Miguel Armaza 🎙🎧

Max Levchin (Max Levchin) Founded Affirm and Slide. Co-Founded PayPal, along with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Invented the CAPTCHA. Runs a $22 Billion publicly traded company. And launched the Levchin Prize for real-world cryptography. I sat down with Max Levchin, Co-Founder and CEO of Affirm, for an in-depth Fintech Leaders interview. Max is one of the most technically brilliant founders in the history of fintech. He arrived in the US from Ukraine at age 16 with zero English. He taught himself the language by watching TV and playing clarinet. Today he runs one of the largest publicly traded fintechs in the world. We discussed the backstory of Affirm and their deliberate removal of late fees and compounding interest, why he believes the credit card is a broken product and how they’re fixing it, Affirm's powerful network effects, what the Citrini Research bear case got wrong, and what he learned working directly with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. This was a special live recording at Affirm's headquarters in San Francisco. Thank you, Max and team, for hosting me!