"Hobby is Startups"... Endless Challenges Even After Becoming a Billionaire in Their 20s [News Inside]

Max Levchin, Founder of Affirm

▲Max Levchin, Founder of Affirm

[Asia Economy Reporter Kwon Jaehee] A man who became a billionaire in his 20s by founding PayPal in 1998.

This is the story of Max Levchin (46), the founder of 'Affirm,' currently the hottest fintech company in Silicon Valley. However, even after becoming a billionaire, his life has not changed much. After the success of PayPal, Levchin, nicknamed the 'serial entrepreneur' for continuously founding startups, still spends 15 to 18 hours a day at Affirm, the fintech company he founded.

Born in 1975, Levchin was born into a Ukrainian Jewish family and immigrated to the United States with his parents following the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion. After graduating from the University of Illinois with a degree in computer engineering in 1997, he moved to a friend's house in Palo Alto, next to Stanford University, where he began his connection with Silicon Valley. During his college years, he co-founded a company called SponsorNet New Media with Luke Nosek, one of PayPal's co-founders, and Scott Banister, an early PayPal advisor and co-founder of the security company IronPort. His connection to Silicon Valley might have been inevitable.

After graduation, he moved to his friend's house in Palo Alto and attended various lectures at Stanford University, where he met Peter Thiel, then a hedge fund manager, through his class. At 24, Levchin explained a business idea to Thiel involving security technology that stores encrypted information on small devices. Thiel immediately expressed interest in investing and proposed co-founding a company, but the business failed despite several revisions. However, the process was not meaningless. During the failure, Levchin conceived another business idea: if information could be encrypted and sent, then money could also be encrypted and transferred. Thus, in 1998, he co-founded PayPal with Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek.

Later, PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion (approximately 1.7 trillion KRW at the time).

Levchin held a 2.3% stake in PayPal, earning $34 million from the sale. Although he became a billionaire in his 20s, he returned to entrepreneurship.

In an interview with The New York Times (NYT), Levchin explained his motivation for starting again: "I am too young to retire, and I have too much energy to spend the rest of my life on philanthropy like other billionaires."

In 2004, he founded Slide.com, a website for sharing photos and videos. He sold it to Google in 2010, and in 2012, he co-founded Affirm with Palantir co-founder Nathan Gettings and Jeff Kaditz.

Affirm is currently one of the most notable companies in the fintech market. The company name, Affirm, means 'to affirm,' reflecting Levchin's commitment to building the company with truth and positivity.

Affirm provides Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services to e-commerce companies and their customers. Affirm's BNPL service is a two-way service where fintech companies offer consumers point-of-sale installment loans allowing payment at a later date, while providing e-commerce companies with early payment for sales. Recently, Affirm has shown rapid expansion by partnering with major companies such as Amazon and Peloton.

Levchin stated, "Affirm's goal is to innovate consumer finance. We started by creating a payment system that allows consumers to purchase everything in installments if they want."

Affirm has gained great popularity recently as e-commerce has become routine due to COVID-19, especially among the MZ generation. This is because MZ generation consumers with low credit scores or no income can consume without debt by paying a certain fee. In fact, 47.8% of Affirm users are millennials (born early 1980s to early 2000s), followed by Generation X (born mid-1970s to early 1980s) at 32.3%.

Since its listing on NASDAQ in January this year, Affirm's market capitalization has reached about $25 billion (approximately 29.3 trillion KRW). On the 9th (local time), it announced its Q4 (Korean Q3) results, reporting revenue of $261.8 million (approximately 306.6 billion KRW), a 71% increase compared to the same period last year. Due to strong performance, Affirm's stock price surged 18% on the NASDAQ market that day. The number of Affirm users in Q4 reached 7.1 million, an increase of 1.5 million from 5.4 million in the previous quarter.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.