mlevchin@ux4.cso.uiuc.edu
To build a meritocracy About a year ago, we at Affirm decided to add an OKR to our annual planning titled “ High-Performance Culture”, to help shore up the necessary means (for the necessary means) of improving our collective productivity. (Yes yes, big company stuff, whatever – we grew revenue 46% last fiscal year on essentially flat headcount, that’s pretty addictive, and it doesn’t hurt the…
Shamir Secret Sharing It’s 3am. Paul, the head of PayPal database administration carefully enters his elaborate passphrase at a keyboard in a darkened cubicle of 1840 Embarcadero Road in East Palo Alto, for the fifth time. He hits Return. The green-on-black console window instantly displays one line of text: “ Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye. ” There is…
Saturday, May 12th, I had the enormous honor of being the commencement speaker at my Alma Mater (CS Eng’97), University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, on the 150th anniversary of UIUC’s very first class. My heart was overflowing with pride looking over the veritable sea of orange and blue in full academic regalia on the Memorial Field, and a giant cheering crowd of relatives and friends in the…
In 2011, I started HVF as a container entity for all sorts of data-related projects: ideation, incubation, investing, other things starting with letter ‘i’. In the last 5 years HVF has been a highly rewarding exercise in both thinking and doing. We incubated and seeded Glow and Affirm, the latter of which I am now running full time, and invested in over 50 startups. We also began to…
America has always been a safe haven and the land of opportunity for those whose only choice is to leave it all behind. My family and I, and thousands of Soviet Jews like us, came here as refugees in 1991, running from an unjust regime that persecuted us simply for who we were. As a nation of many immigrants (not all, though!), we must not close our doors to refugees, and those willing to…
I loved math and puzzles for as long as I can remember, but my love affair with cryptography began when a fellow student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign let me borrow his many-times-xerox’d copy of the government-issued technical specification of the Digital Encryption Standard in 1994. (Thank you Dave B., I don’t think I ever returned it!). I was hooked, and even tried to apply…
As we grow Affirm, our ability to translate our ambitious mission (Improve lives through honest financial products!), governed by our core values (Focus, Boldness, Excellence, Transparency, and Responsibility), into a cogent day-to-day strategy becomes essential. Truly great companies retain a deep, intimate sense of shared of understanding even as they expand exponentially. I wrote down the…
Every successful startup requires a proper creation myth, a few embarrassing anecdotes punctuated by a poignant teaching moment or two. In the hands of an enterprising communications professional, a memorable origin story humanizes the founders, and preempts the perennial “how did it all begin” with a clever, if non-controversial, bromide. eBay’s PEZ dispenser sales, Google’s misspelling, Twitter…
When I was 14 or so, in 1989, I worked at the Advanced Communications Lab of Kiev’s Communications College, a 2-year “technical professional” training school, at the time known by its Russian-language acronym KPTS. “Worked” in the sense that I talked the guy who ran the lab into giving me after-hours access to the various Soviet Bloc-made computing equipment (built mostly on East…
This is the approximate text of the keynote I gave at DLD13 today in Munich. I felt my delivery of this (admittedly, relatively dense) material was not the best, but the content is crucially important. To that end, I am posting the notes here. They were edited for grammar beyond the basics, so you will have to forgive the occasional fifth-grade prose. ———- Many of today’s…
As announced by Yahoo! this morning, I have been asked and agreed to join its Board of Directors. It is an honor to be asked, in and of itself. There are three key reasons I accepted: Personal: I’ve long respected Marissa’s talent and tenacity. Her decision to take the top role at Yahoo! was a very ballsy move, and when she asked for my help, I was excited about working with her.…
If you are ever going to start a company or work at a startup, do it now, while you are still young. I do not agree with the conventional wisdom that startups are for young people only, that once you get past a certain age it’s all over – in my late thirties, with two kids, a dog, and an Audi, I better not. Helping start up and build companies is something I intend to do well into the…
I simplistically divide people into two broad top-level categories: boring people – not very thoughtful, interesting, smart, talented, etc, and fascinating people – very smart, insightful, knowledgeable, talented, etc. The latter category has a very special sub-category that I am truly enthralled by: the high-leverage people. I define them as people who act on their big ideas. They are…