Max Levchin (@mlevchin) is a serial entrepreneur, computer scientist, philanthropist, and active investor in more than 100 startups. He is the founder and CEO of Affirm, the payment network that empowers consumers and helps merchants drive growth. He is also the co-founder and chairman of Glow, a data-driven fertility company. Both companies were created and launched from his San Francisco-based innovation lab, SciFi VC (formerly HVF [Hard, Valuable, Fun]). Max was one of the original co-founders of PayPal, where he served as the chief technology officer until its acquisition by eBay in 2002. In 2002, he was named to MIT Technology Review’s TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world as well as Innovator of the Year.
Prior to HVF, Max founded, and was CEO of, Slide, a personal media-sharing service, which was acquired by Google in 2010. Max also helped create Yelp, where he served as chairman of its board of directors from its founding in 2005 until 2015. He served on the board for Yahoo! from 2012 to 2015.
Max was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, before moving to the United States and settling in Chicago in 1991. He holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he founded and led four other technology startups.
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Max Levchin, PayPal and Affirm — The Path from The Soviet Union to Building Multi-Billion Dollar Companies (Plus: Real-World Socialism vs. Capitalism)
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Connect with Max Levchin
Website | SciFi VC | Affirm | Glow | Twitter
“The attempt to impress your mate on a daily basis is the secret to the best marriage.”
— Max Levchin
“The best recipe we’ve discovered as humanity is capitalism, a force for constant creative destruction where you build the next thing better than the other guy.”
— Max Levchin
“It’s okay to make a little bit less money if you are able to create something that’s societally more successful, more important.”
— Max Levchin
“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.’”
— Max Levchin
“The job apocalypse people are proclaiming is so goofy. There’s so much opportunity to build so many exciting things for everyone, not just a Silicon Valley startup.”
— Max Levchin
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