Max Levchin shares lessons and stories that have been critical to his development as an engineering leader. He shares stories from the early PayPal days and foundational insights for leading Affirm as a mission-driven, values-based company. He also shares essential principles for building and hiring, and how the hardest problems are almost never about code.
“I should just solve the thing that matters. I don't need to worry about the hard stuff, it will show up on its own. And there's plenty of hard problems and the more you work with people, the more you'll realize that the truly hard problems are always about humans, they're never about code.” - Max Levchin
MAX LEVCHIN - Founder and CEO @ Affirm
Max Levchin is the founder and CEO of Affirm, a financial services technology company, co-founder and Chairman of Glow, a data-driven fertility company, and co-founder and general partner at SciFi VC, a private venture capital firm. All three companies were created and launched from his San Francisco based innovation lab, HVF (Hard, Valuable, Fun). Max was one of the original co-founders of PayPal where he served as the CTO until its acquisition by Ebay in 2002. In 2002, he was named to the Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world as well as Innovator of the Year. In 2004, he founded Slide, a personal media-sharing service for social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, which he sold to Google in August 2010. Also in 2004, he helped start Yelp, where he was the first investor in and Chairman of the Board from 2004 until 2015. He has served on several boards such as Yahoo!, Yelp, and Evernote. Max is a serial entrepreneur, computer scientist, philanthropist and active investor in more than 100 startups.
BEN JUN - CEO @ HVF Labs
Benjamin Jun is Chief Builder at HVF Labs (hard / valuable / fun), a fintech startup studio. The lab focuses in areas where technically differentiable solutions can unlock world-changing companies. HVF founders have spun out companies such as Affirm, Divvy Homes, and Yelp. Ben was co-founder and CTO of Cryptography Research, which provides security technologies for payment systems, mobile handsets, digital content protection, and the manufacturing supply chain. While there, he developed and architected security technologies that shipped in over 25 billion consumer devices. Cryptography Research was acquired by Rambus for $340M in 2011.
SHOWNOTES
- Max’s unsung passion for cryptography and how it came to be. (4:53)
- Max’s cryptography side-hustle stories while starting PayPal. (6:01)
- How Ben tried to convince Max to leave Peter Thiel and PayPal. (9:58)
- PayPal’s early milestones, and why that’s different than what’s commonly celebrated in the press and Silicon Valley. (11:46)
- PayPal’s “one metric” that matters. (13:10)
- How Max is different as a leader now vs. during his time at PayPal. (18:00)
- What to think about when transitioning from a VP of Engineering to becoming CEO (20:52)
- How Max builds complimentary teams. (24:25)
- “Max’s aura test” or “the hallway avoidance test” in hiring. (26:16)
- How to guide your company and know you’re doing the right thing. (29:00)
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The Engineering Leadership Podcast