20VC: Affirm Max Levchin on Why Grading Talent by Letter (A or B) is Total BS | How to Create a Culture of Post Mortems and Writing | Why You Should Only Study Failure Not Success & The Biggest Surprises Scaling to $18.7BN Market Cap

24:11Outcome. Well, highly differentiated in opinions. These days, the ones that I see are very matter of fact. It is never about the individual. It's always about the events. Always come down to a this happened. This choice was made either by a program or a human. And if it's a program, it's a bug or a poorly calculated outcome. If it's a human, it can be a judgment error. Like I thought I would flip this switch and a lights would go on. It turned out to disable power for the entire city. That's a conversation we've had here, but it's never controversial. It's in the past. We need to do better What do you do?

24:44Like you add a big garden to switch that says before you're gonna turn off the lights for the entire city Please read this to a two -line warning and speaking of kind of the decisions that lead to the post -mortems You said before make reversible decisions fast and it kind of makes me think of the one -way two -way doors Honestly, I think everything's really a one -way door I mean there are very very few things that are two -way doors. How do you respond and think about that? I don't agree. Things to change your reputation, things that change relationships with partners, decisions that do that sort of thing are basically irreversible once you.

25:18But do you think so? Like, when you look at, I always use this in these examples. When you look at the transience of news and reputations, you know, Chimath on all in said about the, you know, Uighurs and they're being below his line. A week later, he was number one on Spotify and Schemaath is Schemaath and honestly it has not impacted his reputation one bit. There are probably some people who would disagree with you on that topic. I don't know exactly who they are but I think we can guess. But I agree that superficial statements, even explosive or incendiary even fall off the newsline faster than you would expect them to.

25:56I think people of reputations recover and get managed and manipulated and maybe it's true for companies to, but I think rational people have long memories and do not forget are not easily persuaded by Spotify, top 10 or whatever is the front page of the Wall Street Journal today. The decisions that are probably I care about a lot more are architectural decisions. You can decide to invest a year into rebuilding your systems in some new fashion and if that's a bad decision, you're going to look back and say, well, we're too far in. of the terrible call, but you know, it's just, you know, it's so far and like, what do we, we can't just uproot this.

26:32Somebody be able to be upset, or you agree to a deal that is economically non -viable and you have, you're staring at a giant black hole and you want to get out of it, but you sign the contract and you can't. And it may be it's like not that much money, so you don't care, but sometimes it can be a lot. So I believe in one way, Dors. And part of the post -mortem culture is all about identifying one way, Dors, that you thought were two way, Dors, and saying we shouldn't have done that because that turned to be not a thing we could easily come back from. I agree that a lot of decisions that seem like one way doors are not.

27:02That's probably a very fair statement. Is there a decision that you thought was really reversible? Make it fast and it turned out not to be so reversible? I think for every 10 of the ones that I thought were not reversible, only one, maybe two, were irreversible. The evilsus had something that I love, which is, care about how we make things, mind the quality of the invisible parts. I really like that and I love Fido, he's bound on it. Yeah, that's another reference to Steve Jobs. He was obviously such a brilliant product guy. And I aspire to be a good product guy myself. I think the notion of, so it's an oft repeated story where they signed the insides of the motherboard on I think the first Mac or something like that.

27:44And so the team put their signature on it and the narrative around it was, if you built something beautiful and amazing, you don't mind, in fact, you take pride in signing the insides because if anyone ever looks, they will be blown away by just how beautifully the whole thing is designed and so that's where you want your artist signature. There's definitely a natural and very healthy tension between shipping fast and building things beautifully and building things beautifully requires design and time and consideration of what the next version would look like so you don't have to rebuild from scratch.

28:14There's not a hard and fast rule to know what matters so much that you want to do a great job. And therefore, you will always have a team cleaning up or refactoring code or dealing with tech debt like that. That's a property of every startup that's been a startup for a decade. But there are parts that are obviously going to be important and valuable and could be as simple as some basic UI decision or something as complicated as a machine learning model that deals with credit underwriting, which is one of our crown jewel type achievements. We have some very, very advanced ones. Those things, you know, matter.

