The $100B Niches Hiding Inside Payments

Erik Torenberg is joined by a16z General Partner Alex Rampell and Affirm Co-Founder and CEO Max Levchin for a conversation on 25 years of fintech, from the early days of digital payments to the origins of Affirm and the next generation of agentic commerce. Max and Alex revisit what surprised them most about how payments evolved, why the card interface has been so difficult to displace, and why even the smallest corners of payments can become enormous markets. They also trace the early idea maze behind Affirm, from "pay with your identity" and the pajama problem to the realization that installment financing could dramatically increase merchant conversion. The conversation also gets into real versus "fake" 0% financing, what people misunderstand about Affirm today, why negative customer acquisition cost can be such a powerful business model advantage, and why Max is more bullish on agentic payments than on agents choosing what people buy.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The card payment interface is the singular best user interface ever created. It is the world's largest market by any stretch of imagination. And there are no niches in payments that are smaller than $100 billion.

• 0:11Alex Rampell?

  Once you go really big, the numbers get small, which is strange. There's a lot of volume, but the large volume revenue opportunities in payments tend to be the smaller dollar amounts.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  There's always an opportunity to use another form of payment delivery device to satisfy a basic need. Convenience just trumps as the total amount you're trying to send goes down. The best user interface ever created is the credit card. This may actually be finally up for renegotiation because AI is already there. It's just that you haven't yet trusted your agent to do as good a job as you would.

• 0:46Erik Torenberg?

  Is there something else that you're surprised has not happened yet?

• 0:48Speaker 00

  I went to some cryptography related conference and presented a new idea in digital payments and was literally booed off stage. Because we're certainly not anonymous and the big innovation of PayPal was what if we don't care about anonymity at all? And in that sense.

• 1:04Erik Torenberg?

  Payments may be one of the oldest categories in tech, but Max Levchin argues there are still no small markets inside it. In this episode, I sit down with A16Z general partner Alex Rampell and a firm co-founder and CEO Max Levchin to look back at how payments evolved over the last 25 years and where the next major shifts may come from. They revisit the early days of PayPal and the origins of a firm, including the pajama problem. The first experiments with paying using identity and the moment the team realized financing wasn't just another checkout option, but a way to materially change conversion. They also discuss why the credit card remains such a durable interface. How 0% financing can have very different economics? And what happens when AI agents begin participating in commerce?

• 1:50Erik Torenberg?

  Max is skeptical that we'll hand over every shopping decision to AI anytime soon. But he thinks the payment itself may finally be ready for reinvention.

• 2:01Erik Torenberg?

  So you guys go way back, having co-founded a firm well before then, you guys are pioneers in fintech. You've been thinking about the space, trying to make sense of the present, think about where the future is going for 20 plus years, 25 years, maybe even more. And I'm curious, given so much time has passed since you first got into the space, what has most surprised you about what has happened, what hasn't happened? What did you expect to happen in the early 2000s of how this space would play out? Alex, why don't you start?

• 2:30Alex Rampell?

  I think the rise of Apple Pay and Google Pay and the extent to which they've really penetrated. Because it's very hard to change consumer behavior in general. And it was a bizarre set of accidents, if you will, where there is this merchant liability shift. Because Mag stripes were so easy to replicate that you probably noticed a while ago, your new cards had a little chip on them and you had to dip the chip. And then the machine would be like, don't remove, don't remove, remove, remove, right? That's because the chip was being rewritten. It was much more secure than a Mag Stripe. And basically Visa and Mastercard and then the Euro Pay, that's what the E is for. What is E C M for in EMV? Euro Pay?

• 3:07Speaker 00

  Eurocard?

• 3:07Alex Rampell?

  Eurocard? I don't know, the Europeans somehow got their savings, they always do. They insert their cookies.

• 3:12Erik Torenberg?

  Definitely not electronic.

• 3:13Alex Rampell?

  Yeah, it's Euro something, Mastercard Visa. So it was called the EMV switch. So all of these machines, if you did not want to be liable, like I could go to Best Buy, buy a TV and then get home, use my TV and say, nope, never bought the TV. And if I was using my Mag Stripe and Best Buy didn't have the machine switch over, then Best Buy would be like, oh shoot, we lost all the money on that TV. And Alex gets the free TV. I'm exaggerating slightly for effect. So everybody had to get a new machine and then it turned out that those new machines had a little contactless thing where you didn't have to dip the chip or swipe the card. You could just tap. Nobody was using taps when those machines came out and now it's ubiquitous. So that's something where, I mean, generally speaking, it's hard to change consumer behavior.

• 3:56Alex Rampell?

  But I feel like between COVID and the fact that all these merchants independently had to switch over their machines and the fact that, I mean, I wouldn't have guessed in, I mean, you obviously did because the Confinity was Palm Pilot sending money, so you were ahead of the whole PDA wave. But I wouldn't have guessed that those three things would have come behavior. It's like change of consumer behavior, ubiquitous new merchant payment terminal, plus ubiquitous mobile telephony. And that's certainly one thing that has changed the world a lot.

• 4:23Erik Torenberg?

  How about you, Max? You were dreaming about what the future of money would look like a long time ago. But it would have surprised you about what has happened or what hasn't happened?

• 4:31Speaker 00

  It's very hard to step back from the soup if you're cooking in it for the last plus or minus 30 odd years. I think the, to sort of further illustrate Alex's point, one of the things that's really amazing and subtle about Apple Pay slash Google Pay and its interaction with the Visa Mastercard networks is Visa and Mastercard have a hard two and a half second limit on interaction between the network, the issuing bank and the merchant and the acquiring bank. And so the whole thing has to happen in two and a half seconds where the transaction gets retried or maybe just canceled out. And really leaves very little room for any kind of clever innovation. And online you can play games.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  If you're doing e-commerce, you're like, well, yes, we're going to submit your card to Visa. But first we're going to run some anti-fraud checks and we're going to do some other things to reduce liability. But offline, like once your card is presented, two and a half seconds, that's all you got. And Google and Apple Pay have singularly time shifted the whole thing by creating secure enclaves inside their chips and saying, I already know your card. I can do all kinds of things before I actually have to talk to Visa Mastercard. And maybe the shocking thing is that Visa and Mastercard have not yet introduced some new standards saying, actually it doesn't have to be two and a half seconds at all. It could be 15 seconds while we go and get a bunch of issuers to bid on a better credit quality terms for you or any other type of innovation. But the sort of hard written rules of D H O C era are more or less intact.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  And that's not 30 years, that's like more, you know, 60 years. And so I think that's probably a critical or more criticizing take on what happened. But the shocking thing about payments is that it is the world's largest market by any stretch of imagination. And anything and everything you could have possibly thought of being sort of deconstructed and being the nichiest little thing to poke around and innovate in always turns out to be $100 billion. There are no niches in payments that are smaller than $100 billion. And so that's probably the most surprising thing I've seen.

• 6:33Alex Rampell?

