Max Levchin, Founder & CEO @ Affirm:The Biggest Surprise Scaling to $18.7BN Market Cap

Key ideas

Levchin explains how Affirm handles brilliant but difficult people, hiring grades, emotion-free post-mortems, layoffs and rough prototypes, drawing the one hard line at loss of trust.

From a machine transcript of the audio. Quotes link to the moment they are said.

1. 1

   Be blunt about work, humble about yourself

   Levchin values people who can call a team's work garbage while making clear they respect the team, and says that if you hold back the blow you ship garbage. He separates work that fell short because of circumstances, a fixable conversation, from a person who cannot do better, a harder conversation about their place on the team. He says narcissism or self-orientation is probably the main trigger that turns extreme personalities toxic, and he allows second chances for most things but not for lost trust.

2. 2

   You cannot grade hires at interview

   Levchin says candidates are now coached well enough that you cannot judge A or B at hiring time; you can screen out the weak, and the rest shows once they are inside. He cites the Steve Jobs line about B players hiring C players and says the reason is fear: a B player afraid of being found out may become a manager and hire people worse than themselves. He sees other B players as useful, doing work A players turn up their noses at, and says many grind their way up.

3. 3

   Write down failures, without emotion

   Levchin describes Affirm's post-mortem routine: a separate Slack conversation and document per incident, one named author with a week or two to distill raw data into a white paper, and a weekly review where someone senior judges whether it goes deep enough. He says apology and responsibility-taking must be kept out so people can speak freely about what they got wrong. One case he gives: the team scaled its front end for a big launch and overloaded its database, an error he says someone should have calculated beforehand.

4. 4

   Stay on the floor during a layoff

   Levchin says that in his first layoff, at a company before Affirm, he wanted to hide until a friend who was an executive there told him to go help people pack. He calls the result somewhere between cathartic and therapeutic, and says layoffs have not become easier. He says a strong culture softens the blow in a way you cannot fix in the moment, recalls people in Affirm's layoff saying they understood the company had overhired, and now counts overhiring as a calculated risk that did not pan out.

5. 5

   Test rough, then pull it and rebuild

   Levchin says Affirm has a prototyping team allowed to ship work that is not production quality, to learn whether a crazy idea has any odds. When the data looks good, he says, they pull the feature down and build it properly, because leaving prototypes out produces a collection of garbage. He normally pushes hard against delays, but says he makes exceptions for things like credit models and back-end work he knows will matter for years.

In Max’s words

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