Max Levchin

Levchin was born in 1975 in Kyiv, in Soviet-era Ukraine, into a family of physicists. He was in Kyiv at the time of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, after which his parents sent him and his brother to Crimea.⁠[1][2]

In 1991 he left the Soviet Union with his family under political asylum and settled in Chicago. Recalling that time, he said: “My red Soviet passport was a passport to no country.”⁠[1]

Levchin enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993 as a computer science major and received a B.S. in computer science in 1997. While a student he started companies including NetMeridian Software and SponsorNet New Media, Inc. with Luke Nosek and Scott Banister; in all he founded and led four technology startups while at the university.⁠[1][2]

In 1998 Levchin moved to Silicon Valley, met Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry and co-founded Fieldlink, a security company for encrypted data on handheld devices, which was renamed Confinity the same year. He recruited engineers from the University of Illinois to join the company and has described PayPal as his fifth company.⁠[1][3]

Confinity later merged with X.com, founded by Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry, and the combined company was renamed PayPal; it went public in 2002 and was acquired by eBayeBayeBay Inc. is an online marketplace company headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar; it started out with person-to-person online auctions and listed on Nasdaq in 1998. As of the end of 2025, it had 135 million active buyers, and its platform’s gross merchandise volume in 2025 was nearly $80 billion.Open the full entry that year for $1.5 billion, when Levchin’s roughly 2.3% stake was worth about $34 million. He served as PayPal’s chief technology officer until the eBay acquisition and as a director, and built its anti-fraud systems, including the Gausebeck-Levchin Test, one of the early commercial CAPTCHAs.⁠[1][3][2]

In 2002 Levchin was named to MIT Technology Review’s TR100 list of innovators and was named its Innovator of the Year.⁠[2]

In 2004 Levchin founded Slide, a personal media-sharing service, and put $1 million into the company. The same year he worked with Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons to launch Yelp, and he later chaired Yelp’s board until July 2015.⁠[1][2]

In 2010 GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry acquired Slide for $182 million and Levchin became a vice president of engineering at Google; Google shut Slide down in 2011.⁠[1][3]

In 2011 Levchin founded HVF (Hard, Valuable, Fun), an innovation lab in San Francisco set up as a data-driven incubator. Affirm emerged from HVF in 2012, with Levchin as founder and chief executive officer; the company offers flexible, transaction-level credit and payments to consumers and merchants.⁠[3][4][2]

In 2013 Glow, a data-driven fertility app and the second company to come out of HVF, launched; Levchin is a co-founder and the chairman of Glow.⁠[1][2]

From 2012 to 2015 Levchin served on the board of directors of Yahoo!YahooYahoo is an internet brand founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1994, with email, search, news, finance, sports, and advertising businesses. It developed from a web directory into a portal, underwent major acquisitions and security incidents, and sold its operating business in 2017, when the original listed company became Altaba. Apollo-managed funds acquired the brand’s operating business in 2021. Yahoo launched the AI answer service Scout in 2026.Open the full entry Inc.⁠[2]

In 2015 Levchin joined the Consumer Advisory Board of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the first Silicon Valley executive appointed to it. The same year he created the Levchin Prize for real-world cryptography.⁠[1]

In December 2017 Affirm raised $200 million at a valuation of $1.5 billion to $2 billion.⁠[1]

On May 12, 2018, Levchin gave the keynote address at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s 147th Commencement and took part in a fireside chat with Provost Andreas Cangellaris and students in which he discussed Affirm. He had earlier given a keynote for the 50th anniversary of the university’s computer science department in 2014 and created the Frima Lukatskaya Scholarship in Computer Science, named after his grandmother.⁠[1]

On January 12, 2021, Affirm Holdings, Inc. announced the pricing of its initial public offering of 24.6 million shares of Class A common stock at $49 per share; the shares began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker AFRM on January 13.⁠[5]

On October 16, 2025, Levchin joined the board of directors of The Coca-Cola CompanyThe Coca-Cola CompanyThe Coca-Cola Company is an Atlanta-based beverage company whose products are sold in more than 200 countries and territories. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.Open the full entry.⁠[4]

On September 3, 2026, a16zAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry published the episode “Why AI Agents Could Finally Reinvent the Credit Card” on its YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel, and Andreessen Horowitz posted the same podcast on its website that day as “The $100B Niches Hiding Inside Payments.” Erik TorenbergErik TorenbergErik Torenberg is a tech entrepreneur, investor, and podcast host who is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he invests and is responsible for marketing and the ecosystem network. He was the first employee of Product Hunt and founded or co-founded On Deck, Village Global, and Turpentine, long combining founder communities, expert content, and early-stage investing.Open the full entry hosted, with Levchin and a16z general partner Alex RampellAlex RampellAlex Rampell (Alastair Rampell) is an entrepreneur and investor, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and leader of its Apps practice. He co-founded TrialPay and Affirm and serves on the boards of Wise and Rocket Companies.Open the full entry as guests.⁠[6][7]

The three discussed 25 years of change in fintech, including early digital payments, shifts in consumer behavior brought by Apple Pay and Google Pay, and why the card interface has been hard to replace. Levchin described Affirm’s early idea of identity-based payments, a “pajama problem” involving pajama purchases, and the realization that installment financing could significantly raise merchant conversion; the episode also covered genuine versus misleading 0% financing, misconceptions about Affirm today, negative customer acquisition cost, and why so many founders came out of PayPal. Levchin said he is more optimistic about agentic payments than about agents choosing what people buy.⁠[7][6]

Levchin has invested in more than 100 startups. He founded the venture firm SciFi VC, was an executive producer of the film Thank You for Smoking (2005), and co-wrote The Blueprint with Garry KasparovGarry KasparovGarry Kasparov is a chess player, author and political activist born in Baku in the Soviet Union; in 1985 he became the youngest world chess champion in history, and he played IBM’s Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997. After retiring in 2005 he turned to political activism against Vladimir Putin’s government and has lived in New York since 2013.Open the full entry and Peter Thiel.⁠[2][1]

Affirm: Official website: https://www.affirm.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]