Have you ever thought about opening up a coffee shop?
Totally. If I didn't do what I do for a living, I would just open a coffee shop.
Enjoying my coffee. How did you get into this?
It's one of these self-fulfilling prophecies. So, I grew up in Ukraine and there's a culture of coffee drinking and my dad was really into drinking espressos. So, when I was like 5 years old, he would buy a shot of espresso at a coffee shop. So, I have this visual like a bag and a shot of espresso. I'd be drinking it right alongside my dad.
You're drinking espressos at 5 years old?
Well, there's no prohibition on drinking espresso at any age.
I recently had Keith Rabois on last fall and he said that you were a first-rate technologist and also a first-rate business strategist. So, how did that combo develop?
I walked in thinking I'm going to get a computer science PhD and just be a professor and walked out thinking can't wait to start more companies.
Majority of American banks derive a disproportionate percentage of their income from late fees. Affirm was founded in many ways to fight all of that and we are fastidiously precise about the cost of credit. We'll do north of 47, 48 billion dollars of loans this fiscal year alone and yet that's a drop in a bucket.
We've been public for 5 years and every single letter has a Big Lebowski quote. Have people picked up on that?
Until very recently, no one caught it and then finally one of the analysts wrote a note on us saying Q2 fiscal 25 a quarter that really really tied the room together. Ah, show's good. They finally got it.
Walk us through your daily espresso.
Sounds good. So, first I need to learn how to turn on this scale. Okay. All right. This is a full Are we timing this, too? Do we need a timer? It comes with a timer. Really? Oh, yeah. You have to time it. Really? Oh, yeah. Okay.
All right. This is a durable classic La Marzocco made in So, these days I think made primarily in the US, but born and raised in Italy. I'm a huge fan of this brand. I own several of these. Before we do anything, got to warm up the group and flush a little bit of water.
How many espressos do you think you've made in your lifetime?
That is a I mean, I can try to estimate it, but it'll be a large number. I made 9, 10 today. What? Not all of them were for me, but Okay. How many do you drink a day? Five, six. Five? Yeah.
All right. First things first, we got to weigh out our beans. So, I did prep the grinder, so the grinder is already does not need any more adjusting. So, the grinder's set.
What kind of beans are these?
This is actually I just clipped a little bit of that. It's not good. A little bit over 20 g, that's okay. This is a local roaster. Their name is Wrecking Ball. And the name of the actual espresso blend is Pillow Fight, which I think is a cool name. They're roasted very close to where I live in San Francisco or at least they're sold very close to where I live in San Francisco.
What I'm doing now is declumping. This is called WDT tool or Weiss Distribution Technique. And I am trying to break up any of the clumps of the grinds that were caused by static electricity as I ground them. This is I'm making sure they're evenly distributed.
Tamping my puck, as they call it. Got to flush the group. You can never flush the group too many times. Lock it in to make sure the pressure is There we go. Probably want to edit that out. But you want your surface dry, so your scale does not get water on it.
Why is it important to measure it?
So, the perfect I mean, it's all a matter of taste, obviously, but a good espresso should be just a little bit over 2:1. So, 2 g for actual drink for each gram of the beans that you put into the basket. So, that's why I weighed out. So, it's just over 20 g, so I want this to be just over 40 g. I happen to like my espresso on a slightly shorter side and so I'll probably go for 40. Some people the modern thinking around espresso is probably you want to actually pull longer shots. And so, most professionals will probably pull like a 40 2, 43 g shot for you, but stick to my old-school ways.
Let's see. I'm pulling a manual one. Because I have dialed in the machine before, I don't actually need the timer anymore. I know it'll take me about 25, 27 seconds to get a 40 grams of drink out. That's a good-looking mouse tail. That's the professional term for What is a mouse tail? You want your espresso to coalesce into a single There you go.
If you want a spoon to stir the crema, you can or you can just drink the crema.
The fat layer at the very top, the thing that sort of looks glossy. That's crema. Some people like to stir it in, some people like to just drink it as is.
The best we never raised the business can hope for. No, it's pretty good. You should open a Have you ever thought about opening up a coffee shop? Totally. If I didn't do what I do for a living, I'd just open a coffee shop.
Somewhere where there isn't a great espresso available here.
How did you get into this?
