Business Breakdowns
· S0
[00:00:00] S0: I hope people can appreciate the resiliency of this company, and of Max, and of the team, because, as we talked about, it could have died so many different times, and yet it's still here and growing very fast, with a leadership position, particularly in the US, and with plans to expand globally. I often like to close with a lesson for founders building a company today, and I think we covered that today with HVF — do things that are hard, valuable, and fun. That's Max's way. And so maybe the last question can be for investors: what's the lesson from studying and investing in Affirm?
· Fraser, S0
[00:00:00] S1: We love these businesses that are tech native but operating in what I'll call non-tech industries, when they can merge a cross-section of the talent. So in Affirm's case, they have serious underwriting talent, but they've also got serious engineering talent. And so you merge all the best things about a tech company with all of the complexity of a real-world operating business. And that gives you a competitive advantage that can't be built by Claude Code, frankly. And we could run through a list of businesses that we think fit in this category, but Affirm is clearly one of them. The biggest businesses in the world, whether that be Google, Amazon, Apple, Shopify, have absolutely no interest in extending credit to their customers. They outsource it. It's hard and requires a lot of expertise, and they have core businesses to run. And so Affirm has been able to build its competitive advantage by marrying its tech talent and its underwriting talent. And that gave it a competitive advantage previously, before AI became a huge factor, and we think a competitive advantage in this new environment. [00:00:00] S0: Awesome. Fraser, thank you for your time. [00:00:00] S1: Awesome. Thanks for having me.