  Yeah. Although it's interesting, like once you go really big, the numbers get small, which is strange. If I send a $1 trillion wire, right? The United States just announced we are $40 trillion in debt, right? Let's just say that Elon's Mars colony is worth $40 trillion and Ro Khanna decides to tax him $40 trillion and he needs to send a wire. That wire is not going to be very profitable. There's a lot of volume, but the large volume revenue opportunities in payments tend to be the smaller dollar amounts, which is surprising, right? Because it turns out, I mean, like all of the QSR, the quick serve restaurant, the payment opportunity there, that's massive. That's why Starbucks invented Starbucks Pay because they wanted to stop having to pay.

• 7:16Alex Rampell?

  It's like these prepaid, they only have to pay one time. You put $50 on your Starbucks account, well, they only have to pay Visa, Mastercard and everybody else one time as opposed to every successive time. So what's surprising about payment area under the curve, if you will, is that like the bigger the dollar is, like the smaller the rake, which I guess makes sense because you're not going to get 2% of that $40 trillion payment. But everybody goes after B to B payments. Everybody has a clever idea for B to B payments. And like, that's the only one that is probably the exception in the world.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  I was trying to find, so it's lost in time, the original email between the two of us, which I think we have slightly different origin stories of how we actually met. But I was trying to find the original email between the two of us where we start mentioning what becomes a firm eventually. And it's dated April 2011. And in it, I think I ask you, tell me more about this bill me later thing. Because I was working on something else while you were watching PayPal buying bill me later. And you sent me this really long elaborate sort of here's exactly what it is and all these ideas around it. And we then veer off into this ping pong of emails around bill me later for business. And conclude that it's actually a dumb business where there isn't an opportunity.

• 8:27Alex Rampell?

  It's funny you mention that. I bought the domain payme sooner as a result. So it's like, ah, bill me later was a good idea. Pay me sooner would be an even better idea. Actually, the idea there, it still is, it's not terrible because it's not payments, it's lending. So think of it this way. Imagine that like big companies beat up small companies all the time to get better payment terms. Better payment terms for them, right? It's if I'm GE and you're Eric Torrenberg and you're a little guy, I'm big GE. I'm like, I'm going to pay you net 90. So you invoice me and I pay you 90 days later. Now you have to pay your employees. So you go to a bank, you go to somebody else, you're like, hey, I'm Eric. I run this business. Most of my money comes from GE. They're an awesome company. They're going to pay me in 90 days. Bank doesn't care, right? They're just like, yeah, we're going to charge you 15%.

• 9:12Alex Rampell?

  Meanwhile, GE can issue bonds at whatever sofer plus 10 basis points or something. Like GE is paying 5% for credit. You're paying 15% for credit, but it kind of doesn't make sense because your credit is GE's credit, if that makes sense. Now there's something called factoring where you can sell the invoice. You can actually sell the receivable. That's somewhat usurious. That's very, very, actually it's not usurious because it doesn't like credit laws don't apply because you're selling a receivable. But I always thought that pay me sooner was an interesting idea because the whole economy runs in the fact that like my business is waiting on payments from you. Like the reason why I have to borrow money is because I don't pay you sooner. And yeah, we didn't pursue that.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  There's some healthy businesses these days in both accounts payable financing and accounts receivable financing. So it's not a bad idea, but the revenue opportunity, despite being an unregulated lending space, is seemingly lower than the one in consumer because the convenience factor is something that every participant understands. And there are plenty of players that'll offer you a slightly cheaper chart, which is also the root origin of why a $40 trillion wire to Ro Khanna is going to be not very profitable.

• 10:22Alex Rampell?

  Yes, whoever processes it, yes.

• 10:24Erik Torenberg?

  What's another idea that you're surprised does not exist yet? That you were thinking at some point, hey, the world obviously should work this way. There's an obvious opportunity here and for whatever, you know, conflation of reasons just hasn't happened yet. Or to use, you know, Mark's quote, there are no bad ideas, only early ideas. Is there something else that you're surprised has not happened yet?

• 10:47Speaker 00

  You know, we're forever in search of the great way to pay biometrically. And it manifests itself more in movies where people's thumbs and eyeballs get removed for authentication purposes.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  And yet, like, we're still paying with chips. By the way, the card payment interface is the singular best user interface ever created. And it's not something that people haven't tried to do better. I remember even before PayPal, there was this wand that I think Mastercard and one of the gas refueling station networks produced this thing where you could just like wave this wand next to a gas station and payment is secured and you can fuel your car. And when I saw it, I'm like, oh, my God, this is obviously going to take over credit cards, and it didn't. And it's actually, therein lies a really interesting lesson in payments innovation in general.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  There's some unobvious a priori, but clear a posteriori version of critical mass. And if you don't reach it, you're going to fail. Like, there's not really a okay outcomes in payments. You either get there and everyone needs to have your widget or your network or your whatever, or it's just going to go into the annals of time. And this is a fine example of a thing that actually made a lot of sense. Like, of course, you want to have a little wand on your car keys to just sort of wave and get refueled, but it's just a little bit faster, not a lot faster than the credit card you have in your pocket, and that just works. And so I keep on waiting for some completely different way of authenticating the payer to the device. And like, other than the mobile phone, we haven't done better.

• 12:23Alex Rampell?

  Amazon actually just discontinued the whole thumb payment at Whole Foods.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  Actually, it's not a thumb payment.

• 12:28Alex Rampell?

  Yeah, the palm, the palm.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  I loved it. I would literally go to Whole Foods next to whatever hotel I'd be staying in.

• 12:36Alex Rampell?

  I was sad that they got rid of it. I know, I used to use it too.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  It's actually, it's not even faster, it's just fun.

• 12:41Alex Rampell?

  I know, it's probably slower, actually.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  It is slower. It's like, tell me my fortune and these grapes.

• 12:46Alex Rampell?

  Fortune is you owe me money.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:47Alex Rampell?

  That is, that is the only fortune that you ever get. Well, that was, I mean, I think I called it thumb by, by, by accident, just given the almost, almost name of a firm.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 13:00Erik Torenberg?

  When, when sort of the crypto industry was becoming popular, or when, you know, some of the major projects were starting in the space, did that, were there parts of that that seemed exciting to you or a realization of a, you know, long-held sort of dream? Or did it feel, hey, orthogonal or just not really?

• 13:18Speaker 00

  So I'm frequently late to trends. Like, I'm not the world's earliest adopter of majority of things I encounter.

• 13:25Erik Torenberg?

  I feel like PayPal was pretty early, right?