28:53You know you cannot let them be anything but the absolute best you can possibly produce. When somebody tells me we're doing X and it's going to be a month late, my natural reaction is to jump out from my chair like, you know, how can it possibly, how dare you be so late with this thing like, why can't we ship it yesterday? I absolutely make exceptions for things that I know are going to be crucial for months and years to come. That's where you have to mind the quality of the invisible parts. A lot of times these are in the back end, be it credit or scalability or, you know, infer, etc. It doesn't make me, doesn't make it any easier to cope with to hear someone say it's slipped by a month because we found something that has to be redone.

29:28But you know it's important and you sort of try to try to cope. How do you feel about the concept of like the lean start up and MVP ship? My name's Rhett, just like the first thing you can get into customer's handship, does that lead to a generation of shit, software, or is it actually a great way to get customer feedback? I think there are definitely things that you want in hands of the customers quickly to possibly can. We have a prototyping team at a firm that is trusted, slash, empowered to ship stuff that is not really beautiful or production quality even to get customer feedback because it's really important to find out if something, it's an crazy idea that we have has any sort of odds of success.

30:10Once it's out there and you get data and you think the data tells you that this is great, you don't just say cool, let's leave it out there and go to the next one. We basically pull down the feature, pull down the product and say, okay, now we're going to do right. We're going to make it scalable. We're going to make it beautiful. We're going to make sure that it actually stands a test of time. The idea of finding out of the idea was really important, but if you believe that ideas speak for themselves so much that it can be garbage, you will end up with a collection of garbage and generational garbage software.

30:38And you just have to know when the moment is to say actually that really does have traction. Someone will build a better version of this if I don't do it myself. And that's what you have to do now. Do you think speed is the most important to top of an S6Sas and startups? It's one of the most important. It's very rare that I cannot think of more than like fewer than a handful of companies who had gotten to huge success, huge scale by just kind of rolling along. I'm sure I don't know the inside story and what seems to me like rolling along is probably not rolling along. In fact, they were probably feeling like it's a breakneck pace on the inside.

31:14They just didn't show it very well. There's some founders and some CEOs who have the duck foot property where they're like plastic above water and the feeder going at crazy pace below water. I am not one of those. You can always tell if I'm trying to go faster from the feed up. But there are people who are capable of maintaining composer and maybe their teams are composing themselves to. That's interesting. You said we are a writing culture. Favour short, pithy, one pages to novels or live -rants? I personally like a live -rant being born a micro -friend in my hand as you kindly suggested. What does a writing culture truly mean to you Max?

31:50And why do you think it's optimal? So it feeds back into that notion of post -mortem straight. If you have a depository and we literally have a post -mortem depot where people can go and review every major or minor thing we did going back to the beginning of a firm time and learn from it. It's really valuable. We have a library of case studies that are internal to the company saying, well, that was a screw up. The great knowledge of XYZ. What happened there? Oh, we managed to overload the back end with a front end and so on. So it's just very valuable to have these things not in a form of oral tradition, but like written down.

32:26And then to do that well, you have to have writing culture where people are typing up random words that come into their mouth and are in their minds and basically say, all right, well, read this, make sense in my head, but maybe you'll make sense of it too. So you have to have some baseline quality requirement for writing and basically the most important thing about technical writing and business writing. is simplicity. Like if you're reading a 12 -page thing describing a feature, you're probably gonna miss details. And so if it's a feature that's meant to be confined to like 25 by 25 pixels, the description should be two pages, maybe three.

33:03You should not have many, many, many pages of prose describing the impact on the world you expect to have and have this relates to World Hunger, et cetera. Pithy is important. Liver ants are good as motivation sometimes. they're good at sort of aligning the team around a story and a strategy that the story represents. In my experience, and I host an all -hands -meeting at least once every two weeks, more often than that, usually you end up saying 12 things and people remember two. So the short of the better, like just being short and pithy is way more valuable, even spoken. But in writing, people just run out of time, way of distractions, notifications are popping up, like you have a 12 -page to read and like, oh man.

