#869: Max Levchin, PayPal and Affirm — The Path from The Soviet Union to Building Multi-Billion Dollar Companies (Plus: Real-World Socialism vs. Capitalism)

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world class performers of different types. And my guest today is someone I've wanted to have on for a long time, Max Levchin. Max was born in Ukraine before moving to the US and settling in Chicago in 1991. He taught himself how to code with a pen and paper with a pad. Of paper and a pen under trees in parks. And from those humble beginnings He has gone on to do a million different things. He founded a firm and slide. He helped create. Yelp, and I'll come back to a few of these. He co-founded PayPal along with people you would recognize like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and others. He co-created the capture of the first.

commercial implementation and He Has now Invested in more than a hundred startups. Computer scientist, serial entrepreneur, philanthropist, he does it all.

He is also the co-founder and chairman of Glow, a data-driven fertility company. A firm in Glow were both created and launched from his San Francisco based innovation lab, Sci-Fi VC. And in 2002, not surprising, given everything I just mentioned, he was named to MIT Technology Reviews TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world, as well as innovator of the year. And in this conversation, we get into a lot of details of How he thinks about Productivity, scheduling. His other obsessions how he applies his

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