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Well, sort of. To give you full context for PayPal, I really wanted to build something very specific and quite different from PayPal that operated on very low-power chips. And to do that, I needed to work out how to make cryptographic primitives work on a very, very low-power chip. And we did. And then we promptly realized that I really couldn't do very much other than encrypt some very, very small amounts of data and small amounts of data that need to be encrypted and decrypted quickly that kind of leads you to payments, which is how PayPal came about. But right before all of that began, I went to the wind-down slash bankruptcy party for

• 14:10Speaker 00

  DigiCash, which was the original granddaddy of all digital payments. And it was sort of a somber affair. It was on Stanford University grounds and it was like, you know, pouring out of the 40s and a bunch of very sad-looking cyber punks telling each other how the age of digital payments is not upon us. And so in that sense, we were very late when we were sort of listening to these people talk, whose idea was crushed. It was blind signatures and David Chom was somewhere, he was actually not present, but he was roaming the streets of Palo Alto despondent because his brilliant idea, and a truly brilliant one, was, you know, basically being proven to be not having a product-market fit. And then we promptly, soon thereafter, started PayPal.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  And I went to some cryptography-related conference and presented, you know, a new idea in digital payments and was literally booed offstage because it was not nearly as secure and it was certainly not anonymous. And the big innovation of PayPal was, what if we don't care about anonymity at all? In fact, people don't, they just need to pay for their coffees or their, you know, online purchases. And in that sense, I feel like we were, again, very late to that game. The game had played out, like, all the enthusiasts had left the building. And so cryptocurrency, not to be confused with cryptography, when, so I read the original Bitcoin paper and thought, wow, that's a really clever way of solving the business

• 15:37Speaker 00

  in general problem, that sort of, as all the sort of math slash cryptography nerds was impressed with the approach. But I did not think for a second it would become a currency or a payment method, et cetera. And I'm not convinced it's a payment method now, and it's been quite some time, but as currency and commodity and a store of value goes, it's certainly proven to be extraordinarily successful. And so I think the, as I watched cryptocurrencies expand and become a thing and more and more of a thing, the use cases are coming out now where, you know, stable coins are upon us, and that's certainly a collection of very clear uses.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  But none have, in my opinion, come close to breaching the, I'm going to use this to buy a cup of coffee, which is kind of, that's the canonical and most important, I would argue, use case for all forms of payments. So as currencies go, as store value goes, fascinating.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  What is the last time you spent a Bitcoin or a Satoshi on anything actually important? You know, putting aside people who may get a point of spending it just to sort of prove the point wrong.

• 16:48Erik Torenberg?

  And it's the most important, that buying coffee is the most important metric because of just the, the volume of it, because the frequency of the practicalness of it.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  There's always an opportunity to use another form of payment delivery device to satisfy a basic need. So if you're sort of contemplating a $40 trillion transfer, you'll spend a lot of time figuring out the secure way, the fast way, the cheap way, et cetera. If you're passing through your nearby bagel shop and you need a cup of coffee, if your cryptocurrency wallet password is too long, you're going to look for change in your pocket. And if you don't have it, you'll pull out a debit card or a credit card. And so user interface, as the payment amount diminishes, it takes over, cost takes over everything. Basically, convenience just trumps everything else as the total amount you're trying to send goes down.

• 17:39Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 17:41Erik Torenberg?

  I want you to take us both back to memory lane, to the beginning of a firm and how you guys navigated the IDMA's of what would eventually become a firm.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  You go.

• 17:54Alex Rampell?

  Well, hopefully our stories match.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:57Erik Torenberg?

  Good questions for like.

• 17:58Alex Rampell?

  No, separate room. This, this is like The Prisoner's Dilemma, right? It's just like, ask me, if our stories match, we have to, we get to leave. If they don't match, then we have to stay here all day. So my recollection was I ran this company, TrialPay, which did alternative payments for digital goods. So you don't want to pay for throwing a sheep or doing something on some silly social game, something that was not hard, valuable, or fun.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  Who would do such?

• 18:23Alex Rampell?

  Who would, who would do such a thing? But, you know, you're buying coins in Farmville, or you're doing something, you're buying poker chips, virtual poker chips, of course. You don't want to pay, get it for free if you sign up for GEICO. There's a lot of economic value to GEICO, you don't really care if you use Progressive or GEICO. Ooh, I can get Farmville coins if I switch to GEICO, or get a credit card, or sign up for Netflix. So that's what we did. And I was somewhat persuasive and annoying, probably more annoying than persuasive. So signed up every other social gaming company, except for this one called Slide. And Max ran, proudly or unproudly ran Slide. And I went to the Allen and Company conference, which I almost didn't go to because my wife was very, very pregnant. So this was in March of 2009, it's like the first week of March.

• 19:06Alex Rampell?

  My son was born March 28th, 2009, but her due date was March 16th. So I'm like, I'm not going to go to this conference. And then the Allen guys were like, this is a very good conference, you should really go. I was like, my wife's very pregnant, it's like, you should go to the conference. She goes into labor, we'll fly you back. It's like, all right, that sounds good, I'm going. So I went to the conference, I think we met there briefly. Successfully did not persuade you, but then I think I followed up with a note in Russian.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 19:33Alex Rampell?

  And this wouldn't have worked today because now, obviously, I would have used Gemini or, you know, ChatGPT to write this probably somewhat riddled with grammatical flaws Russian note. Actually, that, that probably would have given it away of not being ChatGPT. It wouldn't have passed, it would have passed Pangram. But I took Russian in, in high school and college, worked there, lived there for a while. And I think you were like, why do you speak Russian? I think that was the response. But then we just became friendly. I think I, you sold to Google, so I could not ever convince Slide to become a client of TrialPay, sadly. But I seem to recall you had like a tweet, like, I'm looking for something to do, any idea, and that was like my reason to reach out. And I think we, we had coffee at the forbidden building at Google.

• 20:17Alex Rampell?

  Remember how like there was one Google building that no guests were allowed at, but you just didn't care? Statute of limitations.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  You're revealing all my secrets.

• 20:25Alex Rampell?

  Yes, exactly, because I know how much you love Vic. So, so, so we had coffee there. And then that's where this, yeah, we were talking about Bill later, but it was like, you know, my recollection was, it's really hard to pay for something on a mobile phone. Mobile phones are becoming more ubiquitous. We should have a way of solving the pajama problem of you're upstairs in your pajamas, you want to buy something, your credit card is downstairs, how do you pay? Meanwhile, not just are mobile phones ubiquitous, but social networks are ubiquitous. And maybe there's a new underwriting mechanism of kind of going back to the old general store from like the 1800s. And it's like, you show up to the general store, you don't have cash, like, both literally and figuratively, you don't have it on you, but you don't even have it, you know, back home, but you run the general store and you're like, okay, Max, I got you, don't worry about it.

• 21:09Alex Rampell?

  But today, you're just like a cookie and an IP address, so I don't really know who you are, or if you go to Walmart offline, it's like, you know, you get greeted by the very nice greeter, I don't think they have them anymore, but like, you get greeted by the nice greeter, they have no idea who you are, you can't do the general store thing. But if you have 500 friends on Facebook, this was wrong, by the way, but if you have 500 friends on Facebook and they all have, and you have a thousand pictures that you've uploaded, you're probably a low credit risk. And if you're not looking for credit, this is the key thing. It's like, a lot of credit offers are sent out proactively. So you have an 800 FICO, I know that you have $14,000 that's revolving for some reason on your Capital One card, I'm going to send you a customized mailer saying, why don't you go refinance with me, Bank of America?

