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Interview with Max Levchin
- baby 10y agoCan I get a tl;dr on who is Max Levchin? I'm surprised to see this article on the FP of HN with such an empty content. He was also giving a crypto prize at last year Real World Crypto.
- lisper 10y agoFounding CTO of PayPal.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- stephenhuey 10y agoYou noticed his crypto involvement - as the original CTO of PayPal he was known for his anti-fraud measures.
- dakrisht 10y agoThe co-founder and CTO of PayPal along with Peter Thiel. Musk joined later. Not sure how you're in the industry without knowing who this guy is. He wrote all of PayPal's fraud algorithms and built the entire platform. Edit: Thiel
- sremani 10y ago>>Not sure how you're in the industry without knowing who this guy is. I caution against such assumptions that every one on HN is privy to SV mythology.
- demircancelebi 10y ago>> Peter Thief Not sure whether intentional or not
- capkutay 10y agoWell...he helped steal the election right? ;) Jokes aside, seems his popularity on HN did drop with his endorsement of Trump.
- dakrisht 10y agoThat's because SV is so knee-deep in their own world / bubble, clarity and perspective is something many simply do not posses. It's a shame really.
- dakrisht 10y agoNot sure if indirect Freudian slip or typo. Corrected. In any case, Peter is a brilliant guy. No doubt about that.
- khazhou 10y ago> Not sure how you're in the industry without knowing who this guy is. Max is one of a handful of people who had successful startups of varying long-term influence ten years ago. Knowing his name is hardly a prerequisite for working in this industry, unless this guy happens to work at Paypal, in which case yeah it'd be weird not to know. Myself, I use Paypal maybe a couple of times a year. Honestly I'm kinda envious of folks who have been able to stay out of the startup celebrity culture and the glorification of founders at the expense of the thousands of employees and innovators who create value.
- dakrisht 10y agoMax changed the way money is sent for better or for worse. He changed the landscape along with Thiel and Musk. PayPal ended up breeding a dozen or so entrepreneurs who have similarly changed the game. How this is not monumental is beyond me.
- webmaven 10y ago> Knowing his name is hardly a prerequisite for working in this industry, unless this guy happens to work at Paypal, in which case yeah it'd be weird not to know. I'd venture to guess that employees at any of the PayPal Mafia[1] companies are reasonably likely to recognize the names of most PPM folks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
- msane 10y ago> He wrote all of PayPal's fraud algorithms and built the entire platform. And that's pretty difficult for a giant lumberjack!
- dang 10y ago> Not sure how you're in the industry without knowing who this guy is. Please edit dismissive personal swipes out of your comments here. Also, not everyone here is "in the industry".
- binalpatel 10y agoThe glorification of stress in start-ups is an interesting thing. I've always wonder if it's because it's a mental thing. If an industry glorified their employees physically harming themselves, it'd be horrific. It took me a while to learn, but working hard doesn't equate to being stressed, and being stressed is more than likely to result in mediocre results.
- dang 10y agoI don't read the article as glorifying stress, merely acknowledging it. Edit: on closer inspection, this is an example of the uncanny power of titles to focus attention, magician-style, on only one thing. Certainly Levchin didn't write the title and the interviewer probably didn't either. We shouldn't pick the most provocative detail and then react exclusively to that. I can almost guarantee that if the headline had singled out his fierce astronomer grandmother instead, the comments here would be about fierce astronomer grandmothers. Which come to think of it would be a lot better.
- throwaway40483 10y agoRight. This is a classical example of priming.
- binalpatel 10y agoI agree with you - coming back and rereading the article, I didn't have nearly the same reaction. Originally I focused exclusively on that single segment, which my fault.
- dakrisht 10y agoStartups have always glorified stress it is simply part of the modus operandi. Stress is part of life in general and a high-paced, uncertain and extremely competitive work environment compounds this. I think Max's point in discerning between an all-nighter and continued and long-term stress is very smart. Everyone has and can pull an all nighter, but dealing with problems for weeks on end is a rare trait and most will break. Hence this is a quality he and most in this business should seek: can the candidate handle prolonged stress? If so, he's built for the challenge. There is nothing impressive about someone writing code to fix a big for 24 hours straight. This doesn't move the needle forward at all.
- msane 10y agoI can't believe this guy is into credit lending now. A bit sleezy tbh.
- seibelj 10y agoThere are only so many areas where having capital and calculating the same numbers that everyone else has differently can reap great profits. I think lending is one such area.
