Podcasts about levchin

Phillip Rogaway was a Professor at the University of California, Davis, and who has advanced so many areas of cryptography. He was the first to be awarded Levchin prize in 2016. Phillip has over 43,000 citations to his work, including classic papers on random oracles, symmetric key modes, garbled circuits, secure computation, and format-preserving encryption. Along with his passion for research, he has published work on areas of morality in cryptography   

Affirm Holdings Chairman/CEO/Founder Max Levchin discusses Buy Now, Pay Later, new features and partnerships. Levchin speaks with Bloomberg's Sonali Basak.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bloomberg Talks: Affirm CEO Max Levchin discusses the company's 'Killer Quarter'. Levchin speaks with Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow and Caroline Hyde.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Max Levchin, CEO of Affirm, explains why the company's safety measures make 'buy now, pay later' superior to credit cards. Levchin also breaks down why he believes the new credit rules enacted by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are a good thing for the industry. The content of the video is for general and informational purposes only. All views presented in this show reflect the opinions of the guest and the host. You should not take a mention of any asset, be it cryptocurrency or a publicly traded security as a recommendation to buy, sell or hold that cryptocurrency or security. Guests and hosts are not affiliated with or endorsed by Public Holdings or its subsidiaries. You should make your own financial and investment decisions or consult respective professionals. Full disclosures are in the channel description. Learn more at Public.com/disclosures. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. There is a possibility of loss with any investment. Historical or hypothetical performance results, if mentioned, are presented for illustrative purposes only. Do not infer or assume that any securities, sectors or markets described in the videos were or will be profitable. Any statements of future expectations and other forward-looking statements are strictly based on the current views, opinion, or assumptions of the person presenting them, and should not be taken as an indicator of performance nor should be relied upon as an investment advice.

Affirm CEO Max Levchin is one of the original co-founders of PayPal, and now he leads one of the biggest players in the buy now, pay later business. Levchin wants to build a company that changes how shoppers pay for big-ticket items and the way people take on debt. But critics argue the company is a danger to consumers because it allows them to make some purchases with no interest payments, thereby encouraging excessive spending. For this bonus episode of WSJ's Take On the Week, Levchin talks about Affirm's future and competing with the credit-card industry. How can we better help you take on the week? Send us an email to takeontheweek@wsj.com.  Listening on Google Podcasts? Here's our guide for switching to a different podcast player. Listen to WSJ's Take On the Week: https://on.wsj.com/3r5DbS7 

EPISODE 1416: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to the author of THE FOUNDERS, Jimmy Soni, about the story of PayPal and its remarkable entrepreneurs - from Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to Reid Hoffman and Levchin - who have shaped the 21st century Jimmy Soni is an award-winning author. His newest book, The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, was a national bestseller and received critical acclaim from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, The Economist, Financial Times, and more. His previous book, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, won the 2017 Neumann Prize, awarded by the British Society for the History of Mathematics for the best book on the history of mathematics for a general audience, and the 2019 Middleton Prize by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his daughter, Venice. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What could be more exciting than carefully reading through Big Tech proxy statements to look at management incentives, comparing them across companies to see what's similar and different, what we like and don't like, and how they rank from best to worst..?If this is not your bag, you're in luck! MBI did this work for you and shared his findings in a post.But that's just a starting point: In today's episode, we go deep into Big Tech compensation, and MBI shares additional thoughts and analysis based on feedback he received after publishing his work. We discuss Apple, Google/Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta.For a lot more good stuff from Mostly Borrowed Ideas (

Recently, you may have noticed that when you buy almost anything online - clothing, furniture, even groceries - there's an option to Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL). This usually means splitting the total cost of your purchase into a series of smaller payments, and it doesn't require a credit card up front. The BNPL business is taking off as a payment alternative, thanks in part to Affirm. Affirm is a financial company that allows its 14 million active consumers to pay for purchases over time, without a credit check and without late fees. In this episode of Leadership Next, hosts Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt speak with Affirm's founder and CEO Max Levchin. Levchin, also a co-founder of PayPal, struggled to build credit in the U.S. after immigrating from Ukraine. He shares how this led him to eventually found Affirm and shares his hopes for making financial services more equitable. He also explains how Affirm plans to make money without collecting late fees, and discusses the ups and downs the company has experienced since its January 2021 IPO.

