If I knew I couldn't fail at solve the world's problems at night, I would just write code from that point on for fun. But it turned out that you actually had to take some required courses, so you couldn't just take computer science. So I took film study as like a this will be easy. It'll be fun. I got to watch things that are actually like gems of moviemaking world. Things like north by Northwest and like Hitchcock movies and all sorts of stuff that blows your mind. And if you don't know about it, again, you wouldn't watch it, because these are old black and white movies. Why would you care? Then you watch them, and you're like, oh, my God, these are stories that have to be required viewing. So one of the movies I watched was Seven Samurai, and it became this obsession where I've seen it over a hundred times, and no one asked me about that one either. But the silliest movie with yet a similarly profound kind of a cultural, and, at least to me, intellectual impact on me is the Big Lebowski. It's this comedy, tragedy, whodunit commentary on 1980s the United States. It's like everything in two hours of cinema that if you haven't watched it, you should watch. And it is unbelievably funny. It's one of the funniest movies ever made. And somehow, over the years. How do you interview talent? One of the things you can do is you can figure out if you share cultural artifacts at the time of the interview. And so when I was interviewing a good half of my management team, I found out before or after I decided that they were the right ones. They were huge fans of the Big Lebowski. And so the team that writes the letter with me is this group of people who loves the Big Lebowski, and we sort of made it our business of sticking Lebowski quotes into our shareholder letters.
- [56:16]
Unknown
I have one final one for you that I know you won't have been asked. I don't think you'll have been asked, but it's kind of a meaningful one. What about the way that your parents brought you up? Have you deliberately decided not to apply to the way that you bring your children up?
- [56:29]
Max Levchin
That's a deep question. So I grew up in an academic family, and for them, the notion of advanced degrees was the ladder to climb. And so it was embarrassing that my mom never got a PhD to her mom, who was exceptionally important influence in my life and my mom's life. And so this notion of the way you achieve in the world, the. The goals to set, the ways to think about success and failure in life, is measured through academic success. My grandmother has papers in the Harvard Library. She's long gone, but she was a Soviet scientist that managed to have her astronomy PhD thesis referenced in dozens of academic papers in the United States. And so she achieved the academic peak early in life and stayed there. And as she was very old and quite ill, she'd asked me, well, what about the PhD track. And I was just about to start my third company. I was like, you know, I'm going to get a bachelor's and basically because of you. Otherwise I would have long dropped out and moved to Palo Alto and started a company already. It all worked out in the end, so I'm not complaining. But they grew up in a world where entrepreneurship was not a factor, so the union was not a place where entrepreneurship meant anything in those days. I would love for my kids to at least explore entrepreneurship and decide that it's important. So telling them you must spend a decade on the school bench is counterintuitive to that. And so I never told them, your storied grandmother with her multiple PhDs is just waiting for you to get your first advanced degree and keep going. And I felt very guilty about it. The day we took PayPal public, my mom asked me, well, will you finally move back to Chicago and get a PhD? And I was like, but this is not the response yet. That is what I was brought up with, and it weighs on me, and I don't want it weighing on my kids.
- [58:17]
Unknown
Have you ever been asked that question before?
- [58:19]
Max Levchin
I don't think so. Good try.
- [58:21]
Unknown
I like it. It's a really revealing question. Max, dude, it's so lovely to see you again. I so appreciate you doing this, opening up, being so brilliant. You are fantastic and I just so appreciate the time.
- [58:31]
Max Levchin
Thank you. You're always. You're always fun to talk to. Good to see you again.
- [58:37]
Harry Stebbings
Honestly, I think I just have the best job in the world. I mean, getting the chance to sit down with Max Levchin, co founder of PayPal and now founder of a firm, and ask the management lessons that I did. What an incredibly awesome job I have. If you want to watch the full episode, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC.com. But before we leave you today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collective $8 billion in total revenue. Wow. Second, Kajabi's users keep 100% of their earnings, with the average Kajabi creator bringing in over $30,000 per year. In case you didn't know, Kajabi is the leading creator commerce platform with an all in one suite of tools including websites, email marketing, digital products, payment processing, and analytics for as low as $69 per month. Whether you are looking to build a private community, write a paid newsletter, or launch a course, Kajabi is the only platform that will enable you to build and Grow your online online business without taking a cut of your revenue. 20VC listeners can try Kajabi for free for 30 days by going to kajabi.com 20VC that's kajabi.com k a J-A-B-I.com 20VC and after building your online empire with Kajabi, it's time to scale your global team with Remote Seamless Hiring solutions. So every business is a global business in 20. But how do you do payroll for your global business and team and comply with international labor laws? Well, Remote handles payroll, benefits, taxes, stock options and compliance to help companies of all sizes pay and manage full time and contract workers all over the world. No matter where your team lives or works, Remote's Global Employment Solutions keep your team, your finances and your intellectual property secure. Remote never charges hidden fees, just best in class Global Employment Solutions for a low flat rate. The world's top Remote companies love remote. GitLab, the world's largest all remote organization, trusts Remote to run their global team. Remote is funded by Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and the host of the greatest Podcast ever, Harry Stubbings and 20VC. Ready to learn more? Head over to remote.com 20VC that's 20VC and begin hiring within minutes. Enjoy 10% off your first three months by using the promo code 20VC at checkout. Now that your team is up and running worldwide, make sure your finances work just as hard with Brex, the ultimate Financial Stack for startups so when Brex was founded, it wasn't just about creating another financial product. It was about solving the really gritty challenges that founders face daily. Let's be honest, building something from the ground up is hard. Hard enough without dealing with clunky, outdated banks that pile on fees and leave your cash idle. Brex is different. It's the financial stack that scales with you no matter where you are in your journey. From corporate cards to maximizing your Runway to earning yield on your cash, Brex was designed with founders in mind to make every dollar go further so you can focus on building. And here's what really stands out to me. Brex combines the best of checking treasury and FDIC insurance in one powerhouse account. You can send and receive money globally at lightning speed, earn Yield from day one and still access your funds whenever you need. Plus, with 20x the standard protection through program banks, your cash is not just working harder, it's working safer too. It's no surprise that 1 in 3 venture backed startups in the US with companies like Anthropic, Coinbase, and Robinhood. My God these companies are incredible. Trust bracks to help them grow. If you want to join the smartest startups on the planet, head over to brex.com startups and see what they can do for you. As always, we so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible 20 product episode coming on Friday.