Interview with Libor Michalek, President, Technology at Affirm, Inc.

Location: San Francisco Bay Area







* What’s your background and how did you get into management?* What are the biggest challenges you face?* What is your approach to hiring?* What’s your advice for managers who are just starting out?* What’s your workday like and how do you manage your time, emails, etc.?* What’s a personal habit that contributes to your success?* Share an internet resource or tool that you can’t live without.* If you could recommend one book to managers, what would it be and why?* What is your approach to mentoring and coaching members of your team?* Where can we go to learn more about you?







Vidal: Libor, hi, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Maybe you could introduce yourself, say a little bit about where you’re located, and what’s your current role.



LIBOR: My name is Libor Michalek and I’m the President of Technology at Affirm. I run our engineering, product, operations, and people teams.



What’s your background and how did you get into management?



Vidal: All right. I was looking at your background. I know you worked at Google, YouTube and different places like that before. Can you maybe tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into management and engineering leadership?



LIBOR: Certainly. So a lot of it actually came out of necessity. I went to school at University of Illinois, got a computer science engineering degree there then went straight into writing software. Pretty quickly, I moved into helping as an engineer, early engineer or first engineer building a variety of startups, in a variety of spaces. I was always very excited about software as something that enables a new business and new idea to come to fruition across really a variety of domains.



LIBOR: The first startup I worked on was in enterprise software followed by consumer web, and data center networking hardware. Then back to consumer web with a foray into social. At YouTube, I ran the infrastructure engineering teams. And, finally, into Affirm, which is solving financial technology problems and building products in the financial space.



LIBOR: I was always really excited about building and solving problems that were interesting and having the software background, that was the avenue for how to solve those types of challenges. In fact, one of the criteria for each one of the things that I worked on was always that software and technology had to play a vital strategic role in solving those problems.



LIBOR: The transition into leadership and management was something that happened for me multiple times, not just once. In each of these organizations with no real management in place or required given the size and scale, I’d go in, roll up my sleeves and write software. Then, as the organization grew, I would ultimately take on a technical leadership position, then a management position. And as the companies grew, I’d move into senior management positions.



LIBOR: I was fortunate to have the opportunity to go from individual contributor to tech lead, to manager, to manager of managers, director and vice president. Not only going through the journey multiple times but also taking lessons and applying them to the next opportunity.