We cover so much ground in this conversation with friend-of-the-show David Senra (

Jim Cramer and David Faber kicked off a new market week by focusing on volatility and a drop in oil prices in wake of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as both sides engage in talks aimed at ending the war. The anchors took an in-depth look at the extended sell-off in Chinese stocks -- taking a hit on COVID-19 lockdowns in China, worries that Chinese companies' stocks will be delisted in the U.S., and reports that Russia has asked China for help in its war with Ukraine. Should you buy Alibaba at a six-year low? Affirm Holdings CEO Max Levchin appeared on the program: The co-founder of PayPal offered a unique perspective on the Russia-Ukraine war as someone who is a native of Kyiv. Levchin also discussed Affirm's raised guidance, with the stock down 70% year-to-date.

My friend Jimmy Soni (

There's been a surge in the buy now, pay later space, which is exactly what it sounds like: Get something you maybe can't quite afford and pay it off in installments. You might not even need to have your credit checked. By some counts, more than half of Americans have used it. There are concerns that this new method of payment could be confusing us about what we want versus what we need. And now Affirm, a leader in this space, is partnering with Amazon. Marketplace’s Jed Kim speaks with Max Levchin, CEO of Affirm. Levchin believes the new model of buying is necessary.

There's been a surge in the buy now, pay later space, which is exactly what it sounds like: Get something you maybe can't quite afford and pay it off in installments. You might not even need to have your credit checked. By some counts, more than half of Americans have used it. There are concerns that this new method of payment could be confusing us about what we want versus what we need. And now Affirm, a leader in this space, is partnering with Amazon. Marketplace’s Jed Kim speaks with Max Levchin, CEO of Affirm. Levchin believes the new model of buying is necessary.

There's been a surge in the buy now, pay later space, which is exactly what it sounds like: Get something you maybe can't quite afford and pay it off in installments. You might not even need to have your credit checked. By some counts, more than half of Americans have used it. There are concerns that this new method of payment could be confusing us about what we want versus what we need. And now Affirm, a leader in this space, is partnering with Amazon. Marketplace’s Jed Kim speaks with Max Levchin, CEO of Affirm. Levchin believes the new model of buying is necessary.

