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Max Levchin

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2026-06-09
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2026-06-09
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  1. “No, my work is out there. I try to build in public if you're interested in a firm, obviously a firm.com is where you find that Tend to go deep, so my project list is short at any given moment, but leftchin.net.com either one is the list of those things.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Of course, exactly. And so that's a good book about him. These days, it's so hard to read books because there's so much content online and like podcast and blog form that you're sort of like, I'll get to this thing. It's content online feels ephemeral. So you're like, I must read this now because it might scroll off and I'll never see it again. A book is in my hand. Like I have books in my backpack that I travel with that I've been meaning to read for half a year now and I still haven't opened them and just like carry the weight.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “So anyway, so he is. A great example of someone who worked in some very serious stuff and was always playful. He's like Richard Feynman of Computer Science. So Feynman was famously brilliant and would like there's a great quote from Murray Yellman. Somebody asked him, like, what's your algorithm for solving really hard problems? Encounter really hard problem, step two, give it to Richard Feynman. Step three, receive solution. Shannon was kind of that in computer science. Proto computer science, obviously. He was building this in the 40s, 50s, 60s. And he managed to remain fun. He managed to have fun. He was just this unbelievable fountain of fun ideas and he was like a hardware tinker and made card counting devices and all kinds of hilarious stuff.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “I didn't learn this from anthropic people, but I would be shocked if that's not the answer. Claude is not a common name. And Shannon is obviously the inventor or the postulator of the information theory”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “It just seems like an unbelievable guy. So he was friends with Claude Shannon. That alone makes him unbelievably interesting. So Claude Shannon is kind of like a platonic ideal of what I thought I was going to be before I left academia because the guy is just like brilliant in every way. Like everything he touched became this flower of intellectual brilliance.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Are great books. There's a great book called A Mind at Play, which is Claude Shannon's biography. By the way, when I was preparing for our conversation, not nearly as well as you are, I was listening to your conversation with Ed Thorpe, who I knew a little bit about, but I was like, oh my God, that guy is flipping amazing. Like, I want to be when I like him when I grew up. He's now like one A of the list of people I'd like to meet at some point in my life.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “So, Titan is probably the one that's closest to business advice. It's a bit of a how to be ruthless, basically, but that's besides the point.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Holy crap, what have you done? So you find yourself in these moments where you have to persevere before and then after a decision that you made and many, many flavors of it. It's a good book that kind of teaches you how to think about it, how to tolerate the stress that comes with it, how to sort of put up with the pressure you're going to get, and not lose your humanity and now become a tyrant, but also not be someone who is easily balled over into like, okay, okay, I'll reverse my decision because then you lose the confidence of the people you're supposed to lead. That's a great book. I am sure it's in your list and everyone's list, but you should read. If you haven't read it, if you're trying to start a business, you should read influence by Caldini because that is probably the most important social science book published in the last 50 years.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Why network businesses are longer living than non-network businesses and what brand actually means. People are, oh, you know, I'm going to build a brand. Why do you care about having a brand? And so it's a great book. Distills a ton of these things that you kind of think you know, but they need names and terminologies. And it isn't cratic in the sense that I didn't think of the word power. I didn't think of the term power until I read his book. And I found it to be a great kind of a distillation. It's very short, slightly shorter than Master Margarita. So anyway, that's a good book. Another good book that is off the beaten path, but a great one called A Failure of Nerve. It's a book about leadership and it really postulates this concept of differentiated leader. As a CEO, as a founder, a lot of times you find yourself at odds with your own team where you're making an unpopular decision, you're firing a beloved employee, the sort of whenever there's doubt, there's no doubt, then you go do it and you're like, whoa.