25 Years of Building Out the Internet
summary
Co-founds a payments company after multiple failed startups, recruits demo‑scene engineers, throws away early product iterations and lands on a winner; later builds a media company and sells it to Google but feels unsatisfied. Starts a credit firm to make lending fairer, now accounting for 2% of U.S. e‑commerce, public for two years, twelve years running the company and holding almost $3 billion in cash. Builds an offline prototype called debit‑plus card that blends debit and optional lending; product is early but shipping.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Introduction and Finnish rock
- 1:05Demo scene and Finland
- 2:11PayPal’s earliest days
- 3:57PayPal team and failures
- 4:41The PayPal mafia
- 5:01Starting Slide after PayPal
- 6:46Media business regrets
- 7:30Returning to payments
- 8:54Founding Affirm and credit fairness
- 10:41Personal credit score struggles
- 12:07Affirm’s fair credit ethos
- 13:11Going public challenges
- 15:19Public company benefits
- 16:00Public CEO responsibilities
- 17:24Channeling startup energy
- 19:08Next decade’s s-curve
- 20:12Affirm’s buy now pay later
- 21:14Debit Plus card innovation
- 22:37Economic downturns perspective
- 24:23Advice for founders today
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