33:46And some people are very good at focusing, but I think majority of people are less focused than they'd like to be and less focused than they think they are. My seat back in the office now. It's quite hybrid and it really depends on the geo. So we have offices now worldwide. And by offices, I mean places because some places do not have an office. Our world headquarters notionally is still San Francisco. So that's where I'll be today. And I think it'll be on the order of half full, maybe a little more than half full. Our other coast office in New York will have San Eruon Lee. There will be not enough seats, not enough cubby holes to hide in because people will be there in such quantities.

34:21And everything in between is not true that we are fully back. We have not seen you like to be fully back if you could. Every CEO I speak to says, I wish we were fully back or we are fully back. I think there's a ton of value in being fully back. Again, like everything else, this texture to this value. If you have a sea level team, one way of pushing them into B level is you make sure they all sit together and are surrounded by A players who are constantly telling them, like, hey, go better, do more. If you have a great team, some people are actually more productive when they are able to cut out all distractions.

34:57And so they can hide themselves in their spare bedroom and just write code for 12 hours or design product for 12 hours or whatever it is. And so I care a lot more about output and productivity that I care about where you are physically, but the thing that I'm completely not compromising about, there has to be enough together time. And so the notion of everybody back in the office, even if all of your meetings are in Zoom because you're talking to our team in Madrid from San Francisco, it's hard to make that argument. It's just not a very productive use of commute time. If you live in these bay and you need to get in barred and you ride across and you get to the office and you get into a cubby hole and then you're in Zoom for 12 hours or 5 hours or six hours, whatever it is, it's hard to make the argument that you should have been in that bar train coming in and coming back.

35:39The argument of, I've never met my team, but I'm as productive in person. I only see them on Zoom is a stupid argument that's just not true. Like you form relationships, you understand each other's decision making style, you break bread together, you form camaraderie, that has to happen. Like that, that is entirely non -optional. And I think everyone who's saying I can be fully remote and these people don't ever have to meet person is getting themselves. What was Moral lowest in the company and what did you learn about leadership from that period? We had to do a layoff two years ago. That was Moral lowest point for me and I think everyone around me.

36:14And those are never easy and I've had to do more than one in my life and every time it doesn't get any easier, it's always brutal and no matter how... Did you learn anything about messaging from the first time taken to the second time? Very first time I had to do it was certainly not a firm, which, and every time I have done it, I said I hope to never do it again. But the very first time I did it, I didn't know what I was doing, and I was terrified of owning the responsibility that I screwed up. I was the CEO every single time I had to do a layoff, and the first time you feel like everyone's gonna blame me, it's my fault.

36:49I just want to run and hide. This is terrible. I have to go through with this, but I can't wait for the moment to be over for the day to be over. I just need to like not be here. Actually a good friend of mine who was at the time and exec that company took me aside and said, hey, this sucks for all of us. You are the leader. Like you have to be out there helping people pack their boxes. Like you have to be part of the goodbye. This is not a death sentence. It's a professional event. It sucks. No, no less than any other really major trauma. But you can play this from the comfort of your office or in the middle of the floor that's crying and like go be with the people, it'll feel better in the end, and they will feel better in the end.

37:28And so that's what I did. It was sort of between cathartic and therapeutic and that was a really important lesson to learn. You cannot hide from the grief that a layoff is. And then the other thing that I learned over the years of watching my friends have, you know, having to do it and certainly having to do it a couple times myself. Empathy is really important. The other thing is that you will find if people actually, If you've built a great culture, this isn't the thing you can fix in the moment. But if the culture of the company is great, the blow is much softer than you think it'll be. Because people understand that you had tried with every possible strategic or tactical idea to not have to go through this.

38:07And so this is the decision, this is the last decision of a long list that you could have taken. And they are inevitably more understanding and less hard on you than you are on yourself. Like one of the more amazing and sort of emotional events for me of the Affirmale off a couple years ago now was every single person I talked to it said Hey, I get it this happened we grew too fast we over hired I understand I even understand why me and not the next person I hope there's an opportunity to come back I really love this place I want to come back is over hiring and calculated risk yes it's certainly yes that's a good answer in retrospect to your question about Calculate Risks that did not pan out.