- sean_patel 10y ago> A bit sleezy tbh. Care to explain yourself? Are you confusing Levchin with Thiel? Granted they co-founded Paypal, but if you see Levchin's public talks (at SXSW, YC School etc), you'll see he's a very honest individual. Affirm itself was formed because Max felt it wrong that Big Banks makes a majority of Profits on hidden, sleezy, fine-print fees. He says this so himself at the SXSW Talk (search in youtube). Affirm touts itself as being honest and upfront about each and every charge or fee for their service.You can see it on their website.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dakrisht 10y agoMax and Peter are two of the smartest guys in the game. Period. And their successes prove it to the naysayers. There's nothing sleazy about what either have done. What have you done aside from posting comments on HN?
- msane 10y agoThey want to make a conversion optimized "make-me-a-debtor" button for the internet. I'll say it again, *sleezy.
- snarf 10y agoAffirm was initially supposed to be an alternative credit rating system based on social signals, and I believe credit ratings are highly regulated, so they pivoted to money lending, which is not as nice of a business. Levchin seems pretty desperate to be a successful serial entrepreneur and compares himself to other ex-Paypal people who have gone on to do big things[1]. This is despite having made a ton of money via investing in Yelp. He did manage to exit Slide to Google, but I don't know how successful of an acquisition that is considered within Google. There was that Sarah Lacy book called "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good" in which he was pretty prominently profiled, so successful serial entrepreneurship must be a prestige thing for him. I agree with you that retail money lending seems a bit desperate and unseemly, and definitely not on the same level as SpaceX or LinkedIn. It feels a bit like Square getting into payday loans to gin up revenue. [1] https://pando.com/2013/08/08/with-another-6m-glow-is-max-levchins-trojan-horse-to-remake-american-healthcare/ https://pando.com/2013/08/08/with-another-6m-glow-is-max-lev...
- khazhou 10y agoI always consider it a bad sign for a startup whenever their founder is interviewed on topics completely irrelevant to the company. This article had nothing to do with Affirm, and is only generic hiring advice that purports to be about startups, but in fact applies equally to a large established company (e.g., perseverance)
- johnloeber 10y agoSuccessful startup founders are not one-dimensional business machines, they're usually smart people who have some kind of different view on the world (which enables them to succeed in the first place). As such, you can assume that they have interesting things to say. I don't see why you'd deny them the right to speak about topics outside the narrow band of their startup.
- khazhou 10y agoSorry, I know my comment is negative in nature. And I'm not saying someone can't or shouldn't talk publicly outside their narrow band. Just pointing out that when the few public interviews a founder gets are outside their actual venture, you begin to worry about the venture.
- johnloeber 10y agoI'm not sure whether the relationship between startup success and public speaking engagements is established. Why do you think the relationship/correlation should be negative?
- paganel 10y agoI think that no-one is capable of handling stress for long periods of time without huge side-effects, for example obvious health problems. But in the end guys like Levchin are capitalists not health-gurus, as long as those start-up people are willing to sacrifice their health so that their investors can get their money back multiplied by 50 or 100 then everyone is happy. The start/up founders knew what they were getting into (or at least I hope so), investors like Levchin do not care one iota about what said start-up founders will do with their lifes after all is said and done (i.e. after everyone has cashed out)
- cft 10y agoI know Max and I know how before PayPal he started three failed companies, maxed out his credit cards and still pulled it off in the end. He slept in a sleeping bag under the desk, working 90-100 hr weeks. Rationalize all you want, but the end result is that Max writes in NY times and you write second level comments here...
- dang 10y ago> the end result is that Max writes in NY times and you write second level comments here Please don't do this here. It just poisons the well further, and is not a very positive way to defend somebody.
- leroy_masochist 10y agoI think his go-to "how did you handle layoffs" interview question is interesting and probably a good heuristic, but I would think that a discussion of individual firings rather than mass layoffs would provide a better data point for evaluating managers. Layoffs are bad if they involve a lot of people, no question about it, especially if there's been a sense of dread around them for the days/weeks leading into the announcement. But at the end of the day, "we're laying you off" means one or more of: "our business is not healthy enough to support the team we think we need" and/or "we made a poor managerial decision and mistakenly hired a whole bunch of the wrong people" and/or "the nature of our business is changing and we don't need you to do what you currently do". Telling people they don't have a job sucks, but it's a lot harder to fire individuals for underperformance, especially if they've been trying hard and don't want to go....they like their jobs and they don't want to deal with the finality of "we don't want you to work here anymore, $name."