Affirm: Max Levchin (Part 2 of 2)

As we were brainstorming ideas, the first filter I would apply is what is sort of gut-wrenchingly difficult that just people are willing to go to the ends of earth to figure out. And I said, I know credit scoring is such a gnarly problem. I still brace for impact every time I hand my credit card over because who knows, they might cut it up and bring it to me in two pieces because my credit is so bad. And it was sort of this like, that's really hard. There's a lot of people like me who screwed up in college and probably would like to buy things using credit but have these horrendous triple-digit rates they have to deal with. So that was the jump-off point and we went to work feverishly.

Yep. Yeah. She basically said, "You're insufferable. Go figure out what you want to be."

Uh, I attempted a poor excuse for that right after she broke up with me. I always wanted to live in a loft somehow. I was obsessed with this idea of extremely high ceilings. So I got this loft south of market in San Francisco and I decided to learn how to DJ. I think I was trying to call myself DJ Irate. I'll leave it to the reader to understand what that meant. But I took a bunch of lessons, got some equipment, and then started inviting my nerdy PayPal friends to come to my loft and have dance parties. And I had like two or three and then the neighbors complained and I was like, "Wow, this is quite a different level of misery. Probably shouldn't be doing this." And then I decided this whole thing was kind of silly. And I stopped.

Yeah, exactly. So, right around sort of the DJ phase, I realized that basically the only way out of the pit of despair was to work. I wasn't going to be happy with just more money or cars or anything really and I was missing my girlfriend desperately. So I sort of thought, well, I need to return to some kind of notion of what I was when she thought I was okay. I basically said, what is the essence of work for me? I can write code but I don't seem to be motivated and I can brainstorm product ideas but nothing's on the whiteboard. What's going on? And I went back in my mind to the earliest days of PayPal and the happiest moments were when Luke and Kenny bought all these really cheap whiteboards and we would just fill them with ideas and some of the ideas were completely insane. But that was the intellectual fountain of craziness and creativity and cool. So basically I decided what I need is to rent an office that I could mount lots of whiteboards on the walls and just start brainstorming and bring in some people that I love brainstorming with and something good will come out of it. And so it was less a formal incubator and more of a need to pack a room with brilliant minds and something will happen. And as we started doing this, it actually very quickly that cool ideas started to appear and I thought, wow, what I really need is a structure and maybe some engineers to start prototyping things. So it evolved as opposed to being created.

Yes. Actually, this may be the only time in my life that I sort of jumped off a cliff without checking if there's water. So, I had already gotten back together with then-girlfriend, now wife, who had graciously took me back after a I think we stayed apart for maybe 6 weeks, by the way. So, this was not like a true long separation. But my spirits were suddenly very much up because the love of my life was willing to have me again. I was coming to work and I was brainstorming and my whiteboard was filled with ideas. Russ, who was my chief architect at PayPal, and Jeremy, who was my VP of engineering at PayPal, were hanging out in the space and brainstorming all the time. They were in this corner together talking about all these various ideas around local search and they pitched me on what became Yelp. And entirely on a whim, I basically said, "I will buy as much of this company as you'll sell me for a million dollars." And I don't think I've ever done that before or after.

By the time of the IPO, yes, but in the moment it was much more since there was really nothing.

It did a lot of things and therein lies the problem. The very original idea was this realization that I had that content online will start to become more like TV where you do nothing and just content washes over you. This is before YouTube. So this idea of video on demand on your desktop just wasn't a thing yet. And video, by the way, was very expensive to stream and to post and to encode. So I thought, alright, so video isn't a thing yet and maybe won't be a thing for a while. But what's the closest thing to a video that people could interact with the same way they interact with TV, where you get news and you get content and you get beautiful images and maybe ultimately get advertising and that's how you monetize it. So I came up with this idea of a kind of application that sits on your desktop in a corner like a tape that just scrolls images of things and goods and advertisements and stories and news and you get to configure it. And it was inspired in a way by a much earlier company that died in the dot-com crash called PointCast. I remember obsessing over what PointCast was and what it did wrong, what it did right. And eventually I decided they did nothing wrong. They were just too early.

