#869: Max Levchin, PayPal and Affirm — The Path from The Soviet Union to Building Multi-Billion Dollar Companies (Plus: Real-World Socialism vs. Capitalism)

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers of different types. And my guest today is someone I've wanted to have on for a long time, Max Levchin. Max was born in Ukraine before moving to the US and settling in Chicago in 1991
He taught himself how to code with a pen and paper, with a pad of paper and a pen under trees in parks. And from those humble beginnings, he has gone on to do a million different things. He founded Affirm and Slide. He helped create Yelp, and I'll come back to a few of these. He co-founded PayPal along with people you would recognize like Peter Thiel, Neil and Musk and others. He co-created the Capture, the first commercial implementation.
And he has now invested in more than 100 startups, computer scientists, serial entrepreneur, philanthropist. He does it all.
He is also the co-founder and chairman of Glow, a data-driven fertility company. Affirm and Glow were both created and launched from his San Francisco-based innovation lab, SyFy VC. And in 2002, not surprising, given everything I just mentioned, 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. And in this conversation, we get into a lot of details of how he thinks about productivity, scheduling, his other obsessions, how he applies his meticulous tracking and performance orientation to other things. There's a lot you can use, quite a few labs. We get into the power of fiction, why time is a zero-sum game, and in some cases, pain with a smile. What does that mean? We're going to find out. So you can find all things Max at levchin.com, and a firm, you can find at afirm.com. And almost certainly, you have used or you have seen a firm. A firm is the payment network that empowers consumers and helps merchants drive growth.
And we also get into being born in Ukraine and having front row seats to socialism. What does it actually mean to compare socialism to capitalism? What does it look like in real life? Well, most people treat that as a theoretical exercise, and Max has lived both and can tell you all about the comparisons. So with all of that said, what a preamble. Let's get to Max Levchin. Thanks for listening. Enjoy.

**Max Levchin** (2:28)
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:32)
Can I ask you a personal question?
Max, it's nice to see you.
And I wanted to kick this off with a thank you, believe it or not, from what you put into my last book, Tribe of Mentors. And it was in response, you had several responses to this, but it was in response to the metaphorical billboard question. What would you put on a giant billboard, anywhere with anything on it? What would it say and why? Any quotes you think of often or live your life by? And there was one that I had never come across because I had never seen the movie Ronin. And the line was, whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt. And I have come back to this after watching the movie. So many times it's hard for me to even give you an accurate count or even estimate of account. But perhaps we could give people some context. Why was this one of your answers to that question?

**Max Levchin** (3:45)
It's a great quote. I love that quote.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:47)
Yeah, so good.

**Max Levchin** (3:48)
The next line in the movie, that's the first thing they teach you.
I'm only showing off.
I guess I love that quote so much too. It's a great quote. Encapsulates so many different flavors. It's like, don't doubt yourself. The real meaning here is you know the answer. You may be too scared, too embarrassed, too unprepared, to embrace the fact that you know the answer, but you know the answer, so let's not mess around. You know the answer. That's layer one. Layer two is make a decision already. Layer three is even if it's unpleasant, you're going to have to do it anyway, so don't delay. It was just so many flavors of the same idea over and over again, encapsulated beautifully in just a few words, and so I think it's a great succinct line. The other thing, I'm a huge fan of studying leadership. Fan of leadership sounded weird, so I love leadership-related lessons, and there are two movies where leadership, I think, is, or I'm sure there are more than two, but like two of the movies that I fall back on for leadership content is Ronin and Seven Samurai, and Seven Samurai is hard to quote because it's in Japanese and you can use your native speaker which I'm not, but Ronin is in English and so it's great to quote. There's a lot of other great lines, but that's the best one.