• 21:51Alex Rampell?

  But if you go on Google and you say like, I'm out of money, need money, need money, credit, credit, credit, like, you're probably a bad credit risk. So kind of going back to the general store concept, people that aren't looking for credit, that might not have their wallet with them, kind of make it like the 1800s and pay with your identity. That, that was kind of how I remembered it.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that, that matches. The.

• 22:15Speaker 00

  To add a little bit more color to it. So the year Google was definitely a challenge in a sense that I was still coming to terms that I ran for like over five years, a company in social media that I had no business running. Like I, I worked very hard, we had a financially very positive outcome for a lot of people. But ultimately it never sort of scratched the sort of entrepreneurial itch that I thought I was, I was scratching. And so one of the things that happened during that year, I spent a lot of time soul searching, like, what am I supposed to do next with my life? I was gonna start a company, but you know, maybe, maybe I should be more thoughtful about what company I'm gonna start next. And my wife, who's pretty much always right, said, you know,

• 22:58Speaker 00

  the hardest you've ever worked and the happiest you were was during the anti-fraud days at PayPal. When we nearly died, or we nearly died, she was there as well. Those were the days when you looked exhausted, but you actually were obviously very happy. And you know, I, you know, she was telling me, I know you swore off doing financial services. I know you were never gonna touch payments again, but just this once, give, give it a chance. And that actually had some influence as to my responsiveness too, because you work in a payments company. Part of my reluctance to deal with trial pay was like, I can't handle another near payments company. Like I, I went into social media for a reason. I don't want anything to do with this stuff.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  And so as I was slowly getting reeled back into working on payments, we started talking about this, the sort of a social B M L was one of the sort of shorthands we used discussing what it would be. The general sort analogy was interesting because at the same time, I don't actually remember which one of us knew this, because you also speak Japanese and this could have been the thing you told me, but I remember reading about social credit in different economies. There's a notion of just pay me later or pay me next time in Israeli grocery stores, which is still common today. Like if you're checking out in Israel, apparently in a small enough town, you can just show your bag to the cashier and they'll remember, and then they'll get you next time if you forgot your money.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  This is even more formalized in Japan, where until very recently, you would give your business card to the storekeeper, even if they didn't know you, if you had a business card, they would write what you bought on the back of it, and that was your total. And the notion of like, just put it on my tab is a thing that's obviously fairly American concept and so on. And so we were converging on this. I was talking to a startup at the time as kind of just learning about the industry that was trying to build a social credit score, kind of modeling it on the Chinese social score, which is used for a lot more than, than credit, obviously. And so we were swirling around this idea of payments and solving the, I don't have my credentials with me, but I still need to get through this.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  Like another sort of metaphorical version of this was I'm watching TV, there's this really cool ad, back in the day when people had advertisements in between things in TV. And I really won the thing that was promised to me at the price that was promised to me, but I could do it on my phone, but I'm definitely not gonna get off my bed. And so like, what if, there's some area under the curve that you can capture by bringing these transactions closer in time and improving conversion, obviously. And so that, that's the kind of the, the swirly origin story. A lot of it, I think the two of us had a slightly different version of what would be fun. So I think you, as a payments guy, you were mostly thinking like, let's go do some payment stuff.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  As a person recovering from doing lots of machine learning in the service of social media, which was, you know, good and well, but wasn't really what I was meant to do. And lusting for the days of doing machine learning to fight fraud. My M O was, I just wanna build a really cool credit score. And then someone else will take care of payments, like lending payments, I don't really know anything about it. And I've done payments, don't need to do lending, but building a really cool score, that would be amazing. Cause I remember just the reams of data we had access to at PayPal. We could maybe get some data, maybe we could buy some data, we can mine Facebook for data. I'm both trying to get in touch with Mark Zuckerberg to see if he might give me some of his data. And so a lot of that was sort of in my head while you were like, I just wanna close some transactions.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  I think that that maybe if there's any difference between the motivations, you were much more motivated by, let's go find a merchant.

• 26:40Alex Rampell?

  Well, but the similar motivation was like, you know, trial pay, I think we were in the throes of selling to PayPal, but then they, they left me at the altar, not your PayPal, but the many, many generations later PayPal. And I was like, I never wanna start a company again. This is so painful. And then you, you had been in that, in the throes of that as well. So it was also like, let's get this thing going. And we'll hire other, well, but then you introduced me to Nathan and Jeff. And we kind of formally incorporated, but I also like, the other thing that I distinctly remember, and you'll, you remember this in a very negative light because it's PHP, but we had a meeting. This is, I, I kind of think of the origin as being the Alan and Cooperated Conference in 2012.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:24Alex Rampell?

  Where.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  I don't, I don't find it a negative thing.

• 27:26Alex Rampell?

  No, no, I know, but it was funny. So, so we have this meeting, like, so we're going through the, the list with Son. Remember your, your old chief of staff, right? So we're going through the list and it's like, oh, we both know Jim McCann, who's this very friendly guy who used to be on all the commercials for 1-800-FLOWERS. Or 1-800-FLOWERS, you can order flowers, order it right now for me, or whatever the commercial was. So we ping him to get a breakfast meeting. It was like 200 person conference, anybody can be with anybody. But it's like, hey, why don't we have breakfast? And I, I pulled like an all nighter, making this demo in PHP. I basically like cloned, it's just funny. Like AI could do this in five seconds now, but I, I cloned 1-800-FLOWERS site and then made a whole like pay with your identity. So you do a checkout, like add the dozen roses to, you know, make up for the bad stuff that I did.

• 28:11Alex Rampell?

  Sending it to my wife, click pay. Oh, she don't have my, my, my payment card with me. Ooh, I can pay with Facebook. What does that do? It does Facebook connect and make sure that I have over 500 friends. And actually Facebook had, I mean, to your point, they had a lot of interesting data. They had their own internal flags around, did they think this account was fraudulent or not? And fraudulent for back then was more of like, it was just created not as a real account. It wasn't a real person because an account is not a person, right? Hopefully they're the same thing, but not necessarily, because one person can have multiple accounts. But if there's one to one, so, so that was, that was our fun demo. And then I remember Jim McCann was like, this is great. Let's do it.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  So I, two other colorful points from that. So it was a good breakfast and then in the middle of it, he goes, oh yeah, we used to do exactly this thing back in the day when the service members would call us and say, send me my wife some flowers. And no, I don't have my credit card with me. And like, oh, that, that's fine. Like, you know, thank you for your service. We'll, we'll just get you on the next one. And he intuitively grocked this idea that like, you can absolutely post pay a thing if you have enough trust. And we were basically there raising our hand saying, we'll take the responsibility for you. They don't pay you, it's okay. We're gonna eat it. And so he was like instantly smitten. He had been a

• 29:31Speaker 00

  great proponent of the product and like a supportive, you know, person slash presence in my professional life ever since that breakfast. And he had absolutely no reason to trust us other than like, he has some degree of sense who we were. And it was like, you guys are great. You seem like you're really, you know, what you're doing.