It's sort of one of these self-fulfilling prophecies. So, I grew up in Ukraine and there is a I haven't been back in a long, long time, but there's a culture of coffee drinking and espresso drinking in particular in Kiev. And my dad was really into drinking espresso. And so, when I was like 5 years old, he would buy a shot of espresso at a coffee shop. And the way they sold it there, it was this two-layer sort of stand-up table. So, you'd walk up to it and he would put his bag on the second level like a thing for the bags and he would nurse his espresso with his pinky out. And then when I got like four or five years old, he'd buy me a shot of espresso and put my cup of espresso at the thing that was I was just tall enough to sort of see the bag. So, I'd have this visual like a bag and a shot of espresso. I'd be drinking it right alongside my dad.
You were drinking espressos at 5 years old?
But there's no prohibition on drinking espresso at any age. Anyway, so I got into it when I was really little and then just over the years sort of got more and more. I tend to get very deep into stuff, so it's not weird that at some point I decided I'm going to learn how to make good coffee and then I got sort of better and better at it.
Why do people get obsessed with beans? Why does that matter?
It's similar to people who like get obsessed with grapes or wine or the right kind of water for whiskey. It's like infinite complexity in the simple. So, you decide that you're really into something, you start asking the question like, all right, so how can I refine it? And this thing the patent that describes how this this thing is called the group head. You can't see most of it, but kind of the like inside like the big steely thing in the center, that's the group head. And it's responsible for the actual production of coffee.
And it's been around for a long time. It's a the patent that describes the one very similar to this one is from 1961. And so, the machine is sort of the machine and then you realize that basically you can vary the beans and the beans are going to be single origin, can be from a variety of plantations and farms. You can There's multiple ways of converting the green beans into The beans actually is a fruit and the seed inside the bean inside the fruit is this thing. So, you first you need to get the green off, so you can either ferment it and you can ferment it in the sun, you can ferment it in other scenarios. Then you can wash off or shell off the green and then you roast it and then you grind it and every one of those processes or every one of those steps can be refined and refined and refined. Of course, there's no right answer, so everybody kind of slowly gets into not every Everybody who's into it gets into a set of preferences that they really love. And most of the time it's not realistic to roast these things at home, although I know people who do. I don't. And so you find your favorite bean producer, roaster, and get into that. And so the Wrecking Ball, the shop where I got these beans roast their own and they have their own story and sort of their own sourcing and approaches they favor. But just like anything else, it's really simple and therefore people will make it very complicated.
Who makes the worst coffee? The worst coffee? What's the worst coffee you've ever had?
Let's not trash anyone on camera here. Was it at a conference? Was it at an airport? I mean, there's so many different directions. You know, it's actually Airplanes. Airplane coffee's definitely very bad.
But you can make exceptionally good coffee out of a lot of things. Like it's the standard truism is So these beans were roasted on the 20th of March. So they're 10 days off the roasting date, which is kind of the perfect time. Like you actually you don't want them to be so fresh because there's still a lot of CO2 trapped in the beans and so they'll be too gassy as they call it. And the sort of truism in the coffee world is the beans are too old is just really hard to get the flavor out of them because they're too dry, the oils are dried out, and etc. And actually not really true. There are plenty of people now who will show you how to fine-tune an espresso shot with very old beans and they'll still taste pretty great. So you can take the least exciting beans and it takes a little bit of work, but you can absolutely get them to taste better than vast majority of coffee you'll get from a specialty coffee shop that prides themselves on being good at it. So it's just a matter of skill. Obviously, if it's like 5 years old and it's lived in a can that's been opened and it's been pre-ground. And like it had some mold. Probably won't taste right. But other than that, you can make some pretty great coffee out of very sus beans.
So you like Wrecking Ball here. Are there any other favorite shops?
San Francisco has a lot of really good roasters that are excellent. So Wrecking Ball is probably slightly on a medium dark side, which I'm a big fan of. It also pairs really well with milk. So if you want to have a milk-based drink with your espresso, you want darker. At least I like darker. If you want slightly lighter, you can go to in San Francisco, Four Barrel, which is a fantastic local roaster. Blue Bottle came out of San Francisco came out of Oakland, became a San Francisco institution. Some of their blends are excellent. I can rattle off a bunch more. So I try to patronize all the local ones. A great recent find is a Boston-based roaster called George Howell, which I'm a huge fan of. So it's on a darker side, so it's great for lattes, but also just makes really good espresso. And so on. We can take up the rest of this hour, but rattling off I have so many I've never talked to someone about coffee before. Every now and again it's like, Max, what is your view on pumpkin spice lattes?
