Max Levchin is looking ahead to fintech’s next big opportunities

Max Levchin needs little introduction in the world of tech. As an entrepreneur, he’s been the co-founder of PayPal (now public), Slide (acquired by Google) and Affirm (reportedly about to go public), some of the hottest startups to have come out of Silicon Valley. And as an investor, he’s applied his power of observation and execution also towards helping many others build huge technology businesses.

We sat down with Levchin for a recent session of Extra Crunch Live, where he spoke at length about what he sees as some of the big opportunities in fintech. Here’s an edited version of the conversation. You can watch and listen to the whole discussion — which includes stories about Levchin’s coffee and cycling habits, and how many times he’s seen “The Seven Samurai” (hint: more than once) — here, also embedded below, and you can check out the rest of the pretty cool ECL program here.

How e-commerce failed to evolve since his days at PayPal

Even going as far back as PayPal I think the industry has devolved. I think fintech had the promise of really bringing simplicity, honesty and transparency to the customer. Instead, we ended up putting a really nice user interface on products that are not designed with the user’s best interest in mind. I’m a big fan of throwing shade on credit cards, because I think fundamentally, their business model is remarkably similar to that of payday loans. You are allowed to borrow some money and don’t really know exactly what the terms are. It’s all in the fine print, don’t worry about it and then you just make the minimum payments and you stay in debt. Potentially forever.

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