Is Affirm outgrowing credit cards? Max Levchin explains

So reality is I co-founded this one, too. I've been a solo founder in the past. It doesn't work as well as people think it does. It's very challenging to be entirely in your own head all the time in the early days when you sort of think I got it. I have a plan. It's a vision and you don't have a counterpart to be like, hey, am I crazy or is this really a thing? And vice versa like are we really toast? Like are we done? Like you want to have that couch ideally fully reciprocated by your co-founders where they can sometimes come hang out on yours and complain to you. And I had that with Peter and I was very happy to have a handful of great co-founders early on at Affirm. The reason the co has gotten dropped at Affirm. It's been 15ish years actually. I didn't realize it. So yeah, it's been a long time and one by one my co-founders are like this is great but you seem to really enjoy running it and I got this other thing I want to do. So one by one they went off to do another startup, join a VC firm, other things. So, I think at some point our head of comms back in the day said, you know, you're a co-founder, but when people ask where the other ones are, you're like, oh, not here.

I am one of four. Okay. It turns out, but yeah, I've been the last remaining last standing. No, last remaining.

So the cool thing, so I'd love to claim extreme foresight, but I didn't know any better. I've been heard recently saying that this is by far the best time in history to run a company as an engineer where just the sheer abundance of engineering amazingness that's happening all around us with AI codegen tools and just all the things that you can do better than most people if you have a good understanding of how AI works, what you can do with it, what it cannot yet do, all the sort of technical details that we have and have taken for granted as computer scientists, as computer engineers is just it's an unbelievable advantage. Like a company that is not run by an engineer is not as good a stock bet in my opinion today as one run by somebody with a CS degree. And 15 years ago, that was not obviously a thing. But I did start a company with three other CS majors. And so we actually only knew professionally how to do more or less one thing, all four of us. But as a result, we sort of got into this habit of like, hey, you're gonna go do this thing and I'm going to do that other thing. Neither one of us really qualified, but both smart people. We have engineering mindsets. We know how to build stuff. We're just going to get it from first principles. That actually served me really well. The current executive team at Affirm. If you look at sort of we've been together for a long time and many people have had their roles fairly suddenly changed like you're doing this, ah, we're going to go do that other thing now. You take over, you go jump on that guy's work. And it works really well for us because huge percentage of people around me all have either the engineering mindset or engineering degrees. Not necessarily computer engineering. Incidentally, our chief operating officer is a mechanical engineer and a great one. And so we have the luxury of having engineering mindsets all around us who are, you know, served us very well in this moment in time.

I think it's going to be the best time ever. I think the rumors of we're all just going to whisper to our agents who are going to tell their agents what to build is like not even a little bit how it's going to work. I think the current moment for computer scientists is the baseline used to be you're an engineer and that other person over there they're 10x and like you will have to work a long time and have the gift and you know go to IOI and all the sort of special unattainable things and then you might get to like 5x but that person they're 10x and the new baseline is like you got a computer science degree cool you're 10x engineer come along we got a bunch of agents ready for you and I think there's still going to be people who are exceptional, but they will not be 10x, they'll be 10,000x. And so this idea of I have a thing over the weekend. I'm going to build this and like turns out to be a six-month long project. It will be a weekend long project. The productivity gains we're seeing are stunning. And so if you're graduating in computer science, like the world is your oyster. Like there are so many opportunities. It's all complicated. You know, some companies are laying off engineers and other companies are screaming, 'We need an engineer right now.' It's all going to be okay. Like your computer science degree is going to be an extremely valuable asset.

I'm just... Oh, I'm not sure I qualify for the other half, but and by I mean old. I mean original. I think the best advice I got is you made the right choice. Don't fret. It's going to be okay. There's going to be a lot of companies that are very interested in building their own software for the first time in a hundred years. Like they may have been great consumers of software and the long list of I wish my XYZ software package did this but the company that made it they just don't care and no matter how big and important we are and to replace that two years ago well I would have to have a 100 person engineering team and it's just not who we are. That's not what we do today. It's like I would need like a five person engineering team and a really clear sense for what I want. Like you brand new computer science major can be in that five person team like that. That's the opportunity ahead of us. And the open-mindedness that you have to bring to the table is you may not want or may not have the opportunity to go work at a frontier lab unless that is exactly what you're trained for and have the interest and the aptitude for. You might end up in like some company that manufactures combined harvesters. They too need software and right now they probably don't make their own.

