Max Levchin

Who they are

Max Levchin is Co-Founder and CEO of Affirm — he co-founded PayPal as Confinity in 1998, built Slide (sold to Google in 2010), and co-founded Glow, a data-driven fertility company, before spinning Affirm out of his HVF Labs innovation lab in 2012.

Person

Levchin got his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997 and moved almost immediately to Silicon Valley, where he co-founded Confinity with Peter Thiel in 1998 — the payments startup that became PayPal and was acquired by eBay in 2002, with Levchin serving as CTO. After PayPal he founded Slide in 2004, a personal media-sharing service for social networks that Google acquired in 2010, where he briefly became VP of Engineering. He then set up HVF Labs in 2011 — an innovation lab (the name stands for Hard, Valuable, Fun) dedicated to data-driven projects — and spun Affirm out of it in 2012, when the company was pre-launch. Alongside Affirm he co-founded Glow in 2013, a data-driven fertility app where he serves as Chairman; founded SciFi VC in 2017, a venture fund focused on fintech and payments where he is General Partner; and established the Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography, which recognizes significant contributions to applied cryptography. He sat as Chairman of Yelp from 2004 to 2015, served on the board of Unity Technologies, and was elected to the board of The Coca-Cola Company on October 16, 2025. The through-line is compounding technical infrastructure bets — cryptography to payments to consumer data to credit — each company applying rigorous data thinking to a system most people accept as opaque. He writes on LinkedIn about buy-now-pay-later, AI in financial services, consumer trust, and immigration; keeps a blog at max.levch.in covering cryptography, HVF philosophy, and fintech; co-authored 'The Blueprint' with Peter Thiel and Garry Kasparov; and appeared on The Tim Ferriss Show in June 2026 discussing his path from the Soviet Union to building multi-billion-dollar companies.

Company

Affirm's most recent headline is the June 4, 2026 renewal and expansion of its funding agreement with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, securing a $1.7 billion commitment that could rise to $2.2 billion — a signal of institutional confidence in its credit book. That followed a strong Q3 fiscal 2026 print: GMV of $11.6 billion (up 35% year-over-year), revenue of $1.04 billion, and GAAP profitability achieved for the first time. In May 2026, CEO Levchin unveiled 'Affirm Edge' at an investor forum — a product designed to embed BNPL and installment loans directly in banking apps — and announced an upcoming partnership with Worldpay to broaden borrower acquisition. That same month Affirm integrated its BNPL options into Google Pay, with availability across Google Search and the Gemini app. The company also cut approximately 19% of its workforce and shut down its crypto unit, while Levchin publicly confirmed no AI-driven layoffs were planned despite broader industry trends.

Market

Affirm is the largest U.S.-based BNPL financier, with nearly 27 million users and $37 billion in volume as of 2025, posting 46% year-over-year revenue growth in 2024 to reach $2.32 billion — the highest growth rate among major BNPL players. Its primary competitive frame is actually traditional credit-card issuers, with BNPL rivals Klarna (which replaced Affirm as Walmart's exclusive BNPL provider in March 2025), Afterpay (Block), PayPal Pay Later, Sezzle, and Zip as secondary threats. The regulatory environment is tightening materially: the CFPB's 2024 interpretive rule classified BNPL providers as credit-card issuers, new 2026 BNPL disclosure guidance is in force, a CFPB fair-lending final rule takes effect July 21, 2026, and active state AG investigations in California, New York, and Illinois plus a federal enforcement matter and class-action litigation deadline in August–October 2026 create real near-term legal overhang.

Network

Levchin's most documented relationship is with Peter Thiel — they co-founded Confinity together in 1998, and later co-authored 'The Blueprint' alongside Garry Kasparov, the chess champion. On Affirm's board, Richard Galanti (former Costco CFO) joined in June 2025, and Ryan Schneider was appointed as a Class III director on July 1, 2026.

Peter Thiel· Co-founder of Confinity/PayPal; co-author of 'The Blueprint'
Garry Kasparov· Co-author of 'The Blueprint'
Richard Galanti· Board member, Affirm (former Costco CFO)
Ryan Schneider· Board member, Affirm (Class III director, appointed July 2026)

How they likely show up

Founded Confinity at ~23 and has been a founding CEO or chairman at every major company since — role_type_pattern is unambiguously 'founder,' meaning he structures problems around ownership and first-principles, not inherited process.
Long tenure at Affirm (founded 2012, still CEO in 2026) → thinks in multi-year compounding arcs; the HVF Labs incubation model suggests he needs to see the structural logic of a business before committing to it.
HVF Labs (Hard, Valuable, Fun) as an explicit named philosophy → he filters opportunities through that lens; pitches that can't answer 'is this hard?' and 'is this valuable?' are likely to stall.
Public writing on LinkedIn covers buy-now-pay-later, AI in finance, consumer trust, and immigration — practical policy and product themes, not abstract thought-leadership → he engages with specifics and is comfortable staking a public position.
Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography and blog at max.levch.in on cryptography signal that he maintains deep technical identity even as a CEO — he'll engage at the engineering level, not just the business level.
Data-driven personal interests (quantified-self, endurance sports, fitness tracking) mirror his professional instincts → he will likely respond to arguments grounded in data over narrative.

Conversation tips

→ Reference the Affirm Edge announcement specifically — asking what banking-app embedding unlocks that direct-to-consumer couldn't shows you've read past the headline.
→ He has spoken publicly about growing up in the Soviet Union and the immigrant experience; if the conversation goes personal, that arc is genuine and well-documented — don't skip past it as if it's just a talking point.
→ If you're discussing AI in financial services, come with a specific position — his LinkedIn writing shows he forms clear views on AI and consumer trust, and vague enthusiasm about 'AI transforming finance' will land flat.
→ The HVF (Hard, Valuable, Fun) framing is his actual decision filter — if you're pitching an idea or partnership, stress which hard problem it solves, not the market size.
→ Don't treat the Walmart/Klarna loss as a live wound without nuance — Q3 2026 results show 35% GMV growth despite it; he'll have moved on analytically even if it's a competitive reference point worth understanding.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on 'Affirm Edge' — at his May 2026 investor forum he unveiled a product to embed BNPL directly in banking apps, which is a structural bet that the future of BNPL is infrastructure-inside-banks rather than consumer-facing brand. That's worth probing.
Reference the CPP Investment Board deal from June 4, 2026 — a $1.7 billion funding commitment (potentially $2.2 billion) from a sovereign pension fund is a specific institutional endorsement of Affirm's credit underwriting model, and it's recent enough that he'll want to talk about what it signals.
Bring up the Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography — he funds it personally and it's distinct from his Affirm work; it signals that his technical identity didn't end at PayPal, and opening there shows you see the full person, not just the fintech CEO.

Discovery questions

Affirm Edge embeds installment lending inside banking apps — how do you think about brand and trust when the consumer-facing experience is now owned by someone else's app?
You've described Affirm's primary competitor as the credit card rather than Klarna or Afterpay — given tightening CFPB rules in 2026, does regulatory parity with card issuers actually help Affirm or complicate the value proposition?
HVF Labs was explicit about 'Hard, Valuable, Fun' as a filter for what's worth building — looking back at Affirm's first 14 years, which of those three criteria has been hardest to maintain as the company scaled to 27 million users?

Avoid

Don't open with generic BNPL market-size framing or treat Affirm as just a consumer lending app — he built it from a data-infrastructure thesis and has spent 14 years arguing it's architecturally different from credit cards, so starting at the category level signals you haven't done the work.

Make it yours