
Interview with Max Levchin - misotaur
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/business/max-levchin-of-affirm-seeking-the-endurance-athletes-of-business.html?smid=tw-share
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binalpatel
The glorification of stress in start-ups is an interesting thing. I've always
wonder if it's because it's a mental thing. If an industry glorified their
employees physically harming themselves, it'd be horrific.

It took me a while to learn, but working hard doesn't equate to being
stressed, and being stressed is more than likely to result in mediocre
results.

~~~
dang
I don't read the article as glorifying stress, merely acknowledging it.

Edit: on closer inspection, this is an example of the uncanny power of titles
to focus attention, magician-style, on only one thing. Certainly Levchin
didn't pick the title and the interviewer probably didn't either. We shouldn't
be reacting exclusively to a single (invariably provocative) detail a headline
writer picks out for us.

I can almost guarantee that if the headline had singled out his fierce
astronomer grandmother instead, the comments here would be about fierce
astronomer grandmothers. Which come to think of it would be a lot better.

~~~
binalpatel
I agree with you - coming back and rereading the article, I didn't have nearly
the same reaction. Originally I focused exclusively on that single segment,
which my fault.

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leroy_masochist
I think his go-to "how did you handle layoffs" interview question is
interesting and probably a good heuristic, but I would think that a discussion
of individual firings rather than mass layoffs would provide a better data
point for evaluating managers.

Layoffs are bad if they involve a lot of people, no question about it,
especially if there's been a sense of dread around them for the days/weeks
leading into the announcement. But at the end of the day, "we're laying you
off" means one or more of: "our business is not healthy enough to support the
team we think we need" and/or "we made a poor managerial decision and
mistakenly hired a whole bunch of the wrong people" and/or "the nature of our
business is changing and we don't need you to do what you currently do".

Telling people they don't have a job sucks, but it's a lot harder to fire
individuals for underperformance, especially if they've been trying hard and
don't want to go....they like their jobs and they don't want to deal with the
finality of "we don't want you to work here anymore, $name."

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baby
Can I get a tl;dr on who is Max Levchin? I'm surprised to see this article on
the FP of HN with such an empty content. He was also giving a crypto prize at
last year Real World Crypto.

~~~
stephenhuey
You noticed his crypto involvement - as the original CTO of PayPal he was
known for his anti-fraud measures.

------
paganel
I think that no-one is capable of handling stress for long periods of time
without huge side-effects, for example obvious health problems. But in the end
guys like Levchin are capitalists not health-gurus, as long as those start-up
people are willing to sacrifice their health so that their investors can get
their money back multiplied by 50 or 100 then everyone is happy. The start/up
founders knew what they were getting into (or at least I hope so), investors
like Levchin do not care one iota about what said start-up founders will do
with their lifes after all is said and done (i.e. after everyone has cashed
out)

~~~
dang
> _investors like Levchin do not care one iota about_

You can't possibly know all the iotas someone else cares about. Please don't
give into cheap attackiness here, especially not when mentioning a specific
person.

(Edit: I originally wrote "what iotas", but "all the iotas" perhaps makes the
point clearer.)

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13154540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13154540)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
paganel
> But the right thing to do is to go be there with the people you just laid
> off and help them cope, help them pack and tell them that you’re going to do
> your best to hire them back once the company’s on good footing. It’s about
> having compassion even when you feel you may not have the strength for it in
> the moment.

I read this paragraph from the article twice, I think it backs my point,
meaning that people like Levchin put their company's and investors' interests
first and foremost before the interests of people which are their employees (I
generally tend to ignore the "compassion" in speeches like this, I cannot pay
rent or my bills with "compassion" once I'm out of a job).

I'm not saying that what Levchin (or any-other person in his situation) does
is bad, because that's what capitalism is all about, I just wanted to say that
we shouldn't foul ourselves in thinking that the employer-employee
relationship is a "Hare Krishna"-type of thing.

~~~
dang
That's a very different point than the one I reacted to. And it's so
uncharitable a reading of that paragraph that I wonder if one could invert its
meaning any further.

I have no idea if Levchin meant what he said, but I'm pretty sure he said what
he said.

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msane
I can't believe this guy is into credit lending now. A bit sleezy tbh.

~~~
dang
Shallow dismissals are a scourge on HN, and you made it worse with the snark
of "I can't believe" and "this guy". In fact, with a single drive-by swipe you
dismissed not only the article and someone's current project, but the entire
person and an entire business sector to boot. That's a lot of dismissing—it
reminds me of the fairy tale, "Seven in one blow." And it's harmful here, so
please don't post like this.

If you have a case to make, you're welcome to make it substantively. If you
can't do that or don't have time, please don't post at all. That way you at
least won't degrade the thread.

~~~
msane
Having known Max, I stand by my comment.

~~~
dang
This comment isn't substantive—it merely alludes to substance.

~~~
msane
Do you think retail credit lending isn't sleezy, dang?

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khazhou
I always consider it a bad sign for a startup whenever their founder is
interviewed on topics completely irrelevant to the company. This article had
nothing to do with Affirm, and is only generic hiring advice that purports to
be about startups, but in fact applies equally to a large established company
(e.g., perseverance)

~~~
johnloeber
Successful startup founders are not one-dimensional business machines, they're
usually smart people who have some kind of different view on the world (which
enables them to succeed in the first place). As such, you can assume that they
have interesting things to say.

I don't see why you'd deny them the right to speak about topics outside the
narrow band of their startup.

~~~
khazhou
Sorry, I know my comment is negative in nature. And I'm not saying someone
can't or shouldn't talk publicly outside their narrow band. Just pointing out
that when the few public interviews a founder gets are outside their actual
venture, you begin to worry about the venture.

~~~
johnloeber
I'm not sure whether the relationship between startup success and public
speaking engagements is established. Why do you think the
relationship/correlation should be negative?

