Max Levchin: The Interview

“The thing that's happened with the LLM powered models is you can now go from, I have an inkling in my head to, I'm going to build a prototype to, I'm going to, not necessarily always on your own, but with a bunch of co-conspirators to build something that's production ready in record short time. And if you do know what you're doing as somebody with a sense for how to build software well, you don't need to vibe code yourself to a prototype and then hand it off to somebody who knows what they're doing. You can actually build something amazing and just ship it.”

“Computer science is a science... It's also an art form. Like if you read code, or maybe we used to read code for fun, some code is more elegant than other, and you would readily see it. That's a beautifully written piece of software. I'm like, that's kind of garbage, but it does the job. So there's a matter of taste and elegance in programming, and it's also a craft. When you actually look at well-made production-grade code, you can identify if you know what you're doing, like that's a well-crafted piece of software.”

“With LLMs, the barrier to entry into an area of programming that you've never done before is nil. I was annoyed at some remote control functionality that I have in my home AV system. So I decided I'm just going to build an iOS app to completely get rid of my stupid remote and have a remote on my phone. Normally, a year ago, I have to learn how to build iOS apps, I have to learn how to interface with this audio video system that I have. This time around, I was like, well, I can just ask my favorite agents to go research stuff and set it up for me.”

“Affirm was founded in many ways to fight all of that and destroy the ridiculous and the exploitive... We don't compound interest specifically to make sure that we can pre-price every loan and say you're borrowing $500 and your total interest chargers will be $25 or $0 if somebody else or merchant is paying your interest for you. And for a long time, consumers were sort of like, yeah, you say that, but there's got to be something in a fine print. One of our core values is no fine print to remind ourselves and the rest of the world that we're not hiding our business model in there.”

“I think companies that have built software orally and just sell that software are very vulnerable. The bar for quality of software is going up rapidly. The, yeah, it kind of sucks and has bad interface, but it really serves an important function and I can't be bothered to hire engineers or build the same thing myself. That excuse is gone. If you really hate some piece of software that you're using and it's just software, it doesn't have some deep proprietary data, proprietary source of value, it will get replaced.”

“I think the net IQ of the world is about to go up, like, 50 points... The average IQ with AI in your ear at all times is about to go up to 150, which is, like, north of the genius definition. So very, very soon, the willingness to put up with random obnoxious things, like low quality or crappy terms or products that pretend to be something they're not, like, all of that is just getting flushed out very quickly. And companies that have business models that are buried in a fine print of some kind are all in for a very rude awakening.”

“In the short term, the market is a voting machine, in the long term, it's a weighing machine. And I'm a big fan of reminding myself, if the price is going up a lot, you can overlook that if price is going down a lot. It's important to remember, but either way, you're working for the long term. If you're willing to drop everything and look at the short term, you're joining the group of investors that I said I don't care about. I certainly don't want to do that.”

“Socialism sucks. It is terrible. The only people who do well in redistribution of wealth are the ones doing redistribution. It's fundamentally corrupt, and there's not enough bad things I can say about socialism. So I think capitalism works exceedingly well, especially when the competition is encouraged and allowed to flourish... We've had thousands of years to evolve a fairly good economic model, and US is most certainly 1A in the right way to do it.”