Yes. It was primarily about personal photo sharing. So, it was very clear that regular people, people who don't really care about cryptography and complex problems, are going to start flooding onto the internet. And I sort of said, well, if the world of the internet becomes suddenly very social, all these humans that are emotional, what will they do? What will they need? They're all going to just follow the seven deadly sins because that's what humans do. We're all wired to transgress in sinful ways. And so I wrote down the seven deadly sins and said that my motto will be one startup for every deadly sin. I remember reading or hearing the quote, "Vanity is the devil's favorite sin." So I thought, well, what does vanity look like online? It has to be media sharing. It has to be photo sharing, has to be video sharing. And so Slide was very much invented through this sort of intellectually rigorous attempt to figure out what will people do once vanity becomes the dominant behavioral force online.

Yeah, probably a good decade.

I think you just answered the question yourself. Part of my existential crisis was I was super successful building a payment system at 27 and all I knew was how to secure things, mostly secure money, and I knew about payments and banking and how to fight fraud and all kinds of really intense things. How could I top that? In my 30s, how was I going to build a better PayPal? And really from what I've read, it sounds like you were motivated by this idea of wanting to make something that was bigger than PayPal because to you PayPal was, you could measure it by a number, $1.5 billion, and in your mind it wasn't about the money, it was about surpassing that number so you could feel like you created something on your own. PayPal wasn't the peak of your career.

Yeah. Starting companies is clearly the thing that gets me going.

Pretty much. I think the original idea was that Peter and I funded it and then fairly soon thereafter I went out and raised a proper financing round. This time I had a brand name to bring to Sand Hill Road. So, lots of Sand Hill Road firms were excited to participate and we were off to the races.

So by the time Facebook started really growing explosively and MySpace was still a thing, we had really kind of nailed this one use case. It's exactly as you mentioned, most photos people post online are of themselves. And so we had basically evolved the product to be just a really beautiful way of showcasing your own photos. And instead of sharing them to a specific individual, you just broadcast them to anybody who would come to your MySpace page or your Facebook page or anywhere. So it was basically like a little scrolling self-advert showing off your photos. And eventually we added things like photo effects and stickers and all the things that you see today in photo sharing software, just 10 years earlier. And by the way, at its peak, how many employees did you have at Slide? 128 if I remember correctly.

That's right. I remember noticing that we were something like the seventh largest property on the web.

The honest answer is I loved the team that I built but we had some pretty serious challenges throughout. Multiple realizations on my part that the culture wasn't going the way I wanted it to. At one point I had to ask a couple of people to leave because I thought they were just creating what is now called toxicity on the team, blowing the company up from within. And throughout the whole thing I felt like a fraud. I never played video games growing up. I was not really into photography. I was not a photo sharer. And so this idea of building entertainment products was a mask I took on. In some ways I was using my own product in real life. I was putting sort of a happy face sticker on Max Levchin.

Probably the most important learning from the problems is that this goes back all the way to PayPal, but PayPal was this unbelievably combative, truth-seeking by any means necessary almost culture. And when I left, I thought to myself, next time around, I wonder if we have to fight so much. Maybe it's better if we had a little bit more love all around. So as I was building Slide, I over-indexed on this idea of, hey, we really have to have a lot more collegiality. And that works really well if you are doing great as a company. But inevitably every company goes through ups and downs and sometimes downs take a long time and you go through the pit of despair for a while. In that moment, all the veneer is stripped. All the superficial, "Oh, such a nice guy, I enjoy spending my time with you" goes away because you start to ask yourself, whose fault is it and why are we not doing well? And the professional emotion you need at that time is respect for your partner's abilities. You don't actually need to feel like that person is an amazingly nice guy. The key thing is I know you will be in your foxhole holding your position with military-level intensity. And as Slide started unraveling a little bit here and there, I noticed that all these people who were extremely loving towards one another, I would find out they didn't respect each other at all. I had to start asking the question, if you don't respect this person professionally, one of you cannot be here.