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Yeah, generalize it, like you're robbing the reader of the true history of what really happened. So I'm a huge fan actually of what you do in your books because there's always so much color directly from the source versus I think this person meant X when they talked to me and I'm not going to print anything they said. Anyway, that said, I'm a big fan of business books that have been distilled to business essays because then I feel like the author did the work of like, I'm going to generalize, I'm going to really generalize it. There's this book called Seven Powers by Hamilton Himmler. If you haven't read it, it's a really worthwhile distillation of what it takes to build a competitively lasting business. It talks about”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Yes. So here's a couple. There's not a panacea, but I will preface this by saying I have extremely low. Degree, by which I mean like zero to negative of respect for business books. Vast majority of them are far too long present company excluded. Business books that are verbatim anecdotes of people who've done it are actually high value because I think it's very hard to distill”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Coffee, beverage stock. Something meant to evoke some plant component that both coffee bush and chicory would share. So like, well, you know, they both have it, so it's good enough. It was disgusting. But it'll wake you up.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “It kind of sort of tastes a little bit like coffee, maybe. Like burn enough hot water into it, if it's hot enough, you're like, ah, it doesn't smell right, but whatever. It was in Soviet Union was one marketed under.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “By the way, so I grew up drinking not just instant coffee, which was hugely popular in Eastern Europe. I occasionally was exposed to chicory coffee, which I don't know if you've ever tried that.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “I've been known to. Exhaust the local supply of preground pods in hotel rooms. So there's coffee and all the beauty of it. And then there's caffeine. And I need both. They're not the same. The spice grinders, as they're known, you can definitely make a cup of coffee with that too. But that said, by the way, if you must have a thing that is not an electric grinder, get a manual grinder. Those are very cheap, I think. Lido, if I remember correctly, is a brand that'll sell you a very, very high-end, but still an aurora magnitude cheaper than any of the stuff that I threw out. I mean, it's a little bit of a, you know, good workout, but you'll make beautiful coffee with that. There's a really nice correlation to the lower the RPM, the less you're damaging, if you will, the bean as you're grinding it. So you could actually get some amazing taste out of manually ground beans. It does take like 10 minutes per cup, though. So you gotta, you know, you gotta be ready.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “If you're going to go for a light roast, I mean, each type of roast, each type of bean speaks to a method. So I happen another heresy, by the way, in the modern day. I like medium dark roast for my espresso. I love the honeyed viscous feels like it's like too thick. You can almost chew it. I love that in espresso. That's a great cup of espresso. For non-espresso drinks, I actually love thin, high clarity, low body. Just give me the pure essence of like not diluted, but like the bean in water. And chemics are probably the best one of those. It's totally the most controllable. Beyond that, French press is great. I mean, that's like a campfire type setup. And AirPress, if you're going to go there, just get an espresso machine.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “On my counter, and it's never failed me, and it's beautiful in both inside and outside. There's lots of cool, like if you're a super nerd and you really want a nerd out on the metrics, decent espresso is a fantastic product, really fun, but it's like an Android tablet that happens to be attached to an espresso machine, basically. Lamarzoko is old school. That is the logo you'll find in every self-respecting coffee shop, like the long red typically spelled out Lamar Zoko. That's a granddaddy of them all. It's amazing. And so on, and there are many, many other brands that will sell you a good espresso machine. If you're trying to go down market a little bit, but like bulletproof will make a good cup every time. Breville, people tend to sort of hate on it a little bit because it's so consumer, but it makes great coffee.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “It's got to be. I had this exact question yesterday. Anyway, so better grinder goes a very long way. After that, go invest in skills. So there's an incredible number of online resources that'll teach you how to do a great job. I'm but a student of those people. There are many, many, many great videos you can watch on YouTube that'll teach you how to make a grid cup of espresso. Before you buy anything else, just go watch all that stuff because it'll teach you a lot of things you don't know about. After that, you're probably going to want to buy a good espresso machine. The great news is that there are many, many very good espresso machines. I don't want to begin religious wars here, so I'll state my preferences, but these are preferences. I prefer 58mm porter filter diameter. Many people now swear by 54, 53 millimeter. You can go up or down, but I stick to the classics. I think the finest, most reliable home machine is made by Lamarzoko. That is definitely in the multi-thousand dollar range, but that's what I have.