Max Levchin
Max Levchin is the founder and CEO of Affirm and a co-founder of PayPal, where he served as CTO and helped build its early anti-fraud systems.
Max Levchin's Bio
Max Levchin is a Ukrainian-American software engineer and entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and former CTO of PayPal, and as the founder and CEO of Affirm. Born in Kiev, he moved to Chicago and later earned a computer science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before helping launch Confinity, which became PayPal.
At PayPal, Levchin led technology and anti-fraud efforts and co-created one of the first commercial CAPTCHA systems. After PayPal’s acquisition by eBay, he went on to found Slide, which Google acquired in 2010, and later started the innovation lab HVF. From HVF, Affirm was spun out in 2012 as a next-generation payments and credit network.
Under Levchin’s leadership, Affirm became a leading U.S. buy-now-pay-later provider and went public in January 2021. He also co-founded Glow, a data-driven fertility company, and remains an active investor and board member across technology and fintech.
Career Timeline
1997 — Earned B.S. in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Completed a bachelor’s degree in computer science after immigrating from Ukraine to Chicago.
1998 — Co-founded Confinity, which became PayPal
Launched the digital payments company with Peter Thiel; it later merged into X.com and adopted the PayPal name.
2002 — Named MIT Technology Review TR100 and Innovator of the Year
Recognized as one of the top 100 innovators under 35 and earned Innovator of the Year honors.
2010 — Sold Slide to Google
Founded the personal media-sharing service Slide and later sold it to Google.
2012 — Founded Affirm from HVF
Started the next-generation payments company and became its founder and CEO.
2021 — Took Affirm public on Nasdaq
Affirm priced its IPO and began trading on Nasdaq under AFRM, becoming one of the year’s notable fintech listings.
Episodes
Related Companies
Affirm
Affirm Holdings, Inc. is an American financial technology company that builds a transparent buy now, pay later payment network for consumers and merchants.
1 episode
PayPal
PayPal is a global digital payments platform that lets consumers and businesses send money, pay online, and manage financial transactions electronically.
1 episode