It's a thing that harvests stuff from fields. You don't know what a combined harvester is?

Oh, it's all kinds of fun stuff. I built software. I've written more software with some help from my agents in the last six weeks than I've done in the last six years. I think...

I love this. Like if I would have my brothers, I'd just like live in a small room with the occasional visit to the outside world to get my vitamin D.

No, this is enjoyable. But I love making stuff. I love making products but making products in my mind is mostly making software that enables others to have great product experiences. So I still build software. I try to write code mostly because it's therapeutic and it's a lot of fun every day certainly every week. Some days are busier than others but every week is definitely the case. I have side projects, have a lot of side projects. They're easier now with agents. I built some home automation stuff recently which I really enjoyed through an agent.

So I designed actually so we went on this long exploration ourselves like I have all these devices I don't like some of them. I really hate the remotes they come with. What if I consolidated everything into a single product and initially I built a command line interface that with my agent friend we had to go get some access and some of these devices weren't really configured for user level access. So, we broke into them together and acquired some passwords that we weren't supposed to have and got through some other holes and we had a full complement of command line access to every device in my house and then I built a web page that I can control it and I showed it to my wife and she said if you're going to make a web page like I'm not going to go to it like you have to make an app like I've never built an iOS app before but this is a great time to start to learn. So I talked to my agent. We agreed that we should build an iOS app together. And then we did and now we have an app that is the consolidation of every remote in my household.

Yes.

It was like I mean I got a little bit rabbit hole into it. So that was probably I don't know like eight hours over the course of two days.

No. I don't... I think the value of human interaction, human leadership and human conversation is actually going up in value and so having a...

Maxbot, Levchinbot, that sounds funny.

I Maxbot actually. So I built a Maxbot one of my other side projects. So I got completely obsessed with the like, you know, Claude Code is a really cool harness as the fancy term of art. And like all these guys have built all these their own versions of like what their perfect bot is. And like these bots are all trained to do something or refined to do something. So some of them are for writing code and others for like doing menial tasks. Like I got to go get one of those for myself. So I built a Maxbot and it's great. It sits on many of my various communication system channels and answers my questions and like look stuff up for me.

It's not that hard. Like you don't need me.

But therein lies the answer to your question. So...

No. Well maybe. But I do think that the world is currently the headlines are dramatically underestimating how much easier it is to start building these things and to bring them to completion if you actually understand how the underlying stuff works.

We live underground. We never leave these sort of polyhedral rooms. Food drops in from the ceiling. We talk to our friends and peers through sort of a screen. Like this guy invented Zoom basically long before COVID. And like we just never visit each other unless it's like a true emergency. And a machine that is fully intelligent and is infinitely capable is there to do everything from bring us food to do medical exams when we don't feel so good and so on. And so it's just this very very dark and it ends badly. I don't want to spoil a surprise but it's not nice. And that story is like that's a future where we surrender more and more control to AI and say like we're not worthy. Feed us, clothe us. We just need to tell you what we want and like descend into this babylike experience where we just like get diapers and food from.

No, I don't think so. I think we're actually headed a much happier future where we are telling the machine, I understand what you can do and I am going to make you better and smarter and I'm going to guide you to the outcome that I want and I will be the judge whether you're successful or not and we're going to co-invent recipes to feed me and we're going to co-design clothes that you're going to make for me right in front of me just like the 3D print revolution never really took off because only very very very sophisticated sort of engineering minds could get into the CAD that you needed to get the designs or the stuff to print then you need to really understand how to operate these 3D printers and that was supposed to be the consumer make everything in their home with AI the interfaces are smarter the machines will understand us better but we will still be co-designers like the future I want the future we're working towards the future that does not look like The Machine Stops is one where we are getting 10x superpowers in everything including the things that we don't fully grasp the underlying realities of but have a good sense for theory of how these things work I think clothing designers are still going to make the best clothing with AI. Software engineers are still going to make the best software with AI. Everything is going to be done with the help and the amplification power of AI, but you'll still have specialization. Like you will make the best podcasts with AI giving you real time help, but you're still going to...

Exactly. But like you will use more and it's going to be even better.