• 29:48Alex Rampell?

  He was so excited.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  We have no idea.

• 29:49Alex Rampell?

  Well, then we got handed to this, what was his name? He actually now runs a successful startup. The, the guy that was his.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  Amit.

• 29:56Alex Rampell?

  Yes, Amit Shah.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:58Alex Rampell?

  Yeah. So Amit took over, we implemented, he was very, very excited. But, and I remember I, I came up in Microsoft, I think I did this in Microsoft Word or Excel, like here's our pricing sheet. We needed a pricing sheet. And I was like, why don't we charge 7%? Like so the, in, in consumer finance for these things, there's a concept of an M D R and an A P R. So merchant discount rate, because you're discounting what you pay the merchant, because you're advancing in the cash right now. You're not collecting it until later. So call it a 7% merchant discount rate. But I think there was like some table, I just literally made this up. And then, and then there was an A P R, but the A P R here, there was no A P R. It was just M D R. But then nobody, like I showed this to somebody, I think it was Rob Pfeiffer, actually, before we hired.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  He had like a real finance employee.

• 30:44Alex Rampell?

  Yeah. So, but, but I showed him this, he was like, ooh, free flowers, right? Because he's like, you just didn't have to pay us back. So the, the returns were not fantastic on that.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  So cynical.

• 30:54Alex Rampell?

  But yeah, I think he literally said free flowers. It's like, this is, this is a great demo, free flowers.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  He's just generally a very smart, but very cynical guy. So we, we were not gonna be perturbed by some cynicism.

• 31:04Alex Rampell?

  I love Rob. His sister used to work for me. So I remember interviewing him in the context of a firm, although I think at the time he was still Expide.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it briefly bumped around as Expide.

• 31:15Alex Rampell?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Speaker 00

  And then we finally renamed it.

• 31:16Alex Rampell?

  What was it? It was, it was incorporated as Expide Software Inc.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think that's right.

• 31:21Erik Torenberg?

  And so how did the idea evolve as you, you know, went from there? When did it start to really get, get product market fit? Or how did the space play out in a way that?

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Every startup has the 40 years in a desert. Like it's just a, a given. Like if it's worth talking about exposed, I mean, some startups, people just like quit too early or you know, something happens to, to destroy it, but I've never run into a company where people start a company and they just like hit product market fit. And 24 hours later, they're just selling and you know, everything's going swimmingly. So you, you always have this period where like, kind of still makes sense to show up to work, but you don't really know if it's gonna end in like a great nothing. And we were definitely meandering through the great nothing period for a while. After 1-800-FLOWERS, we had a sort of a nonstop interactions with said Amit, who was never happy with the conversion rates, with the user interfaces.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  And he was mostly right. Like he, he was kind of a grumpy, demanding guy, but he knew what he was talking about from the product and financial perspective. And he was definitely not gonna pay 7%. And so we were sort of limping through that, we're generating a little bit of volume, but among other things, the notion of, hey, you can pay us later, showed up after you selected the flowers. And so he would say, look, you guys are cannibalizing my credit card volume. If I charged, if I were charging nothing for it, of course I'd send you more transactions, but you're charging me more than credit cards. So it's, it's a dumb idea. Like I don't wanna pay anything for it at all. You know, you guys ought to be ashamed of yourself, basically.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  And we were sort of trying to convince other merchants, but we had one merchant that was essentially saying, yeah, I mean, these guys are nice guys, but it's kind of worthless. And so it was, it was going nowhere fast. And then we had another friend, somebody named Nils, who ran a company called Beautylish, which is kind of still around, but they were selling online cosmetics and beauty products. And the only difference that Beautylish.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  Did as they implemented expedite, I think by then it may have already, I think it was named affirm by then, was that they told their shoppers up funnel, basically as they were selecting their shampoos and perfumes, that you could pay in three installments or 30 days later, or whatever it is we were trying to serve do then. And that had an instant 30% increase in conversion. And that was the, oh, we know what this is. This isn't an alternative, this isn't actually solving the pajama problem. It is solving my budget is this, but if I could pay over multiple periods

• 34:08Speaker 00

  of time, it would expand a lot. And so the second we sort of understood the very beginnings of that notion, we turned it right around into a sales campaign and very quickly found a bunch of small-ish brands, primarily direct to consumers who could not care whether we charged them 1%, 5% or 12%, because they were trying to grow their top line and telling their shoppers that, hey, you could pay for this over time instead of having to cough up the cash right now. It was transformative. And so I would literally get these love letters from merchant CEOs saying, and I'm still friends with a lot of them, like early adopters. Most of these people have now either sold their businesses or the business has failed, or they've gone on to do something else. But I still run into people who were, like, there's this woman named Tracy from Tradzzy, Tradzzy.com was a

• 34:51Alex Rampell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  I just saw

• 34:52Alex Rampell?

  I remember her. Yes.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  She's wonderful. And she was an early advocate for us because her business literally

• 34:59Alex Rampell?

  I forgot about her.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  She would email me screenshots of her dashboards and say, this is the affirm effect. Here's a 35% pop you guys caused for me. Like, please do more.

• 35:08Alex Rampell?

  Well, there was a solution to the pajama problem. And then it was also all the mattress companies.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 35:13Alex Rampell?

  That was

• 35:14Speaker 00

  That was another

• 35:15Alex Rampell?

  That was the big one. I just remember it's like, you know, wait, there's a company called Purple and there's a company called Casper. I was just like, they just kept coming out of the woodwork and that was transformative. And I remember, actually, we were talking about this in the context of like, how can you charge a high MDR and get away with it? That sounds bad. Not get away with it, but like actually show sufficient value to the merchant. The highest MDRs are actually for-profit education institutions. So some of them are like 50, like, I mean, I don't like these guys in particular, but like University of Phoenix. So there's the private equity from Apollo, but there's also like this holding company of all these for-profit institutions called Apollo Group or Apollo something. And University of Phoenix, I think is the biggest

• 35:55Alex Rampell?

  one. And they just assume that most people aren't going to pay and the gross margins are so high is it's an online course. They're like, okay, you could take 50%, right? But you're stuck with the receivables on the backend, which goes back to the fraud fighting that Max was talking about before, because the gross margins of the mattress, like these mattresses, I don't know if you ever bought one, it's pretty cool. Because they didn't actually ship you a mattress that looks like this. It rolls out. So you get this like cylinder, it's pretty small.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  Some of them are box.

• 36:25Alex Rampell?