We can look around at distributed banking, crypto-currencies, Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, and so many other innovative business strategies as new and exciting and innovative. And they are. But paving the way for them was simplifying online payments to what I've heard Elon Musk call just some rows in a database.  Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and former Netscaper Luke Nosek had this idea in 1998. Levchin and Nosek has worked together on a startup called SponsorNet New Media while at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana where PLATO and Mosaic had come out of. And SponsorNet was supposed to sell online banner ads but would instead be one of four failed startups before zeroing in on this new thing, where they would enable digital payments for businesses and make it simple for consumers to buy things online. They called the company Confinity and setup shop in beautiful Mountain View, California. It was an era when a number of organizations were doing things in taking payments online that weren't so great. Companies would cache credit card numbers on sites, many had weak security, and the rush to sell everything  in the bubble forming around dot-coms fueled a knack for speed over security, privacy, or even reliability.  Confinity would store the private information in its own banking vaults, keep it secure, and provide access to vendors - taking a small charge per-transaction. Where large companies had been able to build systems to take online payments, now small businesses and emerging online stores could compete with the big boys. Thiel and Levchin had hit on something when they launched a service called PayPal, to provide a digital wallet and enable online transactions. They even accepted venture funding, taking $3 million from banks like Deutsche Bank over Palm Pilots. One of those funders was Nokia, investing in PayPal expanding into digital services for the growing mobile commerce market. And by 2000 they were up to 1,000,000 users.  They saw an opening to make a purchase from a browser on a phone or a browser or app on a cell phone using one of those new smart phone ideas. And they were all rewarded with over 10 million people using the site in just three short years, processing a whopping $3 billion in transactions.  Now this was the heart of the dot-com bubble. In that time, Elon Musk managed to sell his early startup Zip2, which made city guides on the early internet, to Compaq for around $300 million, pocketing $22 million for himself. He parlayed that payday into X.com, another online payment company. X.com exploded to over 200,000 customers quickly and as happens frequently with rapid acceleration, a young Musk found himself with a new boss - Bill Harris, the former CEO of Intuit.  And they helped invent many of the ways we do business online at that time. One of my favorite of Levchin's contributions to computing, the Gausebeck-Levchin test, is one of the earliest implementations of what we now call CAPTCHA - you know when you're shown a series of letters and asked to type them in to eliminate bots.  Harris helped the investors de-risk by merging with Confinity to form X.com. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are larger than life minds in Silicon Valley. The two were substantially different. Musk took on the CEO role but Musk and Thiel were at heads. Thiel believed in a Linux ecosystem and Musk believed in a Windows ecosystem. Thiel wanted to focus on money transfers, similar to the PayPal of today. Given that those were just rows in a database, it was natural that that kind of business would become a red ocean and indeed today there are dozens of organizations focused on it. But Paypal remains the largest. So Musk also wanted to become a full online banking system - much more ambitious. Ultimately Thiel won and assumed the title of CEO.  They remained a money transmitter and not a full bank. This means they keep funds that have been sent and not picked up, in an interest bearing account at a bank.  They renamed the company to PayPal in 2001 and focused on taking the company public, with an IPO as PYPL in 2002. The stock shot up 50% in the first day of trading, closing at $20 per share. Yet another example of the survivors of the dot com bubble increasing the magnitude of valuations. By then, most eBay transactions accepted PayPal and seeing an opportunity, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion later in 2002. Suddenly PayPal was the default option for closed auctions and would continue their meteoric rise. Musk is widely reported to have made almost $200 million when eBay bought PayPal and Thiel is reported to have made over $50 million.  Under eBay, PayPal would grow and as with most companies that IPO, see a red ocean form in their space. But they brought in people like Ken Howery, who serve as the VP of corporate development, would later cofound investment firm Founders Fund with Thiel, and then become the US Ambassador to Sweden under Trump. And he's the first of what's called the PayPal Mafia, a couple dozen extremely influential personalities in tech.  By 2003, PayPal had become the largest payment processor for gambling websites. Yet they walked away from that business to avoid some of the complicated regulations until various countries that could verify a license for online gambling venues.  In 2006 they added security keys and moved to sending codes to phones for a second factor of security validation. In 2008 they bought Fraud Sciences to gain access to better online risk management tools and Bill Me Later. As the company grew, they setup a company in the UK and began doing business internationally. They moved their EU presence to Luxembourg 2007. They've often found themselves embroiled in politics, blocking the any political financing accounts, Alex Jones show InfoWars, and one of the more challenging for them, WikiLeaks in 2010. This led to them being attacked by members of Anonymous for a series of denial of service attacks that brought the PayPal site down. OK, so that early CAPTCHA was just one way PayPal was keeping us secure. It turns out that moving money is complicated, even the $3 you paid for that special Golden Girls t-shirt you bought for a steal on eBay. For example, US States require reporting certain transactions, some countries require actual government approval to move money internationally, some require a data center in the country, like Turkey. So on a case-by-case basis PayPal has had to decide if it's worth it to increase the complexity of the code and spend precious development cycles to support a given country. In some cases, they can step in and, for example, connect the Baidu wallet to PayPal merchants in support of connecting China to PayPal.  They were spun back out of eBay in 2014 and acquired Xoom for $1 billion in 2015, iZettle for $2.2 billion, who also does point of sales systems. And surprisingly they bought online coupon aggregator Honey for $4B in 2019. But their best acquisition to many would be tiny app payment processor Venmo for $26 million. I say this because a friend claimed they prefer that to PayPal because they like the “little guy.” Out of nowhere, just a little more than 20 years ago, the founders of PayPal and they and a number of their initial employees willed a now Fortune 500 company into existence. While they were growing, they had to learn about and understand so many capital markets and regulations. This sometimes showed them how they could better invest money. And many of those early employees went on to have substantial impacts in technology. That brain drain helped fuel the Web 2.0 companies that rose.  One of the most substantial ways was with the investment activities. Thiel would go on to put $10 million of his money into Clarium Capital Management, a hedge fund, and Palantir, a big data AI company with a focus on the intelligence industry, who now has a $45 billion market cap. And he funded another organization who doesn't at all use our big private data for anything, called Facebook. He put half a million into Facebook as an angel investor - an investment that has paid back billions. He's also launched the Founders Fund, Valar Venture, and is a partner at Y Combinator, in capacities where he's funded everyone from LinkedIn and Airbnb to Stripe to Yelp to Spotify, to SpaceX to Asana and the list goes on and on and on.  Musk has helped take so many industries online. Why not just apply that startup modality to space - so launched SpaceX and to cars, so helped launch (and backed financially) Tesla and solar power, so launched Solar City and building tunnels so launched The Boring Company. He dabbles in Hyperloops (thus the need for tunnels) and OpenAI and well, whatever he wants. He's even done cameos in movies like Iron Man. He's certainly a personality.  Max Levchin would remain the CTO and then co-found and become the CEO of Affirm, a public fintech company.  David Sacks was the COO at PayPal and founded Yammer. Roelof Botha is the former CFO at PayPal who became a partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the top venture capital firms. Yishan Wong was an engineering manager at PayPal who became the CEO of Reddit. Steve Chen left to join Facebook but hooked back up with Jawed Karim for a new project, who he studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana with. They were joined by Chad Hurley, who had created the original PayPal logo, to found YouTube. They sold it to Google for $1.65 billion in 2006. Hurley now owns part of the Golden State Warriors, the MLS Los Angeles team, and Leeds United. Reid Hoffman was another COO at PayPal, who Thiel termed the “firefighter-in-chief” and left to found LinkedIn. After selling LinkedIn to Microsoft for over $26 billion he become a partner at venture capital firm, Greylock Partners.  Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons co-founded Yelp with $1 million in funding from Max Levchin, taking the company public in 2011. And the list goes on. PayPal paved the way for small transactions on the Internet. A playbook repeated in different parts of the sector by the likes of Square, Stripe, Dwolla, Due, and many others - including Apple Pay, Amazon Payments, and Google Wallet. We live in an era now, where practically every industry has been taken online. Heck, even cars. In the next episode we'll look at just that, exploring the next steps in Elon Musk's career after leaving PayPal. 