I am. I wouldn't be there if I didn't love it. I'm definitely enjoying it tremendously. I think probably the most interesting stuff we're going to start seeing, we're seeing a little bit of it already, so maybe it's not the most interesting stuff. The most interesting stuff is something that no one's seen yet. But the things that I'm quite blown away by is getting multiple flavors of models helping each other get better. So AI as judge of other AI output is like very much a thing. It's happening everywhere. It's really really cool. The thing that I'm quite excited about that we're certainly working on at Affirm and in my copious spare time building agents that are uniquely taught to do a thing better. The general purpose LLMs that sort of teach you one of everything and kind of have greater depth than many topics that you and I can have just through sheer limitations of memory is still like that much deeper. The thing that's going to be amazing is when you have embodied AI. So you have robots that actually have really good grasp of the world around us and are taught to be like the best manufacturing robots we could ever possibly imagine. You're still going to need to help them decide what to build. Like they're not going to know the next thing they're going to build on their own. But you'll be able to take advantage of both software and hardware agents. They're like so much deeper than any human than any generic LLM or generic technology out there right now. And which is also why I think like this whole like oh you know the jobs are just going to go slowly dwindle down to zero is total insanity. Like there's going to be so many humans needed to train them and to guide them and to co-design with them. Like your job is safe.

I think on my memory a similar moment was when the web emerged. So I had the extreme good luck of matriculating at University of Illinois in the fall of '93. And that summer I was still chatting on IRC and direct messaging on ICQ and emailing from Pine, like all the green screen tools that you may be too young to remember, but as young as you think, but yes, I was there and it was great. I thought the internet was the most amazing thing ever. I could talk to people from across the world and it were like, you know, 33 milliseconds, you could be coast to coast. And then the browser came out on my campus thanks to Marc Andreessen. And it was like, oh my god, it's not always going to be just like the green screen of my mom's generation. She was a software engineer. She's now retired, but she spent her entire career writing code on green screens that were like mostly Fortran. And you know, I mean, and that was very exciting to me when I was much younger. But I was like there's you know, only one color, green or not green, $2. And the idea that you could have these amazing very visual experiences with people around the world with tools that are built in real time in these pages that like you click and it becomes the next thing. You don't have to wait like everything suddenly came together and it's like the world's going to change and it's going to be like TV meets mainframes. That's what I felt like that's how I explained to myself when I was starting college majoring in computer science at the place where this was invented at the time where it was invented was like the best thing ever happened to me obviously but also just like an unbelievable moment of like the world is changing in front of me and I can have my fingers in it if I want it. And then right after I graduated, I moved to Palo Alto where it was being commercialized. Like that moment in time like I would go to Tresidder Union or outside at Stanford where kids would eat lunch and people who were kids like 10 minutes before maybe have graduated Stanford or dropped out were pitching VCs that drove down from Sand Hill Road to talk to them and like literally explaining, oh well, let me tell you about what an IP address means. And so that moment was just like the whirlwind moment where everything changed and it was so exciting and you would run into someone and be like, 'Oh, you're not working on a startup. What's wrong with you? Everyone's working on a startup. It's so cool. Get going.' And this is what it feels like right now in AI but just AI adjacent world where like every one of us and again that's why it's so cool to understand how these things work.

So you know the famous line, future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed. It does feel that way. It's definitely the case when you talk to people who are not in the soup right now. It feels a lot like 1993-94 where I would tell someone like have you seen the latest version of Mosaic the very first graphical browser and like what's that is that like Windows I can have it there too like so it's not quite here for everyone yet but that's where the opportunities are. The reason there's so much venture capital being raised, the reason there's so much funding events going on is because it's very clear it's going to benefit everyone, but we have to do the work of bringing it to everyone who could benefit from it. And so I wouldn't expect to wait too long. I think you'll see it quite quickly in a lot of different places, but physical world is complicated. You know, the great thing about the internet is it's not that hard to bend to your will. So long as you're willing to write code or you have an agent to write code for you. To get the food cart downstairs to fully benefit from the AI revolution, there's going to be some atom movement that's going to be a little bit more complicated.

Yeah, sometimes it's got pretty cool. It is fun. When she retired fairly recently, actually, she coded basically non-stop for 30 but like more like 40 years.

And she was definitely good in her time and every once in a while she'd like hey if I'm working on this thing can you help me debug it? I'm like mom I'm like trying to run this company with... I enjoy that tremendously. She's definitely probably closer to where you are.

No, the most valuable thing on this couch will be the real Sazi. Like there will be an AI Sazi who will be told we will take what you just said and make the 500 clips that need to go everywhere on the internet because we have a pretty good facsimile of you. But the idea of what to say that will be genuinely you will only come from the wetware. It's not going to come from an agent.