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “All right, so first of all, this is primarily relevant to espresso. I love all coffee in all forms. I happen to prefer espresso as a beverage of choice, but I don't judge. You can have your lattes, your Americanos, you know, whatever. But from the point of view of espresso and espresso-based drinks, the single most important thing is the grinder. And so you can get a fantastic grinder like a niche or kind of these $600, $700 grinders that will elevate your game to an incredible level. If you have a grinder that you didn't pay a couple hundred dollars for, you got to go do that. If you want to get to like a demonstrably better grinder than sort of the $600 range, go get something that looks like a Kaya orbit. That's like a $1,600 to $2,000 grinder. That's a great grinder. You can swap out burrs. So switching out burrs is really important. But even if you're never going to replace your burrs, you still want something that's a fall through.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “The world changed a bunch of times over the last 12 months, but I think the cloud code moment last December was like a big, like, whoa, it really is here. The ability to produce something from a glimmer in your mind to like a thing that actually works reasonably well and has only improved since was like a big breaking point. The one before was obviously chat GPT and so on.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “the foreseeable future there's so much to build the thing that irks me the most in today's media is the SaaS apocalypse whatever but the job apocalypse people are proclaiming is so goofy there's so much opportunity to build so many exciting things for everyone not just Silicon Valley startup everyone from the oldest companies to the youngest ones are like oh my god there are all these pieces of software that I had to buy from someone who did a bad job or that I could never buy anywhere and I wouldn't know how to start with like well now you have all these amazing tools that just like birth it for you straight from your head. Speaking of things you can put on your brain. Very soon we're going to have ultrasound mind reading that spits code on the other side of it. That's what I'm waiting for.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “I'm probably going to pay for it over time because it's expensive. And I definitely want to pay no late fees. And ideally, I don't want to pay any interest. I'm bringing my business to someone who should be so lucky because multiple people will sell me a beautiful Italian-made bike and go to some comparison shopping for me. Bring me some images of beautiful bikes and I want to lust after all of them and then pick the one that gets my business. That's a great task for AI. The building blocks for that will include something like a firm where the AI will say, all right, so all these people offer some ways of paying. Some of them offer a firm which has no late fees and by the way has negotiated a special deal with a manufacturer or the seller where they will pay your interest for you. So they're actually covering the time value of money. So the plan is interest free, which a lot of our transactions are interest free exactly this way. They're funded by the retailer or the manufacturer. And we're like grasping at that future right now. We're certainly building a lot of the pieces, so I tend to be slightly ahead of schedule as far as.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Agent, bring me a pair of pants. Like, sure. For most people, I want them to make sure they fit and I want them to be my favorite color. And I also wanted to match the rest of my ensemble hair and so on. And so it goes up from there. Like I need a bicycle, but I have brand preferences and my components are important to me, et cetera, et cetera. So AI will not replace the need for decision-making and thoughtfulness in consumption. It will obviate some pieces. Who has the best price on the bicycle I want with a component tree that I prefer is a thing that you will gladly outsource. Like you need to make sure it's real. You need to make sure that the data your LMs are fetching for you is current, but that's what we're working on today. But at some point very soon, you'll say, hey, Chadbot of the moment, or of my browser, of my desktop, I would like to buy beautiful looking Italian-made bike with shimana components. I want a good deal.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Boggles my mind, but like their storage of mass market goods to buy at Edge has got to be just like an exercise and extraordinary logistical prediction. Anyway, that stuff is here. It's coming and more will happen. I want to know what I'm getting into. I want to have agency in selecting a thing. My taste matters to me is a thing that probably will always involve humans. Like I need a pair of pants is not actually a thing 95%. If you're Silicon Valley engineer and you're too busy coding and you just, you know, you have a big hole on your butt, you got to eat them pants.