I knew that I would leave and start another company at some point, but I certainly didn't enter the campus thinking, hey, this is a very temporary thing. I was actually quite genuine. I'd never worked for anyone for more than a couple of months, and that was one time at eBay. So I thought, alright, you know what? All the stress of being a founder, maybe I don't want it. It turned out I did.

I think for a little while I was suddenly worry-free, but I found myself bumping into some of the corporate walls reasonably quickly. And by the way, it is, I don't mean to sound like an advert, but there's lots of good things to say about Google, and none of it is disingenuous, but for an entrepreneur, you get reminded you're an entrepreneur when you're not trying to run a company the most. You start realizing that rules are written and you kind of have to follow them because you're in someone else's backyard. Eventually I said, look, I think I'm probably better off on the outside stressing at three o'clock in the morning.

That's right. I actually knew a little bit earlier. Sundar, who's now of course the CEO of the whole thing, was singularly the kindest person I met at Google. When I was sort of lost in the corporate wilderness there for a little while, he took me on walks and talked to me and let me pour my confused heart out. As he was counseling me through what's really going on in your head, man, I pretty quickly, maybe 6 months, figured out this probably isn't going to work. Then I chatted with Larry and Sergey and they said, "Look, before you hang up your cleats, poke around at Google X, look at all the really amazing stuff we're doing. Surely there's something intellectually interesting that you can try to find." I did that for 6 months. I honestly looked for something cool and more autonomous and independent that I could do.

Yeah, I don't think they were pleased.

Yeah, it was honest. I sort of said, "Look, I have a road I have to go find again."

Yes. I kept my fingers involved in a fair number of pies, and Yelp was certainly a very important one.

We had the second one just as I was leaving Google. So this is the same wonderful Nelly and now plus two kids and a puppy. My primary thought at the time was, hey, last time I ended up almost losing everything. So I am definitely going to go start some company or do something to keep my brain occupied, otherwise I run the risk of being told to move out again. So I was actually very, very keen on finding something interesting. In fact, I was literally talking to people to start brainstorming maybe the day after I walked out of Mountain View for the last time. But I also decided I would take longer figuring out what I want to do because throughout Slide and even throughout Google, Nelly would tell me, "I know you're going to start a company. Next time around, just sit back and ask yourself what would make you happy. What is the thing that you're really meant to do?"

I didn't know. And most of 2012 I spent brainstorming completely random ideas. But the probably most important output of that time was I wrote this essay for myself titled "Hard Valuable Fun" where I tried to explain what drives me, why I do the things I do. This rigorous self-reflection process. The short version is it has to be difficult. I'm an engineer at heart, I like solving puzzles, and if it's not hard, I just don't value it enough. Going all the way back to PayPal, one time I was working very late at night, working on some project outside of PayPal at the PayPal office. I was still kind of had enough time to tinker. Peter walked in and asked me, "What are you working on?" I described whatever program I was trying to hack together. He said, "That sounds really difficult." I said, "Yeah, it's really hard." But is it valuable? I don't know. It's just really fun. He said, "Well, hard is not always valuable. Valuable is typically hard, but the inference doesn't work the other direction all the time." And it really stuck with me. That is such an easy way of explaining why a lot of puzzles are worthless. So it's still important for me to solve really hard problems, but they have to be valuable. A nod to Peter Thiel. Then I wrote a whole paragraph on what is fun for Max. And I don't really think it's photo sharing and I don't think it's social games. That was a moment of truth where I was like, "Oh, I know the class of companies I'm going to start." Then I showed it to Nelly and she said, "You finally figured yourself out." That was liberating because I then said, "Well, it sure sounds like something in financial services again, but I'm definitely not going to do that." And she said, "Just give yourself permission to go build something that's like another PayPal but better."

