1/10 Today @Affirm is going public. It’s the next step in the company’s journey and the culmination of years of hard work from @mlevchin and team. I’ve been lucky to get a front row seat on that journey. https://link.medium.com/ilFaj1M50cb 

2/10 In 2005 I was GM of Netscape and exploring working in startups or VC. I was introduced to @mlevchin to be his COO at Slide. He was incredibly impressive. But instead I joined @lightspeedvp to work with multiple startups rather than just one.

3/10 I ended up investing in Rock You, a competitor to Slide, but we stayed in touch until @Google bought Slide in 2010. When @mlevchin eventually left Google, he set up an incubator in 2012 to figure out what was next for him.

4/10 He felt like he’d “been there, done that” with fintech, yet fintech ideas kept capturing his interest. I started meeting with him once every few months, sharing some of what we were seeing as big data and ML began to reshape underwriting best practices.

5/10 Eventually @mlevchin decided to go back all-in on fintech, with @Affirm. And in 2013 @lightspeedvp co-led the 1st institutional round of financing.

6/10 . @mlevchin’s vision was clear to us from the start: to build honest financial products that improve lives. That meant creating transparency in pricing, and not charging late fees, penalty interest rates or asking people to pay a penny more than what they agreed to upfront.

7/10 Money is a commodity. @Affirm’s approach meant forming a proprietary judgement about peoples’ willingness and ability to repay loans, using all data available so as not to disadvantage immigrants, recent grads and others new to credit.

8/10 Credit is the heart of lending. Applying the best practices of Machine Learning and Big Data through technology can meaningfully improve credit decisions. But doing it well is difficult.

9/10 Technology is at the heart of @Affirm, marrying the best of technology and banking to custom-build Affirm’s proprietary models that have held up through both the boom times of the last decade and the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic.

10/10 Today @Affirm is much more than a point of sale lender. It is a beloved financial institution because it is living up to its mission, to build honest financial products that improve lives. @lightspeedvp is grateful to have been along for the ride. https://link.medium.com/ilFaj1M50cb