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The Tim Ferriss Show

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

6/9/20261 hr 58 min

Max Levchin (@mlevchin) is a serial entrepreneur and investor in 100+ startups. He's the founder and CEO of Affirm, the payment network powering consumer purchases and merchant growth. An original PayPal co-founder, Max served as CTO until its 2002 acquisition by eBay.

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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.

*

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Clips

Socialism’s Built-In Corruption
Impress Your Mate Daily
Banks Laughed At No Late Fees
Denied A Car After IPO
Living Inside Cryptonomicon
Ultrasound Brain Interfaces

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Tim Ferriss· Host0:00

    Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers of different types. And my guest today is someone I've wanted to have on for a long time, Max Levchin. Max was born in Ukraine before moving to the US and settling in Chicago in 1991. He taught himself how to code with a pen and paper, with a pad of paper and a pen under trees in parks. And from those humble beginnings, he has gone on to do a million different things. He founded Affirm and Slide. He helped create Yelp, and I'll come back to a few of these. He co-founded PayPal along with people you would recognize, like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and others. He co-created the CAPTCHA, the first commercial implementation. And he [laughs] has now invested in more than 100 startups. Computer scientist, serial entrepreneur, philanthropist, he does it all. He's also the co-founder and chairman of Glow, a data-driven fertility company. Affirm and Glow were both created and launched from his San Francisco-based innovation lab, SciFi VC. And in 2002, not surprising given everything I just mentioned, 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. And in this conversation, we get into a lot of details of how he thinks about productivity, scheduling, his other obsessions, how he applies his meticulous tracking and performance orientation

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