  Some of them are boxes, but some of them, it's like you just open it and then it just like, it's like one of those old like toys that you'd put in like your bath and then it would expand or something. That was like the mattress. So they had very, very high gross margins. So therefore, a lot more flexible on the MDR. And more importantly, nobody wants, like you're in your pajamas on your uncomfortable mattress, you don't want to spend $1,200 on a mattress, but if it's like 30, like it, once you subdivided, it just has a massive increase of conversion rate.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a couple of other sort of technical things that are probably worth tapping into in that story. But that was the next big leap. So the mattresses was the precursor to the great expansion into DDC brands, which I'm sure we'll touch on. But before we get there, affirm briefly flirted with being a payment provider to the online educational facilities, which we ran out of kicking and screaming because the reason they're willing to pay these enormous MDRs is because the quality of education is largely terrible.

• 37:28Alex Rampell?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  So the reason people don't pay most of the time isn't because they're like, oh, I thought about it. Now that I have a master's degree in basket weaving, I just don't want to pay for it. It turns out my degree is worth nothing. Like, why did I sign up for this ridiculous thing? And so we were, if you go back to sort of, you know, things like, what is it called? General Assembly? Is that there?

• 37:47Alex Rampell?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  There's a whole sort of class of these, like, we will teach you how to code. Another pre EI thing, like, learn how to code? Just ask ChatGPT to code for you. But back in the day, when it was still important to learn how to code, but you didn't really want to go to college for it, you just want to take a six-week course, there were plenty of the sort of University of Phoenix clones.

• 38:04Alex Rampell?

  Academy.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's all the, all these guys. And we saw that trend and thought, oh, my God, like, these people are willing to subsidize education, which is cool and on mission for us. And yeah, the loss rates to consumer dissatisfaction were so high, we lasted like a half a year in that space. But back to mattresses. So the thing is really powerful about direct to consumer, or you can think of them as vertically integrated businesses. So there's some factory in Brooklyn, presumably, or who knows where.

• 38:34Alex Rampell?

  China.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  China. I thought the mattress guys manufactured locally because

• 38:40Alex Rampell?

  I don't know. But they were all in Utah. Remember that?

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:44Alex Rampell?

  I feel like it was like, there was like a Utah mattress town or something, but I think they just all originated there.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Casper is in New York, or was it?

• 38:50Alex Rampell?

  No, but Purple, I think, was in. And then there were like other purples that were

• 38:54Speaker 00

  The thing, one of the weirder things

• 38:55Alex Rampell?

  The diaspora.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  The manufacturing was actually all consolidated. So they ultimately sort of paid very little for these mattresses that were kind of all the same. I mean, don't reveal any industry secrets, but memory foam is memory foam. Anyway, and so they, their primary value, or their value equation was really interesting. So first of all, they bought this memory foam in a box and sort of compressed and shipped it to you with a cool effect. The margin there were gargantuan because you are in fact just sort of taking petroleum and turning it into foam. But the other thing is the replacement cycle. And this actually goes to a, I think a Harvard Business Review article that came out right before Casper was founded. And all these guys, all these really entrepreneurial people, read the same article, which essentially said this,

• 39:39Speaker 00

  people replace mattresses once every seven years. If you were the company that sells that mattress, it is the most important thing in the world. And if you miss it, the next opportunity is seven years from now. But the margins on mattresses, even before the sort of the foam and the everything else, are like 80% or some, some eye-popping number. And so suddenly four or five companies were born from that article, basically saying like, oh, my God. So if we just forgot how to market a mattress, that you will either shorten your replacement cycle. So you buy the next mattress six years instead of seven years from the last one, or you just decide this mattress is the best mattress, or the coolest one, or the one that pops out of a box. That is like, oh, you know, there's so much money in it. And one, it'd result in

• 40:21Speaker 00

  a saturation of mattress industry, obviously. But more to the point, it created this enormous premium on, I will just compel you to buy a mattress by any means necessary. So telling you, I will give you a three-year loan, no interest at all, powered by a firm, of course, is like a small price to pay and a cool marketing campaign. And so that was, there were multiple events like this in a firm's history where we saw an opportunity for the merchant to significantly contribute to the MDR, which allowed us to eliminate the APR. In other words, consumer got a true 0% loan. The backdrop to this is actually really, really important to understand. And one of my sort of, you know, things that I rage against have

• 41:06Speaker 00

  and will continue to until it's made illegal or eliminated by other means, is the fake 0% loan. So if you ever have gone to a, you know, fill in your favorite department store, there is a sign somewhere, these days somewhat less prominent, that says, get a branded credit card from fill in the blank, 0% APR. There's an asterisk next to the zero, which says something along the lines of, assuming you make a purchase for the next 12 months or 24 months, if you're a penny short or a day late paying your principal, the interest accrues retroactively to the beginning of time. Basically, the day you got that card, you swiped it for $1,000, you wake up and you owe $3,000 two years later. So this is called a deferred interest credit card.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  And a huge opportunity we tapped into directly from that rage was this idea of, well, our 0% is going to be a real zero. When you go to buy the inflatable mattress or the mattress from a box, you're going to get a 0% loan. And even if you're a month late or a year late, we're not going to change the price because we are so sick and tired of these ridiculous people who are lying to you about zero with an asterisk. There will never be an asterisk on a firm zero. That is the origin story of why we don't charge late fees, we don't do deferred interest, all the sort of gimmicks and gotchas that the industry loves to throw at people. We've run away from all of that primarily as a point of like, you know what? When you decide to do this for three years with us, you will never get screwed. You will never be surprised to the negative. And so that was another sort of big bounce up point.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  And then every mattress company was like, oh, wow, like, these guys are doing it. Hope we should do the same thing.

• 42:39Erik Torenberg?

  Because if I fast forward you a bit, a lot of people hear affirm today, and you know, one quick thing they think is, you know, buy now, pay later. What does this not fully encapsulate? Or what is this miss about the company today in its entirety?

• 42:51Speaker 00

  One of the things in the email thread that I just reread in the origin, origin of affirm, was your claim that advertising and payments are converging, which was the thesis behind trial pay and thesis behind a bunch of different things. Actually, a failed project within PayPal called PayPal Shops, where I was trying to, personally, I built this thing where I was trying to remarket what you just bought. That information should give us a sense for what you might buy next and, you know, all that. And all these things, by the way, have turned out to be true. Like, they were just, you know, 15, 20, 30 years before their time. But affirm more and more today is means for merchants to not just satisfy demand. So somebody comes in and says, look, I'm going to buy this thing, but my budget is this big.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  I won the shoes. I love a bag, but I'm, and affirm is there to say, actually, we can help you finance this on transparent terms. A lot of times, a third of the time, no interest at all. You should get the bag and the shoes. It's safe. But that is the brand promise of affirm, and it works tremendously well, you know, tens of billions of dollars a year worth.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  That is now becoming more and more about creating a platform for merchants to tell their shoppers, "Hey, we are launching a new thing. We have this desirable new product we are selling.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  We've transacted with roughly 50-plus million Americans alone, and we're now live in four countries and grown pretty quickly. And so we have shifted to just satisfying demand, to helping merchants create or guarantee demand. And the convergence of payments and advertising is upon us, although 15 years later.

• 44:24Alex Rampell?

