MAX LEVCHIN DOESN'T have a problem with the concept of borrowing. An immigrant from Soviet Ukraine, he took out loans to attend college in the US. In his early twenties, he persuaded Peter Thiel to fund the company that became PayPal. Since then, access to cash hasn't been much of a problem for him. After PayPal, Levchin tapped the funds of Silicon Valley's finest investors to build Slide, a suite of photo-sharing widgets that sold to Google, and a fertility-tracking app called Glow. But he kept one foot in fintech, and for the past 10 years has been running a company called Affirm, which takes a new approach to consumer lending. Lots of people, Levchin says, need access to credit. But that doesn't mean they should use credit cards.
I met the 47-year-old founder one day late last year at Affirm's headquarters in downtown San Francisco. He was wearing his trademark rimless glasses and a polo shirt with the company's logo. Levchin will talk about credit cards endlessly, and he'll skillfully bring the conversation back, every time, to how-in a country whose collective credit card bill just took its biggest leap in 20 years, to $930 billion-Affirm is the solution.
The company was a pioneer of the "buy now, pay later" model in ecommerce: When an online shopper reaches checkout, they can choose to cover their purchase with a short-term loan from Affirm or one of its competitors. (The big ones include AfterPay, Klarna, and most recently PayPal.) A team of AI underwriters instantly reviews the shopper's financial profile and proposes terms for the loan, which the shopper agrees to pay back in four or more installments. Unlike credit cards, Levchin argues, this system helps discourage people from financially overextending themselves. Affirm makes its money by charging merchants a fee on every transaction and collecting interest from customers with longer-term loans.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة February 2023 من WIRED.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة February 2023 من WIRED.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Spin Cycle - To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers).
To study tornadoes, it helps to wear a skirt (and rocket launchers). When the Dominator is about to intercept a tornado, Timmer uses a two-prong system to anchor the vehicle. Air compressors lower the car so its thick rubber skirt nearly touches the ground, and spikes wedge 6 inches into the earth to firmly prevent the vehicle from liftoff. Timmer and ONeal have seen roughly 65 tornadoes in the past six months. It was a historic amount, ONeal says. A lot of meteorological setups are busts, but every day we drove out this year, we felt like we would see a tornado.
Fantastic Plastic - a plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history.
Stretchy seaweed. Reverse vending machines. QR-coded take-out boxes. To cure our addiction to disposable crap, we'll all need to get a little loony.
Piece of Mind - This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition.
This diagram maps 1 cubic millimeter of the brain-but its unprecedented clarity deepens the mysteries of cognition. Although this image wouldn't look out of place on a gallery wall alongside other splashy works of abstract art, it represents something very real: a 1-cubic-millimeter chunk of a woman's brain, removed during a procedure to treat her for epilepsy. Researchers at Harvard University stained the sample with heavy metals, embedded it in resin, cut it into slices approximately 34 nanometers thick
I Am Laura Kipnis-Bot, and I Will Make Reading Sexy and Tragic Again
WHEN A FLATTERING EMAIL ARRIVED inviting me to participate in an AI venture called Rebind that I'd later come to think will radically transform the entire way booklovers read books, I felt pretty sure it was a scam.
DAMAGE CONTROL
According to Léna Lazare, the 26-year-old face of the radical climate movement, they're also acts of joy.
AN IMPERFECT STORM
CAN THE U.A.E. REALLY MAKE RAIN ON DEMAND OR IS IT SELLING VAPORWARE?
THE HOLE IN THE MAP OF THE WORLD
ON THE SURFACE, THERE'S NOTHING UNUSUAL ABOUT IT. JUST A SPOT OF OCEAN. BUT BENEATH THE WAVES LURKS SOMETHING INCREDIBLE: A MASSIVE WATERFALL. AND IN ITS MYSTERIOUS DEPTHS, THE FATE OF THE WORLD CHURNS.
COOLER HEADS
The deadliest environmental threat to city dwellers worldwide isn't earthquakes, tornadoes, flooding, or fire. It's heat.
TERMINAL VELOCITY
IT WAS 2 AM at Denver International Airport, and Jared Murphy was only a few hours into a planned 17-hour layover.
THE ETERNAL TRUTH OF MARKDOWN
If the robots take over, we should at least speak their language.
