me pumped up and energized. But
another part of it is psychological—it
gives me a great sense of accomplishment. So even if it’s a bad day at work,
at least I pedaled really hard.
I usually get to the office around
8 a.m. I like being in early, because that’s
when the buzz of activity is the highest.
I travel a lot, so when I’m there, I want
to be available. I have two desks on
different sides of the office, but I rarely
sit at either. Instead, I usually sit at the
very center of the office in the cafeteria
area, on a bench, across from the bath-
room. People know that if I’m not on
the phone they can come talk to me. I’ve
forced myself to do this after sending an
anonymous-feedback survey to employ-
ees last year. Many said, “We
don’t really know where Max
is at all times. We understand
he’s busy, but it would be
great to know where he is.”
A CEO’s job is to continu-
ally find ways of getting other
people to do their best work
in service of a shared goal. To
accomplish that, you must be
available. I’m an introvert,
and talking to other people
all the time is exhausting for
me. I prefer long stretches
of intense work and focus,
but being CEO means being
constantly interrupted and
thrown into some other chal-
lenge. So the decision to make
myself available in the lunch
area came from realizing that
I’m already distracted all the
time. The additional distrac-
tion of people asking me
questions isn’t going to be that
costly to me. And it’s going to
be valuable to them.
Sitting across from the
bathroom was a strategic
choice, because everybody
has to go at some point.
There’s always someone passing by
who can say, “Oh, yeah! I wanted to ask
you this.” This has also helped reduce
emails. Instead of four or five email
exchanges, people can sit next to me
and have a discussion.
I hold an executive meeting three
times a week for 30 or 40 minutes, dur-
ing which all of my executives gather to
air difficulties we’re running into. For
those, I’ll go find a private room. But if a
conversation isn’t secret, I prefer having
it in the open. Recently, I was talking
with our CTO about Affirm’s road map;
we had that conversation in the cafeteria. At Affirm, we’ve been pushing this
notion of transparent finance—we’re
trying to build a bank for the future.
Nonstop transparency is key for a suc-
cessful financial institution that caters to
young people who are disen-
chanted with the secretive,
hard-to-understand world
of banking. So debating
choices about which prod-
ucts get built and which
don’t, that’s all done in the
open. Sometimes it can
get heated. But it is great
for people to see how
decisions are made.
If I really need to focus
on creative work, I’ll go to a
coffee shop. I like the anonymity—all these people
buzzing around, ordering
drinks and going about
their lives. Also, I drink
a lot of coffee. Every day,
I dedicate a couple of two-hour time slots to cutting
myself off from everyone
else—to do whatever needs
to be done. Unless it’s my
wife, I won’t pick up the
phone. I don’t check email,
and I turn off my messenger apps. That has really
helped my productivity.
I’ve experimented
with ways to measure how
productive I am. For example, I track
the length of meetings, and how many
topics I am able to cover in each one.
I also obsessively track my reading
speed, and I can tell you my inbox
levels for the past 20 to 30 days.
My goal is to get my inbox down to
zero, but on any given day, I get about
800 emails. If there are just 100 emails
still unanswered by the end of the day,
that’s a productive day. If it’s more than
200, I won’t go to sleep until I clear
them out. I’ve tried all these different
email-management programs, but for
me, they just make more work. So I just
try to plow through my inbox.
To do that, I push the people I work
with to write very short, one-topic
emails. I’m militant about this. If you
need to send a longer email, you must
preface it with a subject line like “This is
long. I don’t expect a reply.” Emails that
require immediate responses need to be
about one topic only. And if I’m included
in a group email and I don’t think my
input is necessary, I won’t respond.
One small thing I do that’s extremely
useful is set little goals throughout my
day. I might say, “I’m going to clear 50
messages from my inbox in the next
hour.” There’s always other stuff to
do—that list is long—but it still feels
pretty good to get the small, annoying
stuff out of the way.
I’ve learned that the biggest productivity killer for me is content switching,
or moving from topic A to topic B. No
matter how quick or clever you are,
there is an enormous cost to settling
into a task. I try to organize my day into
blocks with natural breaks in between.
So if I have to do a bunch of things for
Affirm and then I have to start thinking
about something for Glow, I’ll try to
arrange my schedule so that the switch
occurs, say, during lunchtime. That way,
I don’t have an abrupt moment when I
have to flush everything out of my head
and go on to another thing.
My biggest mantra is “stay focused.”
If you’re fretting over the competition, or
worried about fundraising or anything
else, it takes away from productivity.
Anytime colleagues say, “This company
is in our space” or “I’m worried about
this competing product,” my response
is always, “Stay focused.” If I’m not
spending time worried about the
competition, why should they?
“I’m an introvert, and talking
to other people all the time
is exhausting for me.”
BY THE NUMBERS
These two companies
have launched under
Max Levchin’s
umbrella, HVF.
A third project is
already in the works.
–
Affirm
A lending service
for online purchases
–
100-plus
Online merchants
that let customers pay
with Affirm
2012
Year founded
60
Number of employees
–
Glow
A fertility app
–
55,000-plus
Women who have used
the app to conceive
2013
Year founded
30
Number of employees
( 10 in San Francisco,
20 in Shanghai)
LEAD 50 - INC. - MAY 2015
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