38:47You decide that you want every incremental engineer to build more features while the fundraising is good and then suddenly it's not and what do you do and there's nothing you can do other than to say, so sorry, but some of you cannot have a seat anywhere. And so the theory was, hey, the features will pay off and that will return cash good and it didn't or it was like, hey, we will have a continuous cash tap of fundraising that didn't The analysis is typically about how fast something will grow, how well you can have the market protect your cash flow. If it doesn't, how profitable something will be, it's roughly what you said, but the calculus is a little bit more complicated.

39:27You're typically estimating more than a few variables. One of my favorite internal lines at a firm is a firm is a constant multivariate analysis problem solving. Like it's very rare. It's like, well, that thing, do we think it's five or is it 10, or is it going to be 500? Like, those are very easy to estimate. It's like, well, we have nine variables and they're all non -linearly distributed. And some of them multiply with the others and some of the other ones we don't really know how they relate to the first pack. Or we're going to have to estimate all of them and predict the outcome based on that.

39:55And so it's our problem to solve, not just for a firm, but for any company. You're inevitably evaluating a bunch of variables concurrently. Man, as you said about growth there, I ask you a blunt one. Is Clona growing false than the thumb? And how do you think about that in terms of Clona's US expansion? I think they announced that they grew 32 % last quarter. I think we announced that we grew 35%. In the last few quarters, and their numbers aren't public. They're about to go public, so it's, it will be a little bit easier to track their numbers, I think, for all involved. But for the last several quarters from estimates, that we have been taking share in the market against all competitors, not just them.

40:37That's a good sign for us. We offer more services though. Majority of our competitors specialize in paying for or something very, very specific. We made the decision from day one to provide every possible service from the 45 day super short term loan all the way out to four years. Very, very few people do everything. And so it should be a natural consequence of our ability to serve all that we would take this proportionate share. The answer to the market is pretty well done. Is that the size of the market? Is that the not grabbing the opportunity from your side? How do you analyze that? Because it's a big toss to go off the US market from Sweden and all places.

41:15Respectfully. How do you think that is? That like fuck we dropped a ball? Or like fuck it to massive market? You're asking me to analyze their strategy? That's a post -mortem they will have to write for themselves. I'm not sure I'm qualified. I don't have all the information. I think it's very healthy incidentally for CEOs of startups to spend very, very little time on other people's strategy. The competitive analysis is valuable at the product level and sales strategy level and sort of like, what do they do that we could do better? Is it really a question to ask? What is their strategy is like asking what whether we'll be 12 movies for that.

41:53No, because they say, hey, they've been really smart in this part of I go to market or that partnership. We do lots of that. Like we tear down all competitor products, all their sales products, sales efforts, like everything we can get our hands on, we learn from because it's free. Like someone is making mistakes for us, we should learn on those two. Is regulation a front end of buy now, pay lacer, or an inhibitor to growth? I think we're always on the record as pro thoughtful regulation. I think you should be paying any late fees, but late fee cap, I was very happy about because I think that's a good development.

42:24People should not be building their profit models based on, I'll just raise the amount of late fee. Do you like being a public company, see? Uh, some days, yes. Other days, no. I think it's a day to - One of the days where you're like, yes, and one of the days where you're like, no. Days when it's yes is when it's not very different from being a private company, see, yo. But being a public company, generally speaking, gives you access to more capital, exposes you to really smart investors you can engage with. So there's lots of things to like. There's some investors out there that will only invest in public equities and they are brilliant people.

42:57Like they've seen it all before. They could write books about what a great public CEO looks like. And you want to go spend a half an hour with them and ask them teach me how to be as good as blank. If you're a private company CEO, they might take your meeting, but they're probably busy. If you're a public company CEO, they might own your stock. And then they want to talk to you because they want to assess you as much as they want to help you. And so that's an cheat code to access some of the best brains out there. The days where you're like, oh man, is inevitably when you're like, well, I now have to go read this filing that we have to make because it's part of my responsibilities to make sure I understand everything we're putting out there in the public and can't avoid that.

