The work of an influencer never stops. Max Levchin got rich at 27, then went straight back to the office. In 1999, Levchin co-founded PayPal, which was sold to eBay three years later for 1.5 billion. Levchin earned a fortune of 100 million from this transaction.

Soon after, he launched Slide, a social media company that he sold to Google for hundreds of millions. He now runs another company, Affirm, a digital lending business, as well as other businesses. Levchin is here to explain again and again how to find and build successful tech startups.

Hello everyone. Welcome to /"Influencers./" My name is Andy Serwer. And welcome to our guest, Max Levchin, CEO of Affirm, co-founder of PayPal – part of the PayPal mafia and a million other companies – maybe just a mathematician. We can call you that. We'll cover everything you've done.

MAX LEVCHIN: I like that. I like this.

ANDY SERWER: Anyway, welcome. Happy to see you.

MAX LEVCHIN: Nice to see you.

ANDY SERWER: So, Max, how would you describe what you're doing to, say, an 8-year-old nephew? What do you do for a living? What is your job?

MAX LEVCHIN: So I normally tell people that I start and run businesses – it's kind of a simple introduction. But when I press it, I go back to, I'm just writing code. That's kind of how I consider myself.

ANDY SERWER: A coder.

MAX LEVCHIN: A coder, a hacker, a builder, a business creator. It's… I didn't think about this one…

ANDY SERWER: Okay.

MAX LEVCHIN: –too carefully.

ANDY SERWER: Very good. Well, maybe we could come back to that. Why don't you tell me now about Affirm, your latest company.

MAX LEVCHIN: It's the latest company in over seven years, so it's a bit of a long-running startup, but still a startup. The… it's a bit of a throwback to my PayPal years. So PayPal aimed to innovate beyond the credit card rails, where we took credit cards – which 20 years ago were very difficult to use online – and built the user interface – which s has proven to be much more than a user. interface– to make it easy to use in a browser. And online commerce has never been the same.

20 years later, it took me a long time to realize that the underlying infrastructure – what's under the tracks, under the ground – is not particularly well designed. It's not transparent. This is not particularly consumer friendly. It has its own UI issues: making money off people's mistakes, sort of, on a very fundamental level.

And so I wanted to go back and see if it could be done better. Seven and some years ago, we started a company with a very narrow view: let's do a better job of credit. So…so the venerable credit score that everyone uses today is pretty opaque. It's not really clear.

There is a lot of information online, where this fraction is the amount of credit you used and this fraction is the amount of money you made. But there's not much else that's been well understood. And, as a result – and, from personal experience, I came to the United States when I was a teenager and I had to ask my co-founder of PayPal to sign for my first car loan, my first cell phone.

You know, this is after PayPal's IPO, so your credit history isn't really put to good use while your credit is being evaluated. And so let's affirm, at the start, this idea, let's build a better score – let's build something that is transparent, inclusive, that takes people where they are excluded.

And then it expanded from there, where at this point we're integrated into the point of sale as a record lender. So when someone wants to buy something, we guarantee… and say, here's the amount of credit we can offer you. We will actually pay the merchants, take the risk on you and finance your purchase. And then we'll bill you over time.

The cool thing about Affirm is that because of this commitment to transparency, we set everything in dollars, as well as pricing. So you know exactly how much you are going to pay all inclusive. So your capital, your interests, we stop at this figure. So once you've paid us the amount we promise, you can't pay us more, meaning we don't add interest to the principal, but more importantly, we don't charge any fees of any kind, including no fees. late fee.

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