MAX LEVCHIN

Born in 1975 in Kyiv, Soviet Union. His family emigrated to the US in 1991, landing in Chicago with basically nothing.

Levchin taught himself to code and studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In college, he started multiple failed companies. After graduating in 1997, he moved to Silicon Valley and founded his fourth startup.

At a lecture at Stanford in 1998, he met Peter Thiel. They co-founded Confinity, which merged with Elon Musk's X.com to become PayPal.

Levchin was PayPal's CTO — he built the fraud detection systems that kept the company alive. eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

Levchin got about $34 million. He was 27.

Then came the "PayPal Mafia" diaspora. While Thiel went to hedge funds and Musk went to rockets, Levchin kept building.

He started Slide (a social media widget company) in 2004, sold it to Google in 2010 for $182 million. Founded HVF (Hard Valuable Fun) as an incubator.

Then in 2012, he started Affirm — the company that would define his second act.

Affirm went public in January 2021 at $49 per share. The stock briefly hit $176 before crashing back to earth with the rest of fintech.

But the company survived, partnered with Amazon and Shopify, and became the dominant BNPL player in the US.

PayPal is the famous one — Levchin built the fraud detection tech that made the whole thing work. Without him solving the bot and credit card fraud problems, PayPal would have died in 2000.

Slide was his social media play, sold to Google for $182 million. Affirm is his masterpiece — a publicly traded BNPL company that processes billions in transactions annually.

He also co-founded Yelp (yes, that Yelp) with former PayPal colleague Russel Simmons and served as chairman.

Levchin is an engineer-investor. He thinks in systems, not narratives.

When he looks at a business, he's asking: what's the technical moat? Basically, what can this company do that's genuinely hard to replicate?

He doesn't chase hype. His angel portfolio is heavy on fintech, hard tech, and companies with real engineering challenges.

He avoids anything where the primary value is marketing.

Affirm. He started it in 2012 when nobody was talking about buy-now-pay-later.

It took almost a decade of grinding — building bank partnerships, navigating regulations, convincing merchants. The IPO in January 2021 valued the company at $24 billion.

Levchin's stake was worth over $2 billion at the peak. More importantly, Affirm proved he wasn't just a PayPal one-hit wonder.

Slide. He started it in 2004 as a social media widget company — remember those Facebook apps that let you throw virtual sheep at friends?

It was a real business for a while, but the model was fragile. Google acquired it in 2010 for $182 million, which sounds like a win except Google shut it down almost immediately and most of the team left.

Levchin has called it a lesson in building something meaningful versus something viral.

Technology should make financial services honest, not predatory. That's the thread running through Levchin's career.

PayPal democratized online payments. Affirm was explicitly built as an alternative to credit card debt — no hidden fees, no compounding interest tricks.

Levchin has said repeatedly that the credit card industry profits from consumer confusion, and he wants to kill that model. Build something people actually understand.

Married to Nellie Minkova. They have three children.

Levchin is private about his family life. He's spoken publicly about the immigrant experience — arriving in America as a teenager with no money and no English, which he credits as the source of his work ethic.

Born in Kyiv, Soviet Union (now Ukraine). Emigrated to Chicago at 16.

Studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The CS program there is one of the best in the world.

He started four companies before graduating.

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