A dozen tired engineers file into the basement of Affirm, their consumer-finance startup in San Francisco, for movie night. It’s 7:30 p.m., and the program features a three-and-a-half hour black-and-white Japanese film with subtitles–preceded by a lecture from their boss, Affirm’s CEO and cofounder, Max Levchin. Tonight will mark the 110th time Levchin has seen Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic Seven Samurai. He launches into a speech on Japanese cinema, the director’s legacy, and the evolution of its subtitle translations. Then he finally gets to the point, when he reveals that “I’ve never taken a single management class.”
He hasn’t had to, he explains, because Seven Samurai is the “perfect metaphor for a startup.” It is about “this guy, he has this goal, he’s probably going to fail, he tries to get people to join him, he’s rejected. People show up who are completely incompetent. He wants to build up warriors. There are terrible challenges to overcome. It’s a very sad story.” Yet it’s “fundamentally about supreme strategy and organization to win a war against all odds.” Seven Samurai has so influenced Levchin’s understanding of business that he once considered getting a bracelet that read, “What Would Kambei Do?,” in honor of the down-on-his-luck warrior who recruits six others to help him save a village under attack from 40 marauders.
Building Affirm, which he launched in the spring of 2012, is not Levchin’s first battle. The 39-year-old serial entrepreneur cofounded PayPal. An incubator of his helped launch Yelp. He sold a company called Slide to Google for $228 million. He is one of the tech industry’s most sought-after advisers and investors, and he sits on the boards of Yahoo and Evernote, along with Yelp, where he is still chairman. He’s wealthy, respected, and connected.
But when you compare Levchin’s career to that of his fellow PayPal cofounders, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, as well as even former PayPal employee Reid Hoffman, there’s a gnawing sense that he hasn’t fulfilled his potential. They are legends. After eBay acquired PayPal in 2002, they went on to have a hand in the creation of several multibillion-dollar companies, reinventing personal communication (Facebook), business networking (LinkedIn), data mining (Palantir), electric vehicles (Tesla), and space exploration (SpaceX). And their impact has spread beyond the tech industry, capturing the public imagination. Levchin, on the other hand, is still searching for a grand second act. As one colleague notes, Levchin has made more money as the shareholder of a company he did not found (Yelp) than from any company he did create.