So no man's land. Can't go there. I just If I allow myself Have you ever had a lot like a like one of those kind of like celebratory lattes before? I make my own lattes and so I refuse to let pumped flavors into them. Okay. It's a bad thing. No lavender. It's great for baths. I understand. I've been told it's good for baths. Not in my coffee.
That's hilarious. You're a purist. Okay.
So we joked a little bit about this earlier, but you're also a major cyclist. Is it true you are number one on Strava?
No. You die. No not even close. There's some very very good cyclists that are number one on Strava. I am not one of them. I am on Strava. You are. I'm on in Yeah, I'm a committed cyclist, but I've also for a long time Strava was a place where people like me would show off to each other and then pros discovered Strava and then all of us moved down to like mini screens below the So yeah, number one is long past its sell-by date.
When did you get into that? Are you going to have one?
Yeah, I can. I can't I got to have a caffeinated companion. I did spend like four or five shots just making sure the machine is dialed in to my exacting preferences. Yeah, I did shots with Alfred Lin before the Upfront Summit and now we're doing espresso shots.
Did Alfred shoot with you on camera?
Yep. Very bold of him. Then like any sort of normal person posted it on X. But yeah, it was fun.
I have known Alfred Lin longer than anyone I know in the Bay Area, I think.
When I was in college, one of my many failed startups didn't fail completely and it ended up parts of it ended up being sold to LinkExchange. Which Alfred and Tony and a bunch of other people I'm still good friends with were founders / very early employees of. And so when I was helping them integrate the thing that they wanted from my college projects, I got to come out here and I was still probably I mean, probably a senior in college or possibly junior. So I was extremely starved, like physically. Like frequently hungry. So I came out to help them get this thing going. It was like maybe the first or second trip to San Francisco. And they're like, 'Oh yeah, come to this apartment. It'll be like we'll meet you there.' Like, 'Apartment? Sure, why not?' And I show up there and it's Tony Hsieh and Alfred and a bunch of other people playing poker. And I was like, 'All right, well, it's cool. I'm not going to play poker.' They're like, 'Oh, you look hungry. Are you hungry?' Sure, I'm hungry. Like, 'Well, there's a bunch of Chinese food. Go feed yourself.' So I fed myself and watched Alfred and Tony and a bunch of other people play poker. That was my introduction to the Bay Area.
Wow. But we're also still very good friends. All that. Is he an investor?
He is not an investor in the firm.
You're also a pretty active investor. You've invested in hundreds of companies. Have you invested alongside him or?
Yeah. Definitely we definitely have some shared interests.
I see no spoon. I'm going to slurp my crema just like you did. So like normally I would stir up my crema to make sure Is there proper etiquette? Like is that proper etiquette?
Not turn out correctly. Proper etiquette for espresso? Drinking this. Oh yeah. There's definitely proper etiquette for Any subculture always ends up with these like insider rules and sort of the right way and the not-so-right way and all that. Yeah.
That's it. That's it. It's good. It's very good. Tastes pretty good to me.
I think the etiquette for tasting coffee, if you wanted to sort of full experience, which I should probably be apologizing for, is you want a sort of glass of sparkling water to go with your espresso to cleanse the palate. You want a spoon to allow you to stir it if you wanted to stir it. If you're in a really fancy restaurant, they might give you a very small biscotti to kind of give you a kick of sweetness at the end, but most people will not eat it because it's there for decoration only.
You drink as much coffee as I do, it's a lot of steps to Are you ever late to meetings because you're tasting coffee.
Yes. Not all that. I make people late to meetings because they are too busy tasting coffee with me. Hopefully not too much. But All right, I finished mine. Where should I put this? Thank you.
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And then we're ready a day early. Oh. So it like we turned it into like a huge thing where if you reviewed at least 300 merchants before the deadline, you got like a t-shirt with 300 embroidered on it. And if you did or did more, you got like a water bottle. And so it was it's like a people who joined after that sadly missed out on the craziness of having to like stay up all night reviewing merchants.
Wait, so I also heard you're a Big Lebowski fan. Is it true you have the entire script written out on your desk and you read it every day?
I don't read it every day. But it is true that majority of our shareholder letters contain subtle or not-so-subtle references to The Big Lebowski. And because it's been public for 20-ish quarters, and at some point all the stuff that I've memorized has been used. So now I need to continuously find new quotes that I haven't used before cuz you don't want to repeat. So I do have a copy of the movie-corrected Lebowski script on my desktop, not on my desk, but on my computer. So as I draft my shareholder letters, I just conveniently have a window with The Big Lebowski for inspiration and quote finding.