  I was too late.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  As predicted. You were too early with trial pay. I'm certainly too early with PayPal.

• 44:28Alex Rampell?

  Well, the other side, I remember, maybe it was in that thread or not, I should, I should find that email. But most companies have very high customer acquisition costs. And like the joke that I make now as a VC is that when I see 90% of consumer companies, I'd kind of rather buy Google stock or Facebook stock because that's where all the customers come from. And I distinctly remember many, many conversations around how do we have negative CAC? Right? And like, I think to me, one of the coolest things about Affirm to this day is it has negative customer acquisition cost. I mean, it is paid to acquire a customer. And there, there are some companies that you would think they look like this, but they don't because they're basically white labeling something. But going back to the mattresses, um, let's just say that you're late on one of your payments.

• 45:12Alex Rampell?

  Casper, the friendly white ghost mattress company, because Casper's a white ghost, doesn't want to get, or a cat or something. We had a cat named Casper when I was growing up. They don't want to send you a done notice saying like, "Get off my mattress. You haven't paid me back." They want that to be a third party versus other companies where, yes, you know, what is the difference? What B2B to C is a really interesting category. It's business to business to consumer. I tried doing this with trial pay because it's like, "All right, you're playing a Zynga game. Go get, uh, free coins. If you signed up for GEICO, powered by trial pay." Nobody knew who the hell trial pay was, so we, we actually tried sending messages to consumers like, you know, we got, I think we got blocked by our email provider because nobody, we, we actually had a right to email these customers, but they had no idea who we were.

• 45:55Alex Rampell?

  Whereas actually having a financial relationship with 50 million people with negative CAC, I mean, it really is, not to patch you, but it's incredible. Like, it's so hard to do. And we never see anything like this in the venture land or, you know, like, because yeah, there are lots of companies that can get to scale. I mean, Casper got to scale, but lots of CAC, lots of CAC. And that's why a lot of these business models, they tend to degrade over time because all the economic value goes to Google and Facebook. So if you can have negative CAC and then you can launch other products as well, right? Because you actually own the customer. And most important, the brand wants you owning the customer. Like, this is what I didn't get right at trial pay. Like Zynga didn't want me owning their customer. Netflix didn't want me owning their customer. I just connected the two.

• 46:39Alex Rampell?

  But, um, Affirm, the, the merchants actually want you to own the customer.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  It's very, you, you already have a burden of supporting your product and dealing with unsatisfied customers or technical support issues or whatever. A company that tells you 12 times for a year-long loan or 39 times, you know, if it's a three and a half year loan, "Hey, you're late," or "You gotta, gotta make your payment," or all the communications that come from your lender, is just another type of burden that the brand is kind of like, "I know what, Affirm, you guys can handle this. This would be great." And so the, the relationship with the customer is a key component of the foundation of Affirm. And our ability to develop new products is, is really built on that. One of the other really sort of cool to sort of going all the way back to the credit scoring thing.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  So we are the only company in the industry, really, there's plenty of competitors who are trying and some, some degree of success, but mostly not really, who will go into these longer-term loans. And by longer, I don't mean mortgage or, you know, 15-plus years, but like three and a half years is a fairly long period of time relative to the average buyout pay later, which is like six weeks. And to do that, you have to underwrite, like you can't shortcut the, "I'll just look at your FICO score." Or "I'll just sort of, you know, I'll look at your Facebook friends." Like, none of that works. You actually have to do a real, very sophisticated degree of machine learning work. There are two cool things about it. It's hard to do, and so it's just hard to compete with us on that front.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  But the other side is it gives you 39 shots on goal or 12 shots on goal to tell this consumer, as you send them billing notices and as you have conversations with them, as they pay you, to upsell them on a new service. And so these long-term loans, which are actually quite hard to manage and quite hard to maintain reasonable default rates and, and delinquency rates on, is the price you pay as a provider of financing to upsell consumers on more and more services. And so our, our business has been fueled by these long-term products, even though they are probably the, the most challenging part of payments.

• 48:42Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. We've been covering some, uh, uh, Affirm history while we're doing a stroke episode. I also want to ask a question about PayPal history.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  I'll keep a straight.

• 48:53Erik Torenberg?

  You know, um, there's been, you know, a book came out, Founders recently, there's been sort of a lot of, uh, you know, revisiting of, of PayPal, both in its impact as, uh, you know, pioneer in sort of, uh, you know, payments and, and fintech, but also in terms of the, the people that came out of it and sort of the, it, it feels like the, you know, highest concentration of, uh, or highest hit rate of people who would go on to do incredible things. The only comparable thing I could think of today is, it's not even companies, it's the Thiel Fellowship or, or something. I can't think of a comparable company to PayPal today. I'm curious if you, you can. And, you know, all with, uh, or many with extremely strong strengths, but also, you know, very strong personalities and some strong weaknesses as well.

• 49:33Erik Torenberg?

  And so I'm curious if there's something you think that is, goes, as that story is being told about of its impact in the industry, uh, you know, how early it was, uh, and, and sort of the people that came out of it. If there's something that's underappreciated or you think not quite grogged or any, any additions you want to make to how we perceive that, the company in that time period?

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Sort of an old answer and a new answer to this question, which I've, you might, you might expect I've answered once or twice before. So the, the canonical answer that I gave in the book, which by the way is very good. So there, there have been many, much ink spilled on the history of PayPal. The Founder's actually a very good book, like, and part of it is because it's well-written, but part of it is because Jimmy, the guy who wrote it, interviewed every single character in the story extensively. He spent a lot of time talking to all of us, and so it's at the very least grounded in facts. So the, the, the answer I gave for his research was as we were interviewing certainly the early team and even the later team, we kept on selecting for entrepreneurs. We would ask, like, one of the stock questions I would ask would be, "So what are you going to do after PayPal?" And the answer that I welcomed the most was, "Oh, this is the last one. I'm going to start my own afterwards."

• 50:39Speaker 00

  So this, they're like, "Oh, if you're coming in here to kind of get your final graduate degree in entrepreneurship, of course, we'd love to have you. Like, you know, if you're, you're that smart, you're that good, and you're that ambitious, you know, please come along." And so that's kind of the, why I think so many people that came out of PayPal proceeded to start companies. And like, literally, you know, hot second after, we all dispersed YouTube and Yelp and Peter's first major fund and LinkedIn. And so that was not an accident. We were attracting entrepreneurs by design. The other part that I think has actually not been talked about and maybe subtle and sort of my own cut of this, but we knew the people in the room intimately. Like, we literally, you know, exchanged hormones by hanging out in these sweaty rooms, brainstorming, screaming at each other

• 51:24Speaker 00

  and spending a lot of time as whiteboards and declaring the other person's ideas idiotic and so on. We knew the, the true version of that person, the sort of the extremely, I don't know, uh, the, the, the ultra philosophical Peter Thiel and the, uh, you know, go all in every time Elon Musk and the, these days, uh, gubernatorial David Sacks. So, you know, all these people, like, they all have kind of the, the presentation layer. And then there's like the, kind of what they are like at a dinner party. And then like, what are they when they're really stressed out and just like head hurts, don't know what to do, and we have a real problem we need to solve? So if you know kind of the true base version of who we all are,

