Max Levchin is a Ukrainian-born American software engineer and serial entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer of PayPal and the founder and CEO of Affirm. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Levchin immigrated to the United States with his family in 1991, settling in Chicago. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1997. In 1998, Levchin co-founded Confinity alongside Peter Thiel, developing the payment product PayPal and pioneering anti-fraud security mechanisms, including early commercial implementations of CAPTCHA technology. After PayPal's acquisition by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, Levchin founded Slide, a personal media-sharing service acquired by Google in 2010. He also served as the founding Chairman of Yelp from 2005 to 2015 and sat on the board of directors of Yahoo! and The Coca-Cola Company. In 2012, Levchin created Affirm out of his San Francisco innovation lab HVF (Hard, Valuable, Fun), building a leading buy-now-pay-later fintech network that completed its initial public offering in 2021. Levchin is an active angel investor with investments in over 100 technology startups.