43:31And those are small prices to pay, but you do have that responsibilities that were not what you thought you'd be getting into when you were getting computer science degree. Is your mentality tied to the market cap of the company? It's so difficult to detach yourself from the valuation of your company. What's been your biggest lessons on that? The short answer is, I'm sure it is, but I'm sure I put an enormous amount of effort into making sure it's not. And so it's a balance here constantly trying to strike where the thing that is hard, harder is when you think you're doing a fantastic job and you can look at the internal numbers and you look at the external numbers you're like, I am absolutely crushing it.

44:11And so sometimes it's very tempting to say, well, by now the market should know and they should just give us high marks and that means the stock goes green, green, green. And more often than not, you have a temporal mismatch where you're doing great, you know you're doing great, and the market thinks you're not. And if you're a startup or fairly high volatility stock, you end up with, well, I did great. Why am I getting punished? And the short answer is it's the market. Like you just don't get to tell it to react to good news or bad news and how. So the more you sort of convince yourself that in the end, there's a great, I think it's attributed to Warren Buffett, but it's actually from Graham, his mentor.

44:48In the short term, the market is a voting machine. In a long term, it's a weighing machine. I take great comfort in saying this to myself whenever the market, I think, Ms. Judge is me. But I also, I've gone through some great links, by the way, to make sure I don't accidentally stumble on my ticker. So my Apple desktop, if I click the top right corner and stock drops down, I cannot see my stock ticker. So I don't accidentally discover that today's a red day or a green day just to make sure I stay focused. You have to think long -term. If you are catching yourself thinking short -term and by short -term, I mean, let's have an amazing quarter and you're in trouble.

45:27Do you see a dip in employee morale that went stock right out? I don't, but I think I make it my business every time I talk to our outcomes as a company. I take great pains not to talk about the price of the stock. The only time I talked about the price of our stock to our employees at length when it was flying very high after the IPO and it's really the head -e -days of 21, I'd actually repeatedly said, look, do not get accustomed to whatever numbers you're reading on the screen today. Like, we will not know what this company's worth for years. Just like, if you think it's too low, good for you, if you think it's too high, it may well be.

46:03Just do not look, do not get conviction that this is actually correlated to some tangible metric. Like, first we have to get profitable, then we have to show revenue growth rates, then we have to show net income growth. And that's what, you know, long term, the weighing machine, that's what that weighs. It's not weighing sentiment. It should not be weighing sentiment. Max, we're going to do a quick fire on. So I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Sure, but sometimes I will take a very long time. He'll have to edit out the awkward silence as the choice of podcasting.

46:38What do you believe that most around you disbelieve? Have this conviction that I can learn anything very, very quickly and eat at a 10 time, right? And two at a 10 time, I'm completely wrong. I decided two years ago that I was just going to read the attention paper and become an expert in LLM's, to read all the papers after that. And I'm still in a process of getting anywhere near expertly status. I try to keep up. It's a lot of really interesting stuff happening in the AI. I just have Mark Batty on the show about 12 hours ago and he said we're getting to the upper limit of LLM efficiency. Agree or disagree?

47:11Agree. But I don't think we are going to stay with LLMs forever. I think we're going to expand the systems that use LLMs. Reasoning models already are not pure LLMs. They have some iterative processes within them. I think we'll invent more really interesting things with that. Light what? And obvious idea, which I know has been explored and will be explored more is a notion of multiple competing LLMs basically debating each other for the right answer. Like that's not a pure LLM model. You can amplify intelligence of humans by having three smart people in a room instead of just one person. As a public company CEO, do you have to have an AI story today?

47:49I generally really dislike stories that have no substance. So I think you have to ask yourself, are we taking full advantage of the best available tools and the most interesting available tools right now are AI. So if you sort of look through your closet and say, hmm, when I'm really using any of this stuff, I got to have a story for the market. You're doing two things wrong. You're telling a story that isn't true and you're not using the most interesting available tools. If you're using the most interesting available tools, your investors might be happy if you told the story. But if you didn't, I don't think they should really care that much.

48:20As you go public, a lot of this becomes, are you growing at the right scale? Are you taking appropriate risks? Are you managing to profitability? The storytelling hour of like, oh, by the way, we have this shiny item that we're so excited about that feeds the voting machine and I'm sure some of it is important, but I spent a lot more time feeding the weighing machine. Max, what would you do if you need couldn't fail? Basically do exactly the same thing I do now. So before a firm was a thing I made a list of difficult problems that I thought required solving. I decided that But financial services are money at the core is one that I am well suited to solve, just given my past experience that I bring.