I you know try... I don't know if you do this much but so I every single shareholder letter every single communication that I send out to Affirm every single email that I write I write entirely on my own. And I am no lit. I will use whatever tools are in front of me and you know two of them at a time if I can. And every time I try to get AI to write something for me, like it just feels inauthentic. That's a good turn of the phrase, but it's not my turn of the phrase. My turn would screw it, I'll rewrite it. And so I have not sent a single fully AI generated or even mostly AI generated piece of content because I feel that communications and writing is like a thing that makes me who I am. And I don't think that's unique. I think that's actually true for a lot of people. Low value communications, you know, sending out stuff that's like, 'Hey everybody, you know, lunch is canceled or whatever,' which I do not do. I'm sure AI will write those for us. But an email that tells Affirm, 'We're going to go get a hundred billion dollars of GMV. That's the next waypoint. We're going to get really big' is a... that's a thing that only a human, I think, can do authentically. And authenticity is going to go up in value a lot in this world because the barrier to entry of creating facsimile of humans, facsimile of anything is going down.

I don't know what's going on inside these companies. So...

Opinion, not fact. I think a lot of it got to be, wow, I have a lot of people at this company who are not prepared to fully embrace this thing. And I'm also not sure what the hell did I do hiring these people. I have the world's best fig leaf. I am gonna cover right up and I'm so sorry, but it's AI. It's like, no, you made some hiring mistakes. You weren't planning. You weren't thoughtful. It would be nicer if certain leaders owned it a little bit better. But it definitely... I don't know. It's not for me to say. That said, it is incredible how much more productive you get parts of your team to be with these new tools. And so, it isn't lost on me that if you had a low bar, again, I'm picking words carefully because I don't want to tell anyone and it nothing sucks more than doing layoffs. Like, maybe I should have started there. So, having...

It's hard if you are human, not AI. You will feel it in your gut. Just feels like it's a terrible thing to do. And it's awful and you like the people you work with and you're telling them like, hey, you know, if you own it fully, say, I made a mistake. I shouldn't have hired so many people. I shouldn't have miscalculated my ability to pay them. But whatever it is, it's not nice. And I think, oh yeah, they're just hiding behind AI is probably too glib and I don't want to seem glib at all. I do think that from our experience, we have a very high bar for engineers. Something like 70 something percent of code we push to production. Not the code we write which is much higher but the code that actually faces the consumer faces the merchant our core customers is written by AI. I do not see an opportunity to say hey you engineering pack go home we got this with agents the opportunity we have is say hey you guys the thing you're going to ship next year can we ship it next month.

Velocity. The quality of product is still a human dependent thing that's where this competence the understanding of how things work that's the strength of that but no you're no longer required to type that much which typing is a limiting factor when I was in college writing code 20 hours a day I think my typing speed was like north of 30 words a minute and all those words were like basically keywords from programming languages but I was a fast typist.

And at some point my hand started to hurt a lot because I had repetitive stress injury from just typing code so telling an agent like hey now that we have this figured out you go typing I'll go figure out another one with another agent is an incredible productivity booster and that's what we're seeing so I we have no way of considering... I ask because like I just need to build more stuff faster.

We start by asking the question what's the limiting factor. So we understand reasonably well. We're very metrics company. We measure everything obsessively. We sort of stare at our dashboards. Sort of primary part of my job these days if I'm completely honest is just...

It's kind of flat down like those are less fun dashboards unless it's credit losses. You want your credit losses to be very steady and ours are. So, I enjoy staring at those kind of flat dashboards, but most dashboards I like are the ones that are up and to the right. And if you are as metrics driven as we are and you're trying to decide what to do hiring wise, you ask the question first and foremost, what's the limiting factor? So the by the way like the most damning thing I can say about the sort of the AI-driven layoffs is well they must be out of ideas. So the thing that I know about us is we make a list of projects we want to get done every quarter and then we go through it with a fine tooth comb and sort it by return on investment. Then we say yep that's great but the bottom 80% of this list it's not going to get done. It's going to get punted into the next quarter because that's how many development cycles we have. So, we're fundamentally development cycle limited. Before we start talking about we need fewer people, we need to improve our productivity 5x. If I'm estimating correctly, 20% gets done, 80% gets punted, and then reprioritized the next quarter. There's room to have five times more productivity to consume and produce these ideas into actual software. We are in no danger of running out of ideas. We're currently still even with agents are constrained entirely by how much software can we ship which is a little bit more than just writing code. You have to ship it, you have to validate it, you have to test it, you have to make sure it's compliant. There's a lot of work that happens that isn't just creating code before a product becomes product. And so we are still hiring engineers. Not even not hiring engineers, which is what I've heard from some of the maybe less headline news people saying, well, I don't need to have any more people. We still need more people. We have to make sure those people are fully AI ready. We need to make sure that they are enabled with the best agent. We need to make sure that we have development productivity tools for them that give them the chance to be five times more productive or, you know, x times more productive. So all of that is still a work in progress, not just for us, but for everybody who is working on these things. But the day we run out of things to build is the day we should be asking, well, do we actually need quite so many people? But like the length of ideal list that isn't getting done because we just don't have the cycles for it is lengthening right now and has been lengthening since the day we started this company. So we're in no danger.