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Bring me a sandwich or bring back your groceries and DoorDash bring me a sandwich or vice versa. The threshold of is this enough money for me to sort of hang back and ask these questions. So it knows who it is too much. They're probably not using these services just yet, for whom it's sort of like, yeah, I want a sandwich and I want it now. And like I want to outsource the rest of this to an agent, be it a human or a robot. Don't care. You have my credit card number, bring me a sandwich. And I think that's here today. And we will see more of that become a thing and many things like real-time delivery or near real-time delivery. If you go to other markets, you have in India, somebody launched a Like six minutes or less delivery service”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “We think you just want a thing and buy a thing. And if that thing is $10, great. And if it's $10,000, well, we get paid a lot. So, okay, just buy the $10,000 thing. And you care about speed and efficiency and less distraction. And normal people actually hang back and like, whoa, it's $10,000. First of all, that's an incredible amount of money. And by the way, for someone who is not within these hot beds of growth and opportunity, maybe $1,000 is an incredible amount of money, maybe $500 is an incredible amount of money depends on where you are. And the sort of, ooh, I got to think about this. I want to make sure I'm not exposing myself to a bad financial decision. I also want to make sure I'm getting a good deal. How am I going to pay for this? How long is it going to be on my personal balance sheet before I'm done paying for it? Like those are all questions people are very conscious of. And so for a lot of people in every part of the US, Agenda Commerce is here when you tell Instagram.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “It's very close. It's very dangerous to consider commerce as this uniform fabric that just kind of won a thing, buy a thing. One of the dangers, by the way, of building on mass market products in Silicon Valley, if you're not inventing the future, in which case your greenfield blank sheet of paper, if you're trying to improve something that exists and has existed for a while, it's essential you travel to where normal people live and see what they do because we are not normal in Silicon Valley, in a global Silicon Valley. This is not limited to San Francisco and the Bay Area.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Fine print driven business model. So, like the world in which you have AI looking out for all of your financial concerns is a beautiful world because we are already there by way of not having any dependency on you. You're too dumb to know what's happening to you to just pay up. That's how the industry, a lot of the industry works today. So I'm very excited about the world where you don't have to change your business model because suddenly no one's getting fooled because that was never a part of our business model.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “A lot more will happen. The discretization of transactions and this incremental friction will be reduced. You don't actually have to do all the manual labor we are putting you through right now because your agents will do it for you. And so today we're offering a thing in exchange for some friction. In tomorrow's world, we're offering the thing that obviously works, $50 billion can't be wrong. But the friction will go away or largely go away, which I think is just going to accelerate this whole approach to financial transactions. And the way people think about money will change towards, I know exactly what the total financial state I'm in. I have agents that are looking out for me. They won't get me into debt that I shouldn't be in. They will get me out of debt the second I should be out. I will have a PhD in consumer finance embedded in my phone looking out for every penny I got. There'll be no slop. And by God, no one's going to fool me again.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Open your app and do some stuff? The answer is simple. The industry devolved and you don't really trust what's going to happen to you after you tap, so you hesitate and you're like, am I going to really be able to afford it? Or is my car going to work? Am I going to get declined? Or am I going to go into debt that I probably shouldn't go into? A firm offers the antidote of you go into the app, you look at your purchasing power, you know exactly what we are comfortable lending to you, you get explicit approval. Next transaction is guaranteed to work. By way of saying we're not going to charge you late fees or change any of the pricing, we're actually telling you you should feel very good about this transaction. We are going to make less money if you're a minute late. We'll make no money if you don't pay us. And we feel good about lending you this money. So what we sell or what we offer to the consumer end of this is certainty and sense of control by way of creating some incremental friction. Fast forward a couple years, I don't know enough of a clear crystal ball to know exactly what a gent e-commerce looks like, but I know a lot of it is happening already.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Credit cards and debit cards for that matter is the single best financial interface ever created. If you think of the level of complexity that takes place when you take out your card and tap a checkout counter and just walk off with your cup of coffee, there's a lot of stuff that happens underneath. There's an acquiring bank. There's an issuing bank. They're talking through a network. There's all kinds of complexity just at a technical level. And then there's credit and blah, blah, blah. There's like layers and layers and layers of many decades worth of innovation that make an incredible single transaction happen in like a tap and off you go. And so when you introduce Buy Now Pay Later, which is this idea, every transaction is separate. You're conscious of every transaction. You understand how long it's going to take to pay this transaction off. You're actually creating friction. You're giving people more steps. So one counter argument to why this thing makes any sense at all. Like, why would you want to trade the beauty of cap and go with this like?”