49:00But if I knew I couldn't fail anything, I would revisit my list of hard problems and that inevitably had things like food, water, shelter, energy, just solve them all. If you could start a company with only one member of the PayPal mafia again, who would it be? Peter. Why? He's amazing. He's brilliant. More so than that Elon? Elon is brilliant too. If I could have a choice between starting a company with Peter or starting a company with Elon, be very hard choice to make. I think Peter is a more known quantity for me. That's why I answered the way I did. So we started the company together and Elon, Elon's company merged into PayPal to form the modern PayPal.

49:39So I know exactly what he's like under pressure and stressed out and trying to raise money and not succeeding for a time and dealing with personal life issues And so I've seen him go from mid -20s to older. And so the risk... How's he changed at the time? When you observe someone closely for a long time, you don't actually notice the change. You see the episodes, but you don't know how the person really changes. We've all grown up. We've all become probably more measured and slightly more careful, slightly less crazy. Maybe slightly more crazy. I don't know. He hasn't changed very much. The thing that makes Peter is, and by the way, actually very similar to Elon in that sense, so there's a really interesting echo between the two.

50:22They both have this amazing quality that I spent as much time absorbing as I could over times that I worked with them, where they bring out the best effort in people around them. They somehow make you feel that you can and should do better work. The conversation with Peter always left me thinking, the problem that I thought was really too hard to solve, I should go give it another try. Like, I think I can, I think this is actually doable. And he is genuinely excited about you solving this problem through the capacity that you have. And I think that's an amazing thing to work with someone on anything because they're just fueling your desire to stay late and do more work.

51:02What's your favorite consumer brand? And why them? I love Airbnb. Less so be caught. Like, the overall brand is amazing. and obviously it's a super successful company, but their tagline, at least the one they promoted for a while, was belong anywhere. I think it's such a profound, two -word brand statement. Like, you know exactly what it means, you know exactly what they stand for. It's evocative, you imagine yourself, and all kinds of crazy places, you're in a Himalayas or in the Amazon. And, you know, like that is an amazing story told with two words. Look back to my brevity, love of brevity.

51:34I think kind of the old world, They probably my favorite brand that I look at every morning. So I'm a huge fan of coffee and bicycles. Not at the same time, frequently, but sometimes at the same time. So every morning I roll out of bed, I stumble downstairs and make myself an espresso. My favorite espresso machine brand is La Marzoca. It's this, I don't actually know that much. They're an informed customer, so I have to fill this closure. But they were a huge favorite of mine long before I convinced them to give a firm a try. It tells this amazing story of Italian manufacturing and the someone with a moustache, smelling the coffee fumes, going, oh, this is perfect espresso.

52:14And it's this sort of a story and a cup that you just think it has to go hundreds and hundreds of years back. They must have been making coffee in Venice with mortar and pestle or something. I don't think it's nearly that old. I think it's maybe on the order of 60 to 100 years old, but it's just this timeless coffee awesomeness that I love. And I use it every day and every time I look at it, I can like, yes, yes, my coffee machine. I love it so much. You can be CEO of any other company for a day. What's company would you be CEO of? I have all these unfulfilled dreams of running a much smaller company that makes, which is, I spend my entire life making things out of bits.

52:52I would love to make things out of atoms. One of my favorite executives came up with a brand name for a company that would sell pickles. called lethal pickles. It has to do with the story in the very early days of a firm where I try to teach people how to make pickles because I love pickles soon. I managed to screw it up badly enough where they eventually turn toxic and grew mold and it was terrible and I was briefly trying to persuade people that it's fine. It's actually not a problem. You should eat them. Almost single -handedly wiped out the entire firm team, but unfortunately no one ate any and we threw them away.

53:25But the story of Max's lethal pickles survives in the annals of a firm, post -mortem history. Someone said, well, you should eventually go fulfill your dream of making things out of atoms and molecules in this case and sell pickles online called lethal pickles. So one day I'll start lethal pickles .com. I have the domain. We're going to name the show Matt says lethal pickles and say, have us. Final one for you. You're asked questions by employees, by investors, both private and public, by a lot of people every day journalists. What question are you never It just be nice to be awesome. It'd be interesting to be awesome.

