Maksymilian Rafailovych “Max” Levchin is a Ukrainian-born American computer scientist knowna s the founder and CEO of Affirm, a financing alternative to credit cards and other credit-payment products that offers instant financing for online purchases to be paid in fixed monthly installments.
Early Life and Education
Max Levchin was born in Kiev, Ukrainian SSR to a Ukrainian Jewish family on July 11, 1975. Levchin went to the United States and stayed in Chicago in 1991. When he was a child, he had respiratory problems and doctors suspected his chance of living. But with support from both his parents and his grandmother, he took up the clarinet to expand his lung capacity.
He graduated in Mather High School and then attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science in 1997. In 2008, Levchin married his longtime girlfriend, Nellie Minkova and they have two children.
Career
Max Levchin and other students in the University of Illinois, Scott Banister, and Luke Nosek founded SponsorNet New Media in the summer of 1995.
In 1998, after graduating from college, Max Levchin with Peter Thiel started a security company called Fieldlink, which authorized consumers to store encrypted data on their PalmPilots and other PDA devices in order for handheld devices to act as digital wallets. After converting the company name to Confinity, they formed a popular payment product known as PayPal and engaged on digital transfers of funds by PDA. The company then emerged with X.com in 2000. In 2001, they approved the name PayPal after its main product. In February 2002, PayPal went public and was obtained by eBay in July 2002. At the time of acquisition, Levchin received approximately $34 million from his 2.3% stake in PayPal.
Levchin is well-known for his PayPal’s anti-fraud struggles and also the co-founder of one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA challenge-response human test called Gausebeck-Levchin test.
In 2002, the MIT Technology Review TR100 acknowledged Levchin as the Innovator of the Year, as well as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
Levchin is part of a group of roughly twenty founders and previous staffs of PayPal who have become described to as the PayPal Mafia, due to their accomplishments in establishing and empowering in technology companies after leaving PayPal.
Slide
In 2004, Levchin founded Slide, personal media-sharing service for social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. In August 2010, Google acquired Slide for $182 million and on August 25, Levchin united the company as the Vice-President of Engineering. Prior to the acquirement by Google, Slide was a prominent developer of social applications, mainly on the Facebook platform, spanning numerous diverse segments, such as photo and video self-expression and social games. At peak traffic, Slide’s photo-sharing widgets alone attained over 150 million monthly users worldwide.
Levchin as the founder and CEO, created the vision for the company, engaged and managed the senior team, performed closely with the Product Management staff on their products and Engineering on the implementation, obtained tens of millions of dollars from angels, venture and institutional investors, and ultimately collaborated the successful sale of the company to Google. On August 26, 2011, Google revealed it was shutting down Slide, and that Levchin was leaving the company.
HVF and Affirm
In late 2011, Levchin opened a company called HVF, stands for Hard, Valuable, and Fun. It was meant to explore and fund projects and companies in the area of leveraging data, such as data from analog sensors.
In early 2012, the financial technology company Affirm was spun out of HVF, with the objective of emerging the next generation credit network. Levchin with Palantir Technologies co-founder Nathan Getting and First Data’s Jeff Kaditz founded Affirm. Levchin stays to be the CEO of the company as of July 2018. HVF introduced a fertility app that aids couples conceive naturally called Glow in 2013.
At Affirm, their mission is simple: to deliver honest financial products to improve lives. They believe the financial industry desperately needs reinvention. Not only is the fundamental infrastructure built with technology from the 1970s, but a dwindling number of people. They are using modern technology to re-imagine and re-build core components of financial infrastructure from the ground up. They are focusing on improving the lives of everyday consumers with less expensive, more transparent financial products.