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Half life of our loan is like five months. So five months back, you get a pretty good picture of how good are you relative to today's macroeconomic reality. And if you look at our loss numbers, our delinquency numbers, whatever metric you want to choose, they're really, really consistent. So we are, in fact, very good at underwriting. And yet, even at 58 billion, we are but a footnote. So the overall credit card debt in the US last I looked was like 1.3 trillion. So we're like scratching at the total size of just the credit card debt. Not all credit card transactions become debt and there's plenty of debit card transactions. So the overall size of commerce is enormous relative to where we are. So our growth is not a surprise in a sense that what may have been a surprise at some point was people actually like this product. There are reasons to believe or reasons to say that this product is harder to use.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “First of all, the reason the growth rates are compounding at an almost $50 billion mark, 30 plus percent a year over year, quarter after quarter after quarter, is pretty awesome. It is a staggeringly good growth rate. It is made better by way of noticing that our credit-related losses are super consistent. It's easy to grow. The top line, I've lent more money this quarter than I did last quarter. Great. But will it all come back? It's a really important question. And the way you measure the success of these underwriting models is you ask the question, okay, so you made a bunch of loans last quarter last year average.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “So hollowing thing to do to squeeze pennies out of the market, they'd rather come to work for me and build underwriting models with me trying to help people in normal America borrow money and not feel screwed or not get screwed. And that was totally exactly right. Like we have people who have been here for 10, 11, 12 years doing that job who are still, I'm so proud of what I do. I'm a mathematician and I'm putting my big brain to work on making honest financial products. So those two things were like they're good ideas, but they're also a lot of luck.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “So, like, there's got to be a latent pocket of talent of people who would absolutely work on underwriting because it's a really hard and really interesting problem, but they won't join the industry until someone shows up and says, I'm going to strip it of all the gunk. I'm going to make it complete.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “And you would have to have the absolute best people working on it. And yet most of the time when you encounter people working on underwriting or credit scoring, they're not as impressive as people I'd met in my wondering Silicon Valley up until that point. And they're like, why is that? It's an interesting problem. It's quite mathematical. There's some various market mathematically inclined people I know. And the best I could get to was it's embarrassing to talk about that you're working on loan and credit underwriting stuff at cocktail parties. Like when somebody asks you, what do you do? You're a math genius. You went to school for applied math or computer science. What do you do? Like one answer is, well, I went to Wall Street and I build real-time trading models. That's kind of cool. Maybe it's not societally important, but you're doing something interesting. And there's all the other answers. I work for the NSA and I break codes. Like, that's a cool. That's what I wanted to do when I was in college. If you're like, I make lots of loans and I make sure that they're underwritten well. And by the way, I make most of my profits by charging people late fees and sneaking in national.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “When somebody shows up and says, I'd like to borrow $100 and you want to respond to them in real time, you have some giant machine learning model or a small machine learning model, decide yes or no. And what that practically means is it has to take whatever available data that person is willing to share, be it public or private data, run it through some form of a classifier, or these days all kinds of interesting architectural sort of ideas exist in underwriting and say yes or no. But yes or no is actually not enough. What you really want is a price of risk. So it's some for simplicity, expected value or expected loss. If I give you money today, what are the odds? What's the expected value of you bringing it back to me with the appropriate amount of interest if that's what the price of the transaction is? And so underwriting discipline of doing that at scale in our case completely in real time. That's the score we built, the underwriting score, the credit score was that. And the theory that I had was credit scoring is hard.