From the 2019 SFELC Summit, Affirm Founder and CEO Max Levchin on leadership qualities and the early days of PayPal.

What does it take to be a real leader? It's not about your title or past experience. Leadership is about taking care of the people within your organization and leading by example. In this episode of Greymatter, you'll hear from Ben Jun, CEO of HVF Labs and Max Levchin, Founder and CEO of Affirm. Max shares the one metric your organization should be tracking, leadership advice for new managers, and lessons learned from the early days building PayPal.

Max is a serial entrepreneur, computer scientist, philanthropist, and active investor in more than 100 startup companies. He is the Founder and CEO of Affirm, chairman of Glow, and general partner at SciFi VC. All three of these companies were created and launched from his San Francisco based innovation lab, HVF (Hard, Valuable, Fun). Earlier, Max was one of the original Co-Founders of PayPal where he served as the CTO until its acquisition by eBay in 2002.

This discussion took place at the 2019 SFELC Summit. SFELC is a curated community of 2500+ engineering leaders evolving the way leadership is implemented in the tech industry. Greylock Partners is the VC partner for SFELC, and sponsored the annual SFELC Summit which hosted top industry leaders to share management best practices and leadership advice.