• 52:09Speaker 00

  as you watch one of these people go for something really big, like Elon taking humanity to Mars, which is extraordinary, and yet, you know, he's a human being. Like, I've seen him sweaty and tired and grumpy at the company kitchen a thousand times. Or Peter, when he is in his dows and calls me from some fundraising trip saying, "I think we might run out of money." You know, they're not gods. You know, they're humans. And that inspires you to actually like, you know what? If that guy who was just a normal dude, I spent a lot of time with him, he's normal.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  And he's going for this big of an idea? I should do the same. I should, I should strive to. And so I think the combination of, like, these are very ambitious people. They all wanted to be entrepreneurs. But we also knew each other when we were young and filled with doubt, which many, I think, still are. I think that that sort of gives you a confidence that it's not all, you know, that roses. It's paved with, uh, with, with, with bumpy parts.

• 53:08Erik Torenberg?

  Is there anything we didn't get to that you want to make sure that we get to while we're here?

• 53:12Speaker 00

  I'm probably less optimistic about agentic shopping. And I'm very optimistic about agentic payments.

• 53:20Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  I think the, the notion of robots will buy our Friday night outfits is misguided. We want to know what we look like long before the robot delivers it to your door. But I think the friction, this notion of, so the best user interface ever created is the credit card. This may actually be finally up for renegotiation because agents are in fact smarter than pieces of plastic and even pieces of plastic with rewritable chips. And so I think that's a, a lot of conversation around agentic commerce is probably looking 20 degrees off where, you know, how can I convince you to just trust a robot to buy the right thing? Like, I don't want to. Like, I love buying bike parts and I spend way too much time looking at two slightly different bike parts because I just, you know, have to participate in the purchase.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  But the part where like, okay, that one, the end, right now, that one is the beginning where you pull out your wallet. Are you, and so I think we, we're, we're about to see some interesting innovation in payments user interface.

• 54:20Alex Rampell?

  So I, can I ask a question on that? So, um, I mostly agree, but I think it depends on, there's like the, I need to research what to buy. Where AI is just yet another tool at your disposal. Like you ask your friends, that's what I'm, it's a bike part, I'm asking you. I'm also asking AI, I'm asking both of you. But now I have the SKU that I want. And I don't actually care which one of the 19 different places that I get it from. And I kind of think about the world, like you have people that care more about money than time. You have people that care more about time than money. The way that I kind of think about agentic commerce, again, none of this is happening right now. So it's trying to prognosticate what's going to happen is here is the UPC. Here's the SKU that I actually want. Go buy it for me at the lowest cost.

• 55:05Alex Rampell?

  It's kind of the thing that people that have a lot more time than money do right now anyway. And like, that's why I always point to Camel, Camel, Camel is like my favorite example of this. Because it's one of the top 100 websites in America that probably nobody with over $100,000 a year of income has ever heard of. But it's, it's a way of saying, I know what I want. You're not helping, the robot's not telling me what bike part to buy, telling me what soda to buy. I know, just give it to me at the lowest price. But it takes way too much time. And sometimes you can just observe one group of humans that already have something as table stakes and then porting that to another group of humans. I guess, do you think that that form of agentic commerce? Because it's actually related to agentic payments as well. I have nine different cards.

• 55:50Alex Rampell?

  I don't remember the Amazon Chase, issued by Chase card terms for a non-restaurant purchase of something under $500 in a five years, my whatever. Like, it's the same thing. Like, people that care more about money than time, they will figure that out. People that care more about time than money, they probably won't.

• 56:07Speaker 00

  I think directionally, that'll make sense. I think the adoption curve is probably going to be fairly slow. And these things are always sort of easy to predict to be very slow and sort of the usual adage as well. Slowly at first and all at once. I'm not, I'm not sure I can handicap that well. The reason people don't, so there's plenty of people who live in this somewhat murky world of sometimes I have money, sometimes I have time. And it has more to do than anything with the price and the degree of care you put into it. I mean, I don't always just buy bike parts. Sometimes I buy milk and milk is milk, certainly bike parts.

• 56:48Speaker 00

  I mostly buy bike parts. But, uh, the, I, I think what really happens for a lot of people, it's just sort of like, well, yeah, I'll, I'll get the, I'll find the cheapest price. But then I'm not sure how to handicap the probability of that item actually showing up at my door at the time of my desired outcome. Even if I'm okay buying a, some bike part from some faraway land and it's sold from three different retailers, I'm going to go with the most reputable one versus the one that's got profit, promising me the cheapest or sometimes the fastest. And so I think we're probably a few steps away from AI grasping

• 57:31Speaker 00

  both the preferences, but also handicapping how these preferences would change based on the input, which me, in fact, maybe AI is already there. It's just that you haven't yet trusted your agent to do as good a job as you would. Like, you can eyeball aside, be like, that looks like it was edited in the 90s. I'm just not quite sure that I'm going to spend $1,000 for a new cassette or $600, whatever the cassettes go for these days in bike cassettes, the rear assembly.

• 57:57Alex Rampell?

  Well, Bike Closet is the site that I'm thinking about that looks like it was made in the 1990s that will sell you a very cheap cassette.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  Uh, exactly. But do you know if they're used by?

• 58:05Alex Rampell?

  Yeah, it's good.

• 58:06Speaker 00

  Someone, you know?

• 58:07Alex Rampell?

  It's true.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  Teeth rubbed off and all.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah. So I think, I think we are in that difficult period where we're still figuring out. The, the other thing that, you know, just sort of maybe end on a positive note. The thing that's really true that no one seems to be celebrating just yet is grocery shopping is 100% agentic. Like, for anyone who uses Instacart, like you tell your Instacart shopper, go bring me milk. You don't think twice when they say, oh yeah, you, you wanted whole milk from Organic Valley, but I found some other brand and here it is. And you're like, oh, of course, like, makes sense. Right? And so the AI inside that shopper's head, maybe not even as good as Gemini or KGB is these days. But do you just sort of say, like, you just, you go through Trader Joe's or Hefus or whatever you're shopping

• 58:52Speaker 00

  and you figure it out and it shows up and 99.9% of the time, it is exactly what you wanted or better. And so we are already conditioned to allow some of these purchases to be fully outsourced. Payments and shopping and everything else. And so we're definitely going to get there. It's just a question of how soon will we work through the quirks of like, well, returning of this wrongly purchased bike part or waiting for it forever and not really knowing what's going to happen to it because it's in transit, but we don't know where it is. I think that, that may be protracted, more protracted, people think.

• 59:25Erik Torenberg?

  That's a good note to end on. We'll have to get a part two at some point when we talk more about the future. Uh, Max, Alex, thanks so much for.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  Thank you very much.

• 59:35Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 1:00:01Erik Torenberg?

  As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.