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Think they don't need any of that. They just need the belief that there's a better thing out there that exists, and they'll give it a try because they are predisposed to not liking the other part. And that turned out to be complete true. The other part, if you are unwilling to profit from all the sort of wacky externalities of financial services, you better be good at underwriting. So if you're lending money to someone, you are paving over underwriting mistakes or lack of underwriting or poor credit score.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “I think this is the part that I was lucky because I didn't know any better in the beginning, but I've since sort of confirmed this to be true. Millennials were early teens during the great financial crisis. And so if you are getting booted out of your house in 08 and you're like an impressionable youth and you're asking your parents like, what's going on? Why do we have to live in a motel now? Parents are like, because the bank, they just took the money, they took my house away and the embarrassment and the horror of telling your kids we're going to move to a smaller house or to a rental or we're going to live on the streets, God forbid, that's a horrible impression to have in your most impressionable years. And so I think there's a lot of people who are like actually quite genuine in the I am willing to try anything but the thing that my parents got the sharpened the stick for. And so that was kind of luck number one. And I really believe that from the very beginning and it turned out to be true, like if we build something that normally have to market it, you have to convince people to trust you and all that.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “So every time I would ask a banker, why can't this exist? Why can't there be a lending product that doesn't take advantage of people's unwillingness to read fine print and do exponential math? They're like, because banking is like the stickiest thing in the world. You bank where you'll live. And like, yeah, you kind of like your bank. It's where your parents bank. Like you go to Marble Hall and the vault and you like it. It's likable. I'm reading a study here that says that they hate you. Like all the people that are going to be shopping and buying stuff 10 years from now, five years from now, they hate you. 78% of them think banks are terrible. They should go kill themselves. None of these people are like, I don't know. I don't believe that study. Like, okay, I mean, they surveyed like 10,000 people. Like, that's a pretty statsig study. So if I'm right and I do a thing that's even slightly better than the existing thing, I have a ready-made audience of people that are going to be like, cool, I hate the other one anyway. At some point, I need to explanation beyond they hate it. And so what I realized.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “There were ideas that I'll claim some ownership over, but I had no idea if I was right. And the first one I read this study that said that millennials hate banks. I didn't really explain why. It was just like, millennials hate banks. They hate a lot of things. Like millennials and every generation has a list of things they want to complain about. These complaining millennials, I'm not a millennial. I'm a, I guess, young Gen Xer. But millennials were definitely like, oh, they're such whiny people, but they were willing to participate in some study where they ranked all the things they hate. And the number one thing they hated, like 70% of millennials, according to that study, hated banks”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “I would pitch this idea in its various forms. First of all, I did have to fund for a while on my own, which I didn't mind doing because I was getting completely obsessed with the idea. So as such, things go, that was a small price to pay, relatively speaking. But I would keep on telling the story to somebody who was like a CEO or former CEO of a bank or somebody who managed a credit card portfolio. And they'd be like, okay, you're doing wrong. All the money's in the late fees. The money's in delinquencies. Just like, eh, come on. And I had two ideas that both turned out to be amazingly right. By the way, every business is like, there's like a moment of luck where people's like, yeah, I don't really want to admit to it.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Optimally, we sneak in a few things you don't notice. And it's all in a fine print, but I hope you don't read it. It is a very, very strange vestigial. Capitalism is supposed to get to efficiency. This got us into a bad part of the decision tree. Like, what if I took a bunch of steps back into the branching point where you could have done the more consumer friendly thing and just did that over and over and over again? What product would I end up with? Like, oh, I ended up with a firm. That's how we got here.