So, I fly down to LA and try to buy this beautiful one of the very first hardtop fully retractable convertibles, which was probably my most coveted possession in my late 20s. And the dealership said, 'Oh, you know, cool. You're the PayPal guy. I saw you guys went public. You're still going to have to pay cash because your credit that I just checked is terrible.' I don't know what you did, but my god. And I'm standing there next to Nelly and next to Luke, one of our PayPal co-founders, and I'm slowly shrinking and my face is probably purple with embarrassment. And it was not the only, in fact, it was one of many experiences where my credit would get checked and it would be this moment of 'Oh god, please don't say out loud that I came to the US as a 16-year-old and got my first credit card on campus, which I promptly went delinquent on. I had no record at all. I had no idea how minimum payments work in college and my FICO score went through the floor. It's been a decade and I took a company public and still doesn't matter. I still look like a deadbeat to the rest of the world because of my credit record.'

Yes. As we were brainstorming ideas, the first filter I would apply is what is gut-wrenchingly difficult, a real problem in the world that people are willing to go to the ends of the earth to figure out. And I was chatting with Nathan, one of my closest friends from college days who was my head of risk at PayPal. He went on to co-found Palantir.

And I said, you know, credit scoring is such a gnarly problem. I still brace for impact every time I hand my credit card over because who knows, they might cut it up and bring it to me in two pieces because my credit is so bad. And Nathan said, 'You know what's really stupid is that at PayPal, we had access to all this amazing purchasing data. We never once tried to use it for credit scoring. We did so well with anti-fraud and all this data-driven risk decisioning, but credit is kind of the granddaddy of them all. And it's actually sort of the consumer-facing part of risk decisioning. Can you and will you pay your bill if I gave you money up front and ask for it back later?' And it was sort of this like that's really hard. There's a lot of people like me who screwed up in college and probably would like to buy things using credit but are either priced out or have these horrendous triple digit rates they have to deal with. And it seems to be stuck in 1970s. And so that was the jump off point and we went to work feverishly. So you started to ask yourself, can I solve this problem? Maybe there's a way to create some kind of mechanism to evaluate consumers in a different way.

That's right. And this idea that there must be other forms of figuring out what you really are like as a financial actor beyond your 10-year-old college record or lack thereof. And then fairly quickly we realized that fundamentally what people really want is not some abstract better credit score. They want to buy things. They don't want to be confused and they don't want to be scared by the cost if they're paying over time.

The short answer is there's no short answer. The most important thing we realized very early on was the problem isn't so much with the credit score although there's plenty to improve there but with the tools available to consumers to borrow money. This will sound harsh but I genuinely believe what I'm about to say. Payday lending is a well understood awful thing where you have very high rate compounding of interest into principal and ability to extend your repayment period essentially arbitrarily so long as you're here to feed chunks of money to the lender. That's the anathema, that's the worst thing in the world. That's payday lending. Now reduce the rate by let's say one zero and you're describing a credit card. The two products are basically identical. You can revolve more or less in perpetuity. The rate's lower, so it looks a little bit nicer, but it's still an exponential curve. And the most common way to borrow money in America is a credit card.

So, one of the key insights for our firm was Gen Z and millennial generations, which now make up more than I think half of American spenders, are starting to actively ask the question, is this the best way? And the fairly loud answer is no, it's not. It's a lot nicer to say, 'Hey, I'm going to borrow X dollars. It will cost me additional Y dollars.' Or maybe it'll cost me nothing because the merchant that really wants me to buy whatever the thing I'm trying to buy is prepared to pay my interest for me. So maybe there's really no upcharge, no interest, and that's it. And then I know that after six payments or 12 payments or 18 payments, whatever the good number is for me, I am done. And if I'm late, there's not going to be a gotcha with late fees. So we said let's not do late fees and let's not compound interest into principal and sort of just stripped out all the payday lending yuck from payments.

