Max Levchin: “The Net IQ of the World Is About to Go Up 50 Points”

“I think the net IQ of the world is about to go up like 50 points. Like we're surrounded by people—not in Silicon Valley, of course—where the average IQ is still 100. I think 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. 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 is just going to get flushed out very quickly.”

“The most important lesson is always the team. It is sort of the Alpha and Omega success or failure of a company is the team. And there's an art form to building a company with it. The corollary to the team is the fact that just having a bunch of brilliant people is not actually enough. You need to organize them, you need to give them a mission, you need to give them a way to pursue that mission that feels true to them, but also aligns them all together, which is kind of what leadership is all about.”

“I think companies that have built software poorly and just sell that software are very vulnerable. The bar for quality of software is going up rapidly. If you really hate some piece of software that you're using and it's just software, it doesn't have some deep sort of proprietary data, proprietary source of value, it will get replaced. Like, there's no reason why not. It's long overdue to get rid of bad software.”

“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 the US is most certainly 1A in the right way to do it.”

“Majority of American banks derive a disproportionate percentage of their income from late fees. A late fee was obviously conceived as a means of slapping your wrist and saying, like, if you're going to be late, I'm going to remind you. At some point, someone said, wait a second, that's 100% gross margin product. It's better if you're late a lot, because then I'll make more money, and it cost me nothing to create that revenue line. Affirm was founded in many ways to fight all of that and destroy the ridiculous and the exploitive.”

“With LLMs, the barrier to entry into an area of programming that you've never done before is nil. This time around, I'm like, well, I can just ask my favorite agent to go research this stuff and set it up for me, and then I can just focus on exactly the functionality that I want and the implementation quirks that I'm interested in. Reconciling this opportunity where coding is fun again and easy again with the need to run a big company is a lot of fun.”