Affirm, a “buy now pay later” company led by PayPal co-founder and former CEO Max Levchin, went public today at a valuation of nearly $15 billion – and then saw its share price more than double. Dan goes deeper with Levchin to discuss the IPO, the future of fintech and the role of payments processors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Max Levchin, CEO of Affirm, discusses starting, running and investing in companies. Levchin says that new shopping trends are emerging. He also points out that retailers will have to reinvent themselves as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Fritz Lanman, CEO at ClassPass, talks about responding to COVID-19 with live streamed classes. He says that the coronavirus outbreak has been "devastating" for the fitness industry. Hosts: Carol Massar and Jason Kelly. Producer: Doni Holloway. 

Max Levchin, CEO of Affirm, discusses starting, running and investing in companies. Levchin says that new shopping trends are emerging. He also points out that retailers will have to reinvent themselves as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Fritz Lanman, CEO at ClassPass, talks about responding to COVID-19 with live streamed classes. He says that the coronavirus outbreak has been "devastating" for the fitness industry. Hosts: Carol Massar and Jason Kelly. Producer: Doni Holloway.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Host of FOX Business Network's The Claman Countdown, Liz Claman is joined by PayPal and Affirm co-founder, Max Levchin. Levchin shares how growing up in Soviet Ukraine shaped the business ethic that drove him to create a financial lending company that "does not want to benefit from [its users'] mistakes." Plus, Levchin discusses American reliance during challenging times. Follow Liz on Twitter: @LizClaman

All links and images for this episode can be found on CISO Series (https://cisoseries.com/defense-in-depth-lack-of-diversity-in-cybersecurity/) Cybersecurity teams are notoriously not diverse. At the same time we keep hearing and talking about the need for diversity. Is it critical? Can you be just as successful without it? Check out this Twitter feed for the discussion that is the basis of our conversation on this week’s episode co-hosted by me, David Spark (@dspark), the producer of CISO Series and Allan Alford (@AllanAlfordinTX). Our guest is Christopher Zell, vp, head of information security, The Wendy's Company. Thanks to this week's sponsor, Electronic Frontier Foundation. On this episode of Defense in Depth, you’ll learn: Discussion is based on a quote by one PayPal co-founder, Max Levchin, who said, "The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong. You should try to make the early team as non-diverse as possible." There is diversity of people and there's diversity of opinions. Those two often go together, but they don't have to. While appalling, there is some truth to Levchin's statement. When everyone thinks the same you don't have conflict and can move quickly. But lack of diversity of opinion means you don't see the full picture and that can make you susceptible to unforeseen vulnerabilities. If you don't know what problems you're facing, you should want diversity. Minorities often face different and more struggles than those who never have to suffer diversity issues. They've been hardened and that should make them an even more attractive candidate. Start building your diverse network now. When it comes time to hire diversity and you don't have that network already in place, you're going to have a very difficult time. For more, check out the (ISC)^2 study "Innovation Through Inclusion: The Multicultural Cybersecurity Workforce" and Computerworld article, "The next tech skillset is ‘differently-abled neuro-diverse’".

