We’ve got a great Extra Crunch Live chat coming up on Thursday, August 4, that you won’t want to miss. The one and only Max Levchin, is Silicon Valley icon and entrepreneur extraordinaire, is joining us to talk all things tech and fintech. You might know him as the CEO of Affirm, one of the hottest finance startups around right now, but he’s actually been a significant figure in tech in the Valley — and globally — for decades, making his name back in the first dot-com boom, as one of the co-founders of a little startup that you might have heard of called PayPal. Join us this week as we talk about all the many ways that fintech has evolved, what Levchin thinks about the current state of play, and what he thinks is coming next. ear from the one and only Max Levchin.
The magic happens in our next installment of our Extra Crunch Live series, on Thursday, August 4.
Extra Crunch Live is open exclusively to Extra Crunch subscribers. If you’re not already an Extra Crunch member, you can join here.
The EC Live format is a unique one for us at TC. It’s an hour-long conversation, and that allows us to take a deep dive, covering not only some of the biggest issues in tech, building startups and investing today but getting to the heart of them. At the same time, it’s a lighter format that’s actually fun to watch.
Taking the talk out of the formal, hushed, darkened rooms where you usually sit to listen to people get interviewed, we’re Zooming it and keeping it a little more relaxed, and we’re peppering the conversation with questions from you, the audience, throughout. See past talks with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha and Homebrew’s Hunter Walk for a taste of how this works. (See the whole schedule of Extra Crunch Live talks here.)
Max’s current company, Affirm, is trying to bring something new to the world of financing payments, inking deals with a wide plethora of e-commerce sites to give shoppers a way to make interest-free payments in installments, based on a schedule that works for them, and signing up for the service in no more steps than it takes to make an ordinary card payment.
But because this is fintech — behind the scenes the real story is much more complex. Of course. Building these services today and building them 20+ years ago gives Levchin some amazing perspective on the challenges and opportunities of working with data. And it also has given him some critical insights into what consumers want and need, versus what they’ll actually use — lessons definitely pertinent to other financial services and e-commerce entrepreneurs, but actually just as important for other categories, too.
The “modern world” is a moveable feast these days: who would have thought in, say, January that the market conditions we face today would have shifted so drastically? All the more reason to continue the conversation and create more context to make better choices for your own business.
Join Max and me this week. We’re looking forward to it.
Extra Crunch Live is open exclusively to Extra Crunch subscribers, and so if you want to watch, join here. You can find the full details of the call below the jump!