54:02If you are a careful student of my Sherho the Letters, of which I have now written, it cannot possibly be 16, but I think it's 16 or 15. You will see that every single one of them contains a reference to the movie Big Lebowski. You have to look sometimes hard to find it, but no one's ever asked me what's with the Big Lebowski in your Sherho the other way. What is with the big Lebowski? I'm a huge fan of movies. When I was freshman in college, all I wanted to do is take computer science classes. And I came into my university thinking, I'm just going to take every possible computer science class and nothing else because everything else is stupid and boring and I just want to write code and I still love writing code.

54:44If I knew I couldn't fail, I'd solve the world's problems and then I would just write code from that point on for fun. But it turned out that you actually had to take some required courses so you couldn't just take computer science. So I took film study as like a, this will be easy, it'll be fun. I got to watch things that are actually like gems of movie making world, things like North by Northwest and like Hitchcock movies and all sorts of stuff that blows your mind. And if you don't know about it, you wouldn't watch it because these are old black and white movies, why would you care? Then you watch them and you're like, oh my god, like these are stories that have to be required viewing.

55:16So one of the movies I watched was Seven Samurai and it became like this obsession and where I've seen it over a hundred times. And no one asked me about that one either. But the silliest movie with yet a similarly profound kind of a cultural and at least to me, intellectual impact on me is the Big Lebowski. It's this comedy, tragedy, who done it, commentary on 1980s, the United States. It's like everything in two hours of cinema that if you haven't watched it, you should watch. And it is unbelievably funny. It's one of the funniest movies ever made. And somehow over the years, how do you interview talent?

55:52One of the things you can do is you can figure out if you share cultural artifacts at the time of the interview. And so when I was interviewing a good half of my management team I found out before our after I decided that they were the right ones. They were at huge fans of the Big Lebowski. And so the team that writes the letter with me is this group of people who lost the big Lebowski and we sort of made it our business of sticking Lebowski quotes into our shareholder election. I have one final one, P that I know you won't have been asked. I don't think you've been asked. But it's kind of a meaningful one.

56:22What about the way that your parents brought you up? Have you deliberately decided not to apply to the way that you bring your children up? That's a deep question. So I grew up in an academic family and for them, the notion of advanced degrees was the latter to climb. And so it was embarrassing that my mom never got a PhD to her mom, who was an exceptionally important influence in my life and my mom's life. And so this notion of the way you achieve in the world, the goal to set the ways to think about success and failure in life is measured through academic success. My grandmother has papers in the Harvard Library.

57:05She's long gone, but she was a Soviet scientist that managed to have her astronomy, me PGD thesis referenced in like dozens of academic papers in the United States. So she achieved the academic peak early in life and stayed there. And as she was very old and quite ill, she'd asked me, well, what about the PGD track? And I was just about to start my third company and I was like, you know, I'm going to get a bachelor's and basically because of you, otherwise I would have long dropped out and moved to a parallel time started a company already. It all worked out in the end. So I'm not complaining, but they grew up in a world where entrepreneurship was not a factor.

57:41So the union was not a place where entrepreneurship meant anything in those days. I would love for my kids to at least explore entrepreneurship and decide that it's important so telling them you must spend a decade on the school bench is counterintuitive to that. And so I never told them, you know, your story, grandmother with her multiple PhDs is just, you know, waiting for you to get your first advanced degree and keep going. And I felt very guilty about it. The day we took PayPal public, my mom asked me, well, will you finally move back to Chicago and get a PGD? And I was like, but this is not the response.

58:12Yet that is what I was brought up with. And it weighs on me and I don't want it weighing on my kids. Have you ever been asked that question before? I don't think so. Good try. I like it. It's a really revealing question. Max, did it so lovely to see you again. I so appreciate you doing this, opening up, being so brilliant. You are fantastic. And I just so appreciate the time. Thank you. You're always fun to talk to. Good to see you again.

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1:02:18As always, we so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible 20 -product episode coming on Friday.