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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. “It is well translated by a couple of different translator teams, so you can almost not go wrong buying one of the last three translations. There's about six that I remember exist in English anyway. I would not bother with the first three.”

    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. “Union yet. I was fluent in English. It was not a difficult conversation to have. But they're like, okay, here's a VHS of Akira. Here's a copy of Neuromancer. Go home and like don't come back until you've been completely pilled with these things. And I was like, one, these are going to be my friends for life, which turn out to be true. It's been 30-odd years, and we're still talking to each other every day. And it's like the beginnings of completely different science fiction consumption experience. That said, for the next few years, I was like neuromancer and everything he came after neuromancer is the dark sort of plug your brain in future. And Snow Crash offers this like hilarious completely different consumerist, satirical version of the plug your brain in versus this like dark corporations rule the world ninjas in skin suits and like kill you while you're plugged into a deck trying to hack your way into some corporations. Anyway.”

    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. “Yeah, so two things. So actually, this is are we in a simulation? So I come to the US July 16th, 1991, six weeks, I think, before Soviet Union fails. But at least Soviet Union and I come into this dreamland of America, and then six weeks later, my passport is a password that doesn't have a country anymore. And so I become a man with no state and et cetera, et cetera. Thanks for an interesting travel existence. But I'm like an ultra ultra nerd. And I was like the king of the nerds in my prior life. And this is a summer, so I don't know where I'm going to find my people. But like six weeks go by, so a union fails. And I start a public high school in Chicago. And I'm sort of like casting around for my people. And I run into these guys who are still really good friends of mine. And they're like, oh, you're one of us. We have a word for this. You're a nerd. It's great. You like science fiction? Great. You love science fiction. Have you read Neuromancer? Have you seen Akira? They're like, no, has it made it to Soviet?”

    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. “Snowgrash basically presented an alternative to Neuromancer. Neuromancer was this dark dystopian. Also, by the way, first book I read when I came to the US.”

    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. “My college life was shaped by Snow Crash, probably the thing that really put him on the map. I read that there was like a dog-eared version of it hanging around one of the offices that I sort of hung out in college. And I was like, this is the most amazing thing ever. This book sort of shapes my at least software engineering life and then Crypton Romakan was the next one. I was like, all I need to do is just read more Neil Stevenson and he'll show me the way. There were some really long books after which sort of were quite challenging to get through. But then we got to Reemdi, which was another gift. So I'm reviewing my preferences 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

  6. “I think he actually references DigiCache and he's referencing user interface sucks and somebody needs to build something more user friendly. So we're like, am I in a dream? Is this real? Remember sitting next to Russ, one of our earliest engineers who I also went to college with was another Luke Nosick friend and like if we didn't know any better, this is all just like a big brain and a vat experiment. We just don't know whose brain it is. It's being described to us in a book as being published online. And then we ran out of pages and like it wasn't published for a little while longer. How will we know what to build next? We don't have the book anymore.”

    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. “And I was there when DigiCash failed. And I think it failed because of user interface. And this was now a couple of years into PayPal, and we were definitely doing well. And DigiCache was definitely dead. And people were in the audience going like, boo, you totally don't get it. And I'm like, okay, clearly, maybe there's a reason why we're succeeding. Anyway, as we were doing all this stuff, Neil Stevenson publishes the first 100 pages of Crypton Omicon. And so as we're coding, and like I'm literally coding 24-7 SteamCons out of my ears every day because I don't eat, I don't sleep. The six of us are just in the office together and three of us are basically just typing code as quickly as we can because we have this thing we have to build. And the only thing we take breaks for is we're trying to read Crosby Omicon. And the more we read, the more we think he's writing about us. The first few chapters of Chryson Omicon is like this development of digital currency using cryptography. And he's literally talking 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

  8. “Literally within days of that event, I met Peter Thiel at Stanford. He was giving a lecturer. I was hanging around Stanford campus. Luke was actually the connective tissue. He knew Peter and he went to school with me. And so he was kind of like, oh yeah, like you guys should know each other. This was great that he ran into one another. So the origins of PayPal's story were literally being made that summer. And I was still like, sure, I'm going to start a company in Silicon Valley doing something. I don't know what. But I was still going to scientific conferences. So there was this one conference called Financial Cryptography. It was held in Anguilla, which is a kind of a small island of British West Indies. And there's all sorts of interesting characters that probably deserve its own podcast one day, but it's an interesting, hilarious, bizarre story. I'm 99% confident whoever Satoshi is was probably going to the same conference at the same time as we were. But Luke and I were there and then another year Peter and I went there and after PayPal was already a thing I presented something basically saying, hey, so we build this thing. It has a great user interface.”