That's right.

Yeah. Big part of credit cards is that there's some gargantuan limit and you're encouraged to fill up your bucket of debt and never really fully empty it. The product we built was all about, hey, borrow $100, pay it back in 6 weeks, be done. If you need to borrow another $100, let's have that conversation separately. And it might unfortunately result in us telling you, we don't think you can take on another $100.

You know, it's not that different from getting a rate for a mortgage, except we do it in a matter of seconds.

So, we don't look at traditional credit scores since we founded the company with a belief that we can do much better, but we do look at the data that goes into that score. In some ways you can think of us almost like computing a different score using much of the same data plus a bunch of other data.

Sort of at the limit we literally say hey we can't figure out how to reason about your financial situation like maybe you are what's called a thin file where your information is there but it's just not enough of it. Would you please log into your bank account right now? We'll look at your cash flow and we'll actually decide whether we think you can carry this amount as a monthly obligation and we'll honestly tell you and obviously it has to happen fully automatically. No human can look at data and calculate it quickly enough.

You're absolutely right. Every investor I talked to and for a while I'd sort of funded it myself because I've been fortunate and people didn't really believe that this is possible. But every time someone would ask me like how in the world are you going to do this without late fees, without deferred interest, without all the sort of natural quote unquote natural

I'd said look I think we're going to lose a lot less money because vast majority of people are going to pay us back.

Well, for one, if you're delinquent, you can't transact again. If you are what's in the industry evocatively called a sloppy payer, which is someone who generally pays their bills but are almost never on time. The normal financial institutions say, 'Great, you're a fantastic revenue opportunity. You have the money. You just don't care about being on time, and we'll charge you a fee for that.' And so instead of doing that, we basically said, 'Look, we will go out of our way to remind you and remind you and remind you. We'll send you multiple notifications through multiple channels, through our app, through a text, through an email, and we'll also give you an opportunity to set up a fully automatic kind of a timed withdrawal from your bank just so you're not late.' And for vast majority of people, this is more than enough, and they are on time. But if something happens and you're unable to make the next payment, that's fine. But that prevents you, generally speaking, from transacting again until you're current or at least until we understand what's really going on.

Yeah. Or chose not to do it. About half of the United States adults are revolving on their credit card right now. And revolving is expensive and it gives you extreme anxiety if you're revolving for a long time on a lot of money. And so putting more onto your credit card for those people is a very stressful event. And the choice they have is well I'll buy it anyway, damn the interest rate, or you know what I'm not going to buy it. Affirm being the third choice was a really powerful enabler. People said okay so I can buy this thing. I will pay no interest or some number of dollars on top of the retail price but then I'm entirely out of debt for this thing in 6 months or 6 weeks. That seems like a pretty clear value proposition.

We were looking for a hack basically a trick to get consumers who are interested in borrowing money to pay for things over time without having to spend marketing dollars. And so we had a couple of friends that were in e-commerce and literally called around and said, 'Hey, would you consider putting up pay with Affirm right next to your pay with Visa and pay with Mastercard? We think there's a whole world out there that doesn't have access to Visa and Mastercard that probably would use us or nothing.' And then the wow moment was when one of them called me back and said, 'All right, we just saw a 30% spike in volume as soon as we added your button.'

The very first one you would have heard of is 1800 Flowers. It was actually kind of fascinating conversation where I talked to the founder CEO there and 1800 Flowers have been around for quite some time obviously and I thought this would be a what in the world are you talking about and he actually said oh my god like this is very similar to what we used to do in the 70s where people would call us on the phone and order and they'd say oh you know I don't have the money right now I'd like to pay later and he said oh no problem you know just write down a phone number and come back and build them later. Yeah.