Today in payments news, Affirm has launched a new app that will let customers use the service to pay almost anywhere online or in the real world.

Max Levchin is the cofounder and former CTO of PayPal. His stories from PayPal's early days reveal that its methods for addressing security questions from the start can apply to the problems social media companies face today. Levchin started Affirm to do away with amoral loan practices; recently, Affirm allowed government employees who couldn't work during the shutdown to take their time in paying back loans. Levchin values honesty and transparency, which serve as the foundations for his products.   Show notes   Conversation with Max Levchin (0:47) Max is a cofounder and former CTO of PayPal (1:07) The human-computer loop (7:06) PRNG is a pseudorandom number generator (9:53) All Turtles Podcast episode with Renée DiResta (13:13) Affirm is a better way to borrow money (17:20)   Advice to entrepreneurs (34:10) Phil's “Rule of Three” video series (34:38) The rock-paper-scissors model of dealing with competition (35:10)   Listener question (42:28) From Steve via email: I saw an article that Google is giving away $25 million to fund humane AI projects to solve seemingly intractable problems. My question to the All Turtles luminaries is what they think of this effort, which coincides with Google's decision to not pursue $10 billion military contract for use of AI (Microsoft is now pursuing this).   We want to hear from you Please send us your comments, suggested topics, and listener questions for future All Turtles Podcast episodes. Voicemail: +1 (310) 571-8448 Email: hello@all-turtles.com Twitter: @allturtlesco with hashtag #askAT For more from All Turtles, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to our newsletter on our website.

Max Levchin learned to write code out of necessity. His mother's necessity, specifically. Levchin co-founded PayPal, reaped a windfall from its IPO and sale, and became one of the best-connected investor/entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. But before all that, he was a teenage refugee from the Soviet Union, figuring out how to make his mark at the dawning of the consumer Internet era. Before the family had left Ukraine in the early 1990s, Soviet officials had given Levchin's mother a poorly translated programming manual, a PC, and a mandate: Learn to program it. Mother and son took turns reading each other the manual, and by the time they moved to the U.S., both knew how to code. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the retail industry has evolved, credit has remained an equally dynamic financing instrument, moving from early store layaway to today’s digital payments. But retail experiences are continuing to evolve beyond the capabilities of traditional credit and lending. Entrepreneur Max Levchin will share his thoughts on why we need to reimagine the financing ecosystem from the ground up in order to unlock the future of credit. Drawing from his experiences growing Affirm, Levchin will explain why the industry must be willing to embrace new technologies that enable personalized consumer engagement at scale. Levchin will also discuss why Affirm is committed to reinventing credit, starting with the belief that it should help improve consumers’ financial lives in addition to financing their purchases. Moderated by Alex Rampell of Andreessen Horowitz.

Max Levchin cofounded PayPal with Peter Thiel and built it into a Silicon Valley success with the help of Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk. They took it public and sold to eBay in 2002, then all four left the company. But Levchin couldn't let go. He'd still show up at the office. On this episode of "Success! How I Did It," Levchin talks about how he struggled to find himself after the acquisition, so much so that his girlfriend dumped him (but they later married). He has since gone on to launch a bunch of startups and now spends most of his time as CEO of Affirm, which offers small loans but doesn't charge penalties or fees. But before all of that, Levchin grew up in Kiev, Ukraine, where he learned how to write computer code using pen and paper. And in the 1980s, his life was about to change. He lived near the Chernobyl power plant. Subscribe to "Success! How I Did It" on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, RadioPublic, or your favorite app so you don't miss interviews with leaders like Sheryl Sandberg and LeBron James.

Max Levchin helped build PayPal. Then he went onto tackle gaming at Slide. Now he's back in the world of payments and finance with his latest startup Affirm. a16z's Angela Strange talks with Levchin about Affirm's opportunity in the world of finance, and how it aims to build trust among a customer base that doesn't trust banks. Why building models around loans requires making bad loans, and finally, why everyone should start watching Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" -- over and over.