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Affirm CEO claims he’s not worried about Apple Pay Later

Affirm Chief Executive Officer Max Levchin claims he’s not worried about Apple’s new buy now, pay later service, Apple Pay Later. Apple Pay Later allows users to split the cost of an Apple Pay purchase into four equal payments spread over six weeks. Mark Gurman and Emily Chang for Bloomberg News: “I don’t think there’s much concern,” Levchin said Tuesday in an interview on Bloomberg…

Max Levchin’s Affirm seeks capital amid surge in fintech funding

Another consumer finance business is lining up investors for its largest cash infusion yet.

Affirm, founded by PayPal’s Max Levchin, is said to be raising as much as $1.5 billion in a combination of debt and equity, according to people with knowledge of the company’s fundraising activities. Josh Kushner’s New York venture capital firm Thrive Capital is said to be leading the financing, with…

“I am not much given to regret, so I puzzled over this one a while. Should have taken much more statistics in college, I think.”

—Max Levchin, Paypal Co-Founder.

 Societal health can be assessed by a handful of factors: economic mobility (is the current generation earning more than their parents did?), upward mobility (the rate of which an individual can improve their own socioeconomic status), productivity (how efficiently one can earn income) and lastly, whether they have sufficient access to the resources and tools required to advance one’s… Read More

By Adam Bryant, NY Times, Dec. 9, 2016

Interview with Max Levchin, chief executive and co-founder of Affirm, an online financial services firm

Q. Tell me about your early years.

A. I was born in Kiev, Ukraine. I spent my formative years under the Soviet state, which wasn’t all that bad, actually. Ukraine is kind of a backwater, so we didn’t really have any of the tension from those days.

I had a fairly happy childhood. I grew up in a very cool family--pretty much every person was a scientist. My entire family lived together. My grandmother, my grandfather, my mom and dad, my brother and I all lived in the same apartment, so I got this exposure to two generations of scientists.

My grandmother had a double Ph.D. in astrophysics. She ran the Kiev observatory for many years. So I had this kind of extremely sheltered but very fun childhood where I would sometimes get to play with this giant telescope at the observatory.

My mom was told by the Soviet state, her employer, that she had to learn how to program computers. I was 10, and her job was a couple of doors down from our house. So I would go to see her after school, and she would say, “Try and understand this programming thing and help me out,” which is how I got into software. Within three months, it was very clear that I was progressing faster than she was.

But my childhood was disrupted somewhat bizarrely by the Chernobyl accident. I was 11 at the time, and I had to spend the next year and a half living with relatives in an extremely rural community in Crimea. That was kind of a “grow up now” moment.

How so?

Suddenly I was in a place where outhouses were the norm in plumbing. We would walk in snow for four or five miles to get to school every day. I went from a sheltered upbringing among scientists and ideas to be told that when I was done shoveling snow, I could do my homework.

And how did you react to that?

I adapted fairly quickly. I was exceedingly bored because I came from a very high-quality school, and it was as if the work we were doing was rolled back two years. I didn’t have to do any homework, because I became the best student in the school in a heartbeat.

The thing I remember vividly is that I missed having access to a computer very much. So I got in the habit of programming on paper, which actually served me really well. So I would just write it out in longhand. I had stacks and stacks of notebooks filled with programs for games and data-processing software.

One of the most gratifying things, when I went back to Kiev and could use a computer again, is that I would type in all the source code for all these games that I had designed on paper, and they would just work.

How do you think your parents and grandparents influenced your leadership style today?

My grandmother was exceptionally formative. She basically was willpower personified. If she wanted something to happen, it would happen. She had this walk-through-walls style where you did not ask for permission or forgiveness; you just did what you needed to get it done. I still judge some of my decisions based on, what would Grandma decide? Was I sufficiently tenacious or not enough?

And one thing I have found over the years is that in hiring, the dominant characteristic I select for is this sense of perseverance in really tough situations. It’s like the difference between endurance athletes and sprinters. I think it is a really good predictor for how people behave under severe stress.