    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. “Coin paper. So I'm sure they were right. But the conversation was really around it's obviously the right thing to do, the right way to do it. People just don't get it yet. And as a sort of naive, freshly minted computer science graduate, I was like, well, or the user interface sucks. Like it's really hard to have this very, very slow RSA computation happening on your crappy laptop if you're trying to pay for a cup of coffee. It's just too slow. And people are like, ah, heathen like you don't understand what you're talking about. No time too long to wait for a digital signature. Non-repudiation. Like, okay, great, but like, seriously, you know, like I just want a cup of coffee. So it was kind of an early moment like I feel like some of these things are not like the others. Anyway, and so I had.”

    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. “So I graduated at UV in 1997. DigiCash, which was the granddaddy of all cryptocurrencies, I hope I'm not offending anyone's prior art, but I believe it was probably the very first attempt to make a real digital currency using cryptography. I believe it went bankrupt in the summer of 98, the year I moved to Silicon Valley. I actually went to the pouring one out on the curb party held on kind of somewhat less explicably one of the picnic grounds at Stanford University. Happened to be there. It was actually a really good lesson, like sort of took that away with me to PayPal, where there was a bunch of people, people you know today, people who are very active in crypto cryptocurrencies now, but also just like interesting, famous people, famous today. We're all very young back then. And the conversation was around this idea of how the world is not ready for this yet, like the digitash and digital currency, like people aren't ready. 98, you know, this is like 10 years before the big...”

    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. “So that was one of the weirder dual track, like, am I in a dream? Is this a simulation experiences of my life? So full context, so Luke and I were classmates. I think he was ahead of me by a year in school, but we were at University of Illinois together and worked on a couple of failed startups together there. So we go way back. We're really close friends. And as we all made our way to Silicon Valley, I hung around campus because I actually really wanted to research in cryptography, which back then crypto meant cryptography, not cryptocurrency. But I've always thought that there's interesting opportunities in currencies, currency to be invented, powered by cryptography. So I was obsessed with things like David Chom's work, anonymizing signatures, digitash was a thing back in prehistoric times.”

    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. “I'm not yet prepared. Of course, you have to experiment on yourself, otherwise, what's the point? But I'm actually pretty excited about some of the newer things happening in brain-computer interface, specifically in things like ultrasound, because I think we're finally looking at penetrating as a scary term ride. I don't mean that like physically penetrating, but getting into a few inches into your brain versus just scanning the current of the top of the skull is exciting.”

    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. “I used to be a voracious consumer of both manga and anime, and it turns out that time is still a zero-sum game for most things. And so I drifted off my weekly supply of Japanese content production. But I will definitely make room for that. The thing with FMRI and brain modeling, at least last I looked and before I sort of picked to do the thing that I'm doing now with a firm, actually looked pretty seriously into, I'm a huge sort of a closet fan of brain computer interface and all sort of surrounding ideas and opportunities. I've looked on and off at FMRI and all the other sort of stuff in a domain. And it just seems that your cranium is too dense. It's hard to get signal of an very superficial connectivity from. And you have to shave your head, which you've done.”

    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. “There are two movies where leadership, I think, is, or I'm sure there are more than two, but like two of the movies that I fall back on for leadership content is Ronan and Seven Samurai. And Seven Samurai is hard to quote because it's in Japanese. And you quote your, unless you're a native speaker, which I'm not. Ronan is in English, and so it's great to quote. There's a lot of other great lines, but that's the best one.”

    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. “The next line in the movie. That's the first thing they teach you. I'm only showing off. Yes, I love that quote so much too. It's a great quote. Encapsulates so many different flavors. It's like, don't doubt yourself. The real meaning here is you know the answer. You may be too scared, too embarrassed, too unprepared to sort of embrace the fact that you know the answer, but you know the answer. So like let's not mess around. You know the answer. That's layer one. Layer two is make a decision already. Layer three is even if it's unpleasant, you're going to have to do it anyway. So don't delay. There's just like so many flavors of the same idea over and over again encapsulated beautifully in just a few words. And so I think it's a great succinct line. The other thing I'm a huge fan of studying leadership, fan of leadership sounded weird. So I love leadership related lessons.”

    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