Why aren’t more people waiting to get in? Just a few people linger on the sidewalk. After the doors open and the first wave of diners are seated, the line mostly disappears, despite it being one of the more popular spots in the city. His firm has big stakes in Snowflake, Airbnb and DoorDash, the three biggest tech IPOs of 2020.The line outside Shizen, San Francisco’s hottest Michelin-starred hipster vegan sushi restaurant, is extremely long, but the wait is surprisingly short. Rabois is coming off a big December, when Airbnb, DoorDash, OpenDoor and Wish, companies he backed early, all went public.įormer PayPal CFO Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital, is on the board of Unity (along with Levchin), which debuted last year. Keith Rabois, who was an early executive vice president at PayPal and is now a partner at Founders Fund, is on Affirm's board. Founders Fund, Thiel's venture firm, owns a stake worth about $650 million at the high end of the range. Its IPO is set to generate big gains for other PayPal mafia members in addition to Levchin. Less than two years after raising money at a $2.9 billion valuation, Affirm is going public with a market cap close to $10 billion. "People are changing their habits very very rapidly and the most powerful trend is figuring out what can be purchased online instead of having to go outside." "While travel and ticketing and fashion are all down and we know they're all down, the super-massive shift from offline to online is powerful," Levchin said at the time. He said merchant sign-ups were "massively up." Other merchant partners include Reverb Guitars and Nordstrom. In May, during the early months of the crisis, Levchin told CNBC that demand for electronics had doubled and home fitness had grown almost as much. Peloton, Affirm's biggest partner, accounted for 28% of its revenue during fiscal 2020, and 30% in the latest quarter as the ongoing coronavirus pandemic spurred people to exercise at home. But the cost required to purchase loans from banking partners along with provisioning for credit losses equaled more than half of its revenue, leading to an operating loss of $107.8 million for the year. Revenue almost doubled in the year that ended in June to $509.5 million. The service lets consumers pay back the loans over three, six or 12 months. The company has grown rapidly in recent years, partnering with online retailers by letting them offer loans at the time of checkout. The project was initially part of Levchin's incubator, HVF, before spinning out as an independent entity in 2012. EBay bought it for $1.5 billion two years later.Īffirm marked Levchin's return to financial technology. In 2000, Musk's X.com merged with Confinity, and the combined entity was named PayPal. Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn in 2002, is worth about $2 billion, after selling the professional networking company to Microsoft for $27 billion in 2016. Thiel, who turned most of his attention to investing, made over $1 billion from an early check he wrote to Facebook, where he's still a director, and now has an estimated net worth of $6.6 billion. Musk, who started SpaceX, is by far the wealthiest of the crew with a fortune currently valued at $175 billion, primarily from his stake in Tesla, which he's led since 2008. The term "PayPal mafia" started gaining traction about 15 years ago as early employees from the payments company went on to start YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Palantir and SpaceX. He was the first investor in Yelp, co-founded by fellow ex-PayPal executive Jeremy Stoppelman, and was chairman until 2015, while also spending three years on Yahoo's board. A few years after leaving PayPal, following the company's sale to eBay in 2002, he started social application company Slide, then sold it to Google in 2010 for a reported $182 million. Levchin, 45, has made a lot of money in the past, if not as much as some of his former colleagues. At $38 a share, Affirm would be valued at $9.2 billion. Those shares are locked up for the next few months, so the actual value of Levchin's stake will depend on the market's reaction and Affirm's performance as a public company.
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