Yeah. And I not superstitious but I'll touch wood. That said I don't think it's a matter of if like I think at this point the momentum is so strong the thing that we said at our event which I sort of like, you know, my job was to be excited talking head and I did my job I hope reasonably well. But the thing that sort of reflected on a little bit like so we did this exact event not exact but this kind of investor forum full day the entire management team tells investors exactly kind of how we think about the business what are we going to work on sets targets targets would say let's grow 20% or better every year for the next until we reach $50 billion of GMV.

The sales basically the sales that merchants put through our system that we help them. So we yesterday we flashed that the last 12 months were I think 46 billion. It's reasonable to assume that that 46 will round up reasonably soon to a 50. So we're more or less there. The timing aligned that we have our next investor event just now. And we said that hey we're going to compound at 20% we're going to get to 50 and we're going to maintain gross margin between 3 to 4%. We call it revenue less transaction cost but it's basically unit economics of the business. Yesterday we said we're going to grow. So we're much larger now. So we're now effectively touching this 50 billion which when we were talking three years ago like yeah BNPL you think is getting that big.

And so yesterday we said hey we're going to get to 100 and like we're 100. We're not worried we're going to get to 100 when... we didn't put a number down.

But the thing that I sort of took for granted was like wait a second did I just hear say this? And of course I was involved in putting these targets together. So sort of like it shows how the time window moves and you just take things for granted. So as you get larger most companies you expect to slow down like you attenuate you have your S-curve but then you're kind of you know you're big and everything is kind of growing a little bit easier but you're slowing down. We told our investors 3 years ago 20% 3 to 4% profit margins. Yesterday we said 25% compounding the profit margin minimum is 3.75%. So we upped both the pace and the profitability expectations of the business and we put the flag in the ground and said we're going to get to 100 not if when.

Everything. Our largest category is general. Oh, who are we taking from? It's got like there's got to be somebody something or new people. It's new people. So population expanding but most importantly the thing that we observed 15 years ago turned out to be true that people are kind of fed up tapping their plastic and not knowing when they're done paying it off. Like 15 years ago it was like really like is that really true? Like I love my credit cards just like tap and figure it out later. Yes, but if you're a teenager when your parents were really hard up during 2008, that stayed with you. And the theory in 2012 when we started this thing was I think there's going to be a real opportunity to give people a financial tool that is like credit card so pay over time but with extreme transparency where you know precisely when you start and when you end paying your installments where the schedule is set when there's not a minimum payment and a suggested payment and maybe a payment you don't want to make like it's a clear schedule and at the time people are like oh that's so rigid you're like literally telling people what to do People hate being told what to do. They want the flexibility. And at the time, my theory was I think people want transparency and sense of agency and sense of control. That's the founding reality of Affirm was I think people are ready for a pay over time product that reduces flexibility because that robs you of a sense of clarity of what's going to happen when. And that is the original product that we brought to market and it turned out to be true. If you look at the growth of spend of credit cards versus Affirm, we are e-commerce wide, we're probably three to four times the pace of all the other payment methods. If you look at offline or even faster, which obviously that's a slower growing, much larger industry, but we are taking share from other payment methods because it gives you access to credit. It is 100% transparent. We do not charge late fees. Never have, never will. Don't do all the gimmicky stuff where it's a promotional rate, but then it changes. Like whatever rate you see for the first time, it's the rate you're going to see for the last time. If you prepay us, we take out the interest. We literally reward you for getting out of debt faster and so on. There's so many parts of the product that are designed to give you a sense of total control over your finances. Sounds too good to be true, but that is in fact what got us to almost $50 billion. 27 million consumers over the last 12 months. 515,000 retailers active in the last 12 months, north of $60 billion dollars total since inception. I mean these are like gargantuan numbers and yet we are seeing acceleration last quarter. So you know we promised 25%. One of the people in the front row like yes it's 35% last quarter like what the hell is wrong like show me another company that's growing at this rate at the scale.