What are your favorite quotes? You can repeat them.
Majority of them are I guess Cass has dropped a lot of F-bombs in your show, so you can I think you're obviously okay with that. Let's see. What's a great Lebowski quote? There are too many. I just watched The Big Lebowski with my daughter for the first time in her life. I've seen it a lot of times, but she's 14, so it's about time to start introducing her.
Introducing her? Yes. I've inducted my 16-year-old son into Lebowski a couple years ago. When did this happen? And why?
I think I saw it possibly in the movie theater. So I've definitely been in the Lebowski lore for a long time. It's one of these cult movies where you watch it and you're like, 'This is amazing.' And you watch it again and you're like, 'No, it's better than amazing.' And then you watch it again and you're like, 'It keeps on getting better.' Keep on finding these gems. It's a great cast. Philip Seymour Hoffman, very young Philip Seymour Hoffman, so he's kind of funny and Jeff Bridges is not so bad. Very young John Turturro playing a deranged bowler named Jesus.
Doesn't sound like you've seen The Big Lebowski.
I saw it when I was very young. You need to immediately remedy that problem. Like you should see it at least once a We're going to have to cut this interview short. I got to go watch The Big Lebowski.
Yeah. Quoting any part of it is like insulting the fact that every part of it is like extremely quotable. Majority of the quotes that come to mind right now are totally not printable. Like from more than just having F-bombs in them. But great scene where the Dude is trying to explain to Walter what's going on. And Walter says, 'Oh, it's like Lenin always said.' The Dude says, 'Like Lenin always said.' Donnie pops in and says, 'I'm the walrus.' And he keeps on popping in cuz he thinks Lenin is being referred to. It's actually John Lennon. At some point Walter says, 'Donny, V. I. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.' Like he tries to explain that Anyway, so just like the fact that there's these super deep cultural cuts that have like very little to do with the movie and yet they're so obviously well, to me anyway, are very funny.
Have you found like any new movies have that kind of writing in it?
I'm sure there are. The real litmus test of a great beautifully written movie or well-written anything is it survive the test of time. So I will know, but it'll take another 10 years. So I'm sure there's some amazing scripts that are going to be discovered as the great cult classic of 2026 that are in theaters right now. But we won't know until 2036. Like part of Lebowski came out in 1998, I think. The fact that it's like a thing right now. But it's true for anything. I mean, that's why people love vintage, right?
This is our very modestly sized game station and a map that shows where Affirms are from.
Oh my gosh. Look at this. Not all of it is true, though. It's not all true?
I don't think we have anyone from Antarctica. I'm not sure. That one I could neither confirm nor deny, but the Antarctica one is very suspect. It's very suspect.
This is great. Where do you go most?
Well, we have lots of employees here and here and here and here and here. And obviously It's all big cluster. Yeah. That's what some people call us 'the cup knockers.' No. Yeah, so I primarily travel to the coasts of the US. And then we have a big contingent in Poland, sizable one in the UK, small one in Madrid. So I sort of tend to be in three parts of Europe.
Poland is one of the fastest growing countries GDP-wise in Europe. What is it about their culture that makes them one of the best places to work with that talent?
I think it's one of the several, but certainly the largest and maybe most cohesive place where a former Eastern Bloc country embraced capitalism in all the constructive ways. So there's lots of I mean, it's big enough, so it has great education, a lot of very smart people, a lot of people that have trained in the West and came back and want to work in Poland. So there's kind of a natural scale effects of just a lot of great supply. And then also the economy growing as well as it does teaches people that building interesting things is a great way to improve your life and improve your country. So it's flywheel of capitalism working really well. Short answer.
All right. We can stare at this map for a while longer, but Okay. I love maps. So do I. I like maps myself. So let's talk about the Speaking of another great movie from the '90s or play comes to mind, Conspiracy of Cartographers is a great quote from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Say more.
It's if you've not seen that, that is a worthwhile very young Tim Roth, very young Gary Oldman play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet. But it's a Tom Stoppard play that basically retells the story of Hamlet entirely through the point of view of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who are in the original play are these two bumbling characters that are summoned to entertain Hamlet and sort of lure him out of his funk. But in the end you get sort of tossed to the side and off with their next sort of thing. And so the whole play is kind of built on here's how they experience Hamlet. And they're it's very funny. It is.