Yeah. But he grasps the idea instantaneously. He's like, 'Yeah, this is great. Let's give it a test.' And so it was probably the easiest sale I've ever closed.

And having a brand name merchant was a huge enabler. It literally allowed us to say, 'Hey, you know what? It worked for them. They're a referenceable customer.'

So the next set that we were unbelievably lucky to get were a lot of the online kind of new direct to consumer sellers of home wares and home workout equipment. Like Peloton revolutionized home workouts and Casper just completely rewrote the rules on mattress replacement cycle and how you sell, how you deliver it. And so all of these brands were kind of being born in the early teens, the last decade, and we were able to sign up an incredible number of them very very quickly during 2014-15.

Oh no, we certainly did. So when we launched the product, just the very first launch with 1800. So the way the product was just from a cash flow perspective, as long as you're growing, it's a negative cash flow product. You approve a consumer, they get their flowers, you send money minus fees to 1800 Flowers, the consumer pays you back, first payment is due, let's say 34 days from the transaction. So for those 34 days, you have already paid your retailer partners and you're waiting for consumers to come back and pay you. So at any given time you are waiting for money to come back and you need to continuously get more capital to grow the company.

Yes. And so the day we launched, I said, 'Well, we have no way of financing these loans, and it's going to be a negative cash flow business.' And so I will put up $100,000 of my own money to front these payments. And if there's any uptake at all, we're going to have to figure out how to scale some sort of a capital program.

And I went through a sleepless night thinking, 'Oh my god, this thing launches and everybody wants it and my $100,000 will run out and what do I do then?' So I actually had this moment of angst, asking Nelly like how much more should the Levchin family be willing to put up? And of course it launched and nobody cared. True revelation from the world of startup: very rarely does a product launch immediately have the effect of an explosion. Just typically things don't work.

So we had to learn how to promote it a little bit, how to work with 1800 Flowers to tell consumers as they're considering their choices and bouquets that there's in fact a way to pay over time that is available later. But as we started seeing transactions very quickly we had to figure out how to fund the actual loan flow. And the way that works, first you borrow money so you can lend it. You go to bank partners, non-bank partners and say, 'Hey, here's the financial profile of my product. I would like to borrow from you and obviously I want to pay a lower interest rate that I think is fair to charge the consumer or the merchant on the other side and the spread will be my fee.' And you can imagine scaling that program to larger and larger and eventually you effectively issue bonds and those become tradable.

It is on Amazon. The first major kind of break retailer for us was Walmart and it took a long time and I got to know some of the folks in senior management team there and the thing that was pretty amazing is how similar their thought process was about the good and the not so good of the financial products. I was struck by just how aware they are of their customer and how these financial products can be really harmful. And so we had sort of a meeting of minds long before we were official financial partners.

There's a fair amount of Gen X as well. But it definitely skews very young. I was looking at some broad data around Affirm and it has a very high use rate among people of color. And I mean this is obviously always sensitive to talk about, but from what I understand it's been particularly among black consumers has been very welcome. I mean it's a fact that credit ratings can disproportionately negatively affect people of color in the United States. And payday lenders in particular have been particularly predatory in underserved communities. So, yeah, this is an option for lots of people who didn't have another option before.

That's right. It is a natural consequence that we don't look at traditional credit scores and traditional credit data as much. There's plenty of great people across many, many underrepresented groups. And by great, I'm not passing character judgment here, of course, but financially solid footing enough to borrow money and pay it back successfully without the need for the sort of nastier alternatives. And if you treat them right, they tell their friends, which is true for, I think, any of us. And therefore, these products take off because of the honesty and transparency that we bring to bear. And so, I would laugh if I said it doesn't make me happy.

Yes.

Yes. The probably most important thing about Affirm is exactly what you just said. It is a really, really, really cool big math problem that we're solving. If you look at the unit economics which is what happens to every transaction if you divide the overall dollars in by the total number of dollars transacted you'll see that that number is very positive. And so over time so long as we don't spend the excess transactional economics will sort of inherently become profitable. And it is something that we can model and can see in our future because we're a public company. I will stop short of prognosticating what that immediate future or not so immediate future is but it is exactly that.

I'm not worried. I am very confident in the math. That's probably the thing that I'm most confident in in most worlds. The stock price matters for two really important reasons. There are two constituents. So, there are people who bought the stock when it was higher than it is right now. And it is my job to try the absolute hardest I have to make sure that they don't feel that they made a mistake. I think the company is in exceptional shape and so my duty to my shareholders is not lost on me but the way to do it of course is to build a great company over a long period of time and so the fluctuations of the stock today or tomorrow is something that I don't really look at to be completely honest. The second group that I really care about is the employees and for them the mission is truly important but they have choices in their employment and I need them to believe and I need them to be here and continue building things with all of us together and so the stock price matters as an indicator of value that we have created for the personal finances of our employees. So that's really important which is why I care about the stock price. But I care more about building something that five years from now is 10 times more successful financially than we are today. There's a great Graham quote: in the short term the market is a voting machine and in the long term it's a weighing machine and I like that thinking process.

Yeah.

By a wide margin, too. Yeah.

A little bit in the following sense. So I mean this sounds weird and to some people presumably extremely prosaic but financial products is like a playground for me. I feel embarrassed saying that out loud I guess but the ideas that are sloshing around in my head, the things that need to get built, need to get built tomorrow, most of them these days are really in financial services because everywhere I look, every rock we turn over as we run Affirm, there's like oh my god that clearly needs to get reinvented and done better. And so the opportunities that I see these days are just predominantly in my own industry. So how do I stay fully engaged and fresh at Affirm if I really am going to sell shares to the public and commit to them which I certainly have that I'll be here a long time? So we organized in some ways sort of an incubator 3.0 inside Affirm. And there's a team called ZTS 0 to 60. Fortunately, not just me, but a bunch of other pretty smart people who are constantly coming up with ideas that we're incubating inside Affirm and launching. And the way I describe it to my investors, if you look at any successful startup, not just Affirm, it's always an S-shaped curve where you start with nothing and for a while it's just nothing and nothing and nothing and then something clicks and it goes vertical and you just keep going up and up and up and then eventually it has to slow down. As you saturate the market, as the market becomes more competitive, as consumer preferences change, businesses don't go away, but the growth curve slows. And we're lucky to have hit on a giant opportunity in a giant market. So Affirm as it exists today is very far from asymptoting and turning into an S-shaped curve. But if I'm going to be here 10 years from now, if I'm going to be here 20 years from now, I better have another S-curve type product in my pocket. And so a lot of what I work on these days, what gives me greatest happiness really is experimenting within the ZTS team building new ideas and most of them are going to go exactly the way of the dodo as any other startups but even if one of them becomes another S-curve that propels Affirm to the next big thing, its purpose will be fulfilled. So I'm pretty sure I'm exactly where I need to be. So I'm not in fact restless. The restlessness comes from gosh I have to do another really important management meeting and I'd rather tinker with ZTS.

It's a great question. I've heard you ask this before and I thought what is my answer and came up with very little canned anything. I think the role of luck is vastly underappreciated. I think the action you take when an opportunity appears is yours and it's the choice and willingness to take the risk and decision to just go for it and sort of damn the torpedoes moment. But if you are unwilling to move or unable to recognize or don't encounter these moments of opportunity, it's probably not available to you. And I feel a certain degree of guilt that some brilliant people I know may not have had some of these moments and they could have been much more successful than they are. And yet I do think that probably moments of luck appear in front of most of us at some point or another in our lives. And what do you do once you see one of those, have one of those? It does come down to work ethic and just willingness to grind and sleep less and compromise things like work life balance which have their own consequences. It's not free and it can be very damaging, but luck is the kickstart.