I actually I quite enjoy our analysts. We have actually pretty good. They put out really good work.

I do not... some CEOs have adversarial relationships with Wall Street sell side. I generally speaking find them smart and when they come with hard questions is because they're well thought out and when they come to tell us we're doing a great job, it's because they actually did the work and realize that we do.

You know, I'm long long long out of PayPal and obviously it's the first success. So, it's very hard not to feel nostalgia, if not sentimentality. It so happens that we compete with them. I'm biased as I am think that we're doing a pretty great job.

You know, it's a business.

It hasn't. So, I haven't thought it through. I don't know. We just M&A in general and we're a reasonably large public company at this point. So, theoretically, we should be at least eyeing M&A. And it's not like we're asleep. We've looked and are looking, but it's very hard to justify the dilution or the cash expense really if you can grow as fast as we do just by building stuff. And M&A is generally speaking not a high probability of success in most cases. So you better be very sure that what you have has real synergies and real sort of possibility of accelerated growth. We've not done too much of it. The one that's been just absolute knockout success, we bought a company called Paybrite in Canada and that became the foundation of Affirm Canada and that's done spectacularly for us. So, never say never, but we are pretty choosy and it's a high bar to clear. So, exciting brands coming up for sale may be a thing or not and will obviously care to know and look if that's appropriate, but the bar to say, 'Okay, let's dilute ourselves and our shareholders because that makes so much sense.' That's a very high bar for us.

Half the life away. Yeah. I'm a father and a husband first. A reasonably good cyclist, a connoisseur of coffee, and the occasional payments guy. And after that, I'm a PayPal co-founder. Okay. And so, Affirm is the brand that's on, you know, on the chest, on the socks.

I No.

I don't know. Like, all right. I don't know how far you take this. I know people have Affirm tattoos which I mean there are some of our employees and I think it's an extraordinary commitment. I'm a little bit terrified of needles but that's besides the point. I have worked very hard to be introduced as founder and CEO of Affirm co-founder CEO of Affirm if you must.

But that is the... and by the way, PayPal start to the day I resigned was near perfect four years for amazing four years. Like I started it just out of college. I ended it with my eyes sort of permanently popped open going like the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me. It was a very long time ago. It was in my early 20s. Affirm has almost been 15 years. This is by far the longest job, the longest thing I've ever done. It's been totally amazing and like I'm in no danger of retiring. So I'm enjoying this and full throttling as much as I can agents and beyond and it's you know it's a great journey and I hope at this point I'm mostly known as the Affirm founder.

I the short answer that I believe has the added benefit of being true in my case. If you love what you do, that takes care of itself. Like I'm definitely guilty of having my phone buzz in the middle of a family dinner where I'm attentively listening to my kids tell me about their school day and phone is going off and going off like I have to know and I my dashboards... dashboards don't rise to the level but it's like if it's buzzing that much and it's not someone related to me it's probably work or spam. So I've been spam like relief like tell me more about the day. I was like it's one of my C-level guys. I kind of want to know what's going on. I'm a little bit worried. So I've gotten better over the years. In the early days it was sort of like well obviously I have to know right now. So sorry guys. And I've gotten I think a lot better. Although maybe not as good as my family would like me to be. That said they know who I am and they understand what drives me. Understand that my happiness is definitely connected to them first and foremost, but also connected to Affirm. Affirm is a third child in the two kids, one dog household that we have. And it sometimes takes center stage and sometimes I have to apologize for it. And a lot of times I have my family cheering me on saying like go like you got to go like go go get on that podcast. Go go go go go go go do those earnings. I got some very nice go crush it from my family members right before I got on stage for the investor forum.

It is. And the amazing thing is that as your window shifts, you kind of like, well, this is the baseline. The next one is over there. And it's not that far. And of course, when we went public, I was like literally looking at this right before I got on stage trying to like how far have we come. Like we were less than five million active users. We were 4ish billion dollars of volume a year and a half into the pandemic. This is not that long ago. This is just a little bit under five years ago. Like all those numbers that seem like really like 27 million active like 50 billion of volume. How did you... and that is not a long time. And so and yes like huh that was tiny. Like we were so small we went public on those numbers and did just fine. Anyway, so I'm with you on the like how did that happen is a shared sentiment.