It's critical to be at the table because if you're not, you'll be on the menu. AI is on the battlefield. AI is in the White House.
You are a notoriously part of the PayPal mafia.
I was texting Elon about how blown away I was by experiencing Starlink on a plane somewhere.
Thank you Max for coming on. It's great to have you. Can we start here? It's 2026. We were just talking before you came on about the end of the keyboard. Everybody's talking to the machines. Agents everywhere. And I'd love to understand because you're an OG of Silicon Valley. I think you've started nine companies, more or less? Going back to the good old days of the dot-com boom and bust. How does this moment compare to then? Because everybody's worrying about, well, is this a bubble? Is this going to change everything? Are we all going to be out of work? I'd love to just, from your particular vantage point, which is quite unique, how do you view this moment relative to then?
So, I think it's both truly profound, but also not quite as catastrophic or at least not as cathartic as some people make it out to be. I've lived through a sort of green screen to web browser transition in my late teens, early 20s, and then again through the social media moment, and then through mobile, and all the revolutions having to do with computing in the last 50 years, dating myself. And OG really just stands for old. They all happened in front of me. I think some of the moment, some of the bits that we're experiencing now are very similar, almost endearingly so. I remember moving to Silicon Valley in 1998, sort of passing through Stanford University here outdoor lunch space and realizing that every lunch table was taken up by a student or someone who looked like a student and a venture capitalist who was getting pitched. And there was this literally a mass pitching. And it wasn't an event. It was just like that was the only available space left outdoors. And so the indoors was probably packed with other pitches. And so there's a little bit of that going on in the venture community and particularly in Silicon Valley.
The thing that's worth cutting through the noise for is the productivity gains you see with these new tools are extraordinary. They're real, they're profound. The actual science and complexity of AI, we're right at that first moment where you're taking something that really existed in a lab and it was sort of lovingly supported by a bunch of PhDs who were kind of putting final pins into the suit to prevent it from falling apart, to productizing it very quickly. And so there's both the excitement of, 'Oh my god, I now have this amazing tool that does the work of a thousand people,' but also, 'Oh no, it also fell apart in the way that I had no expectation of and now I need to scramble back to the lab and fix it up.' And we're just clearing the academic to industrial transition and we're fairly early. And so I think those are all real and exciting and they map pretty well to the past.
I don't think we're going through this pre-time machine moment, if you know your early science fiction, where 20 years from now we're all going to sit in togas and play harps and AI agents will be toiling underground to feed us all. I don't expect that to happen at all. Most of us in the business of building things don't get enough sleep because it's just impossible and yet too exciting to not try to keep up with everything. There are a bunch of things that are interesting about this particular revolution that are different. Most interesting, I think it's fundamentally an accelerationist thing. There's less new, there's more afterburners for everyone, a sort of moment for people who are building things already. You suddenly have this incredible ability to imagine things just happening a lot faster, a lot more richly. And that's exciting, that's fascinating. I don't know if it's going to create many more companies, but it's going to allow people who are into the sort of thing that I am, creating companies, to just go faster, build more interesting things, get to something that much faster and find out if their ideas are any good. So, I'm very excited, but I'm also easily excited by technology revolution, so you should discount appropriately.
I'm glad you talked about not sleeping. We were speaking about that earlier. There's such a rush to do more that I keep hearing about people in tech just wanting to stay up and do as much as they can.
Yeah, and for the old guys, this is a familiar feeling. I remember feeling like if I just got enough hours in a day, I would know the most exciting thing happening in social media that I couldn't have possibly found out in the 20 hours that I was already awake. And this is happening now.
On that point, so you run Affirm which is a buy now pay later company. That's a big...
Well, exactly. I was going to say, given that there's this whole new waterfront of opportunities, ideas, afterburners as you say, is Affirm kind of boring? Like when you could change the world.
But we are changing the world. It's not traditional...
And we can't see but you're wearing an Affirm t-shirt.
I always wear an Affirm t-shirt.
So it started as a really basic idea that people do need to borrow money. Western economy runs on credit and there's nothing shameful about the notion of I'm going to have a thing now and pay over time for it because I get the use of it now and the capital expense is timed. But if you ask people who work at most lending institutions, they don't particularly like talking about what they do at cocktail parties because they're embarrassed because they know, maybe not super consciously, but definitely know enough that the way they make money is by charging late fees, by compounding interest, by making really confusing products. And so we have this bizarre dichotomy not just in the US and not just in the UK, but kind of most of the western world where lending and credit are very, very important. And yet people who work in it just don't quite like admitting to it because they understand that the general public thinks of them as kind of vaguely immoral. And so I decided that it's time to create a lender that is not just proud of what we do, but has an extremely hard set of views on what moral is when it comes to credit and stick to it. And so that was 15 years ago. And that was the core idea and it's still the core idea. When we took the company public, my founder letter to the shareholders was built around this idea of money and morality as the two DNA strands of Affirm and we've never deviated from that, never charged a penny of late fees in our lifetime and continue to build really well.
I'm sure you know the guys at Klarna. We had Sebastian on the pod. I think it was last year. And he famously made a move where he's like, 'We've replaced 700 customer service agents with the one bot.' And then fast-forward, he's like, 'Never mind. We need to hire back a bunch of humans.' And I'm curious how you view this going back to the kind of moment we're in. I'm sure you know there's lots of obsession out here with this self-improving company, this idea of building AI, the company brain, an army of agents, and you don't need middle managers anymore, etc. How do you think about or are you changing the way you run your company or build your company? How are you leveraging agents, AI, etc.? Is it doing something fundamentally different than what you've done before?