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Like by missing three payments, how did that happen? And so a year later, I was like, oh my God, this whole thing is so broken and no one even knows it. Revolving on a thousand dollar draw and finding yourself with a $3,000 debt. And you're like, hey, I want to borrow some money. It's like, great, I'm going to bet on you failing. I'm going to give you a loan. But I want to believe that you're not going to fail completely, but you're going to be really late. Ideally, you take forever to pay the loan back because I make more money that way”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “Are CS majors, we all have some number theory background, therefore, machine learning, therefore AI. And so we built a score and it was like just use some publicly available data, a little bit of some other secret sauce. We built a score, like, oh, well, now we should make people lend money using our score because it's cool. And so I talked to some bankers, which is how I began this sort of like, you're doing wrong kid conversations. And yeah, no one's going to lend money using a score that no one else is lending money against. Like, what if it's a bad score? What if it doesn't work? And so if you tell an entrepreneur over and over again, this thing will never work unless someone does X. The natural response is, well, I will do X and see if it works. And so like, all right, I guess we're going to lend money. And so I'm just going to go and get into a lending business, at which point I was like, oh, I got to understand how this stuff works. I've never actually looked at lending very carefully. And that began the journey of like, okay, so how do credit cards really work? How do I manage to mess up my credit at the right age of 18 in like”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Including, and then Luke Nosuk had a sweater wrapped around his head because it was really cold on five. We're really worried about him. Anyway So the story comes up or came up over and over and over again. And so I was like, I should do something about this. Like there's got to be a credit score to be built around came to the U.S. as a teenager with no record of any kind and $600 for a family of five. And now independently wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur. It was like a five or seven year window between those two events. So it's not weird, but it's super weird. It's seven years like hello. I got a computer science degree. I was eminently employable. I started a bunch of companies. Not all of them failed. And like, why did it not catch up to me at all? In fact, it seems to have had no bearing on my ability to borrow a fairly modest amount of money relative to everything else. That's been sloshing around my head for years. And I finally sat down with another luke-nosic friend from U of I was like, what if we built a better credit score? And so like, yeah, I wouldn't be too hard. So like all of”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Was wrapping up on the day. They're like, oh, yeah, we finally got your wire. Okay, here's your keys. So we drove from LA to San Francisco on five, basically erasing each other at some ungodly speeds and got pulled over at two o'clock in the morning and the cops were very upset with us, but actually let us go because they were similarly fascinated by these cool new cars. So we didn't actually get into a lot of trouble, but got into a minor amount of trouble for going way too fast at 2 o'clock in the morning. But the story stuck with me because I was fine financially, better than fine. I was mid-20s and just never needed to work a day in my life. And yet the car dealer who knew who I was, like he looked us up, was like, oh yeah, I know you guys. Your PayPal kids, cool. Yeah, you can buy a car. Sorry, your credit stock. And I was like, why does my credit report or my credit score not reflect the fact that I'm basically independently wealthy now? And that really stuck with me. And so I had a version of this conversation.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Two identical. We can't have the same color, so we need to take which. So we get to LA, we go to the dealership. Like, we want to buy this cool hardtop convertible from Mercedes, like a mechanical folding hardtop. So it's like a thing that transformer car becomes a convertible if you press a button. Super cool. So we got there and they're like, okay, Mr. Nosik, here's your auto loan. Here are your keys, Mr. Lefchin. Your credit sucks, so we're not going to sell you a car today. Wait a second. Like, we literally just took PayPal public. I'm okay. I've paid off my student loans and everything. Like, yeah, but your credit score is really, really bad. So if you want to buy car today, you're going to have to wire the total amount of money, which is like my future wife then-girlfriend is like, ooh, okay. You didn't tell me that part of your biography when we just start getting to know each other. What did you do? Like, I started this company in college with Luke Nosik, who's in the room. And he knew and I didn't, that if you don't pay your credit card bills on time, it'll come and show up on your permanent record. So I had to, in fact, wire money. And like as this dealership,”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Right after PayPal went public, Luke and I, I mean, Luke is a wild and crazy guy. You've met him. Think he talked to me. I'm going to go with he talks me into, but I'm already dating Nelly and I'm trying to impress Nelly. I'm still trying to impress Nelly every day. But I decided the way to impress Nelly is to get a really cool convertible. And so Luke and I find this convertible. Mercedes just launched their first hardtop convertible. So we fly to LA with a view to buy”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “The earliest version of this thing is actually pretty funny, abridged since it's a colorful story. Actually, Luke is involved, like weird Luke makes another.”

    2026-06-09 · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT