Today, we are breaking down @Affirm. Affirm's stock fell more than 95% after its IPO in 2021. Today, it processes over $50 billion in GMV and is growing more than 30%, faster than when it was a fraction of its current size. Its founder, Max Levchin (@mlevchin), grew up in Ukraine, moved to the US as a teenager, and co-founded PayPal in his early 20s. While in college, he funded his first startups with credit cards and unknowingly destroyed his credit score. Years later, even after PayPal's IPO, he was denied a car loan because of his credit history. That experience helped inspire Affirm's founding mission of building more honest financial products. Fraser Christie, founder and CIO of Sandstone Global Investment, joined us to break down the business, its remarkable recovery, and why he believes Affirm can become the payment network of the internet. Some interesting facts from our conversation: 1/ Affirm has roughly 50% market share in US buy now, pay later 2/ Max Levchin earns less than $40,000 in annual salary and owns billions in Affirm stock. He now spends much of his time working with a small engineering team on new products. 3/ Affirm can have negative customer acquisition costs. 4/ 70% of purchase volume comes from interest-bearing loans 5/ Affirm earns roughly 4% gross profit on purchase volume after funding costs and credit losses. 6/ Affirm underwrites every transaction individually 7/ Affirm Card already accounts for roughly 20% of purchase volume and is growing over 100% annually. 8/ Only 75 of the 250 largest US merchants have integrated Affirm directly into checkout. 9/ Headcount, G&A expenses, and stock-based compensation have remained essentially flat for several years despite significant growth. 10/ 95% of transactions come from existing customers. Average usage has grown from 2 transactions per year to 7 since its IPO. 11/ Roughly half of Affirm's loans are sold to third parties, with the other half remaining on its balance sheet. 12/ Affirm has no late fees, no compounding balances, and no deferred interest. Every loan is designed to be paid down to zero. Enjoy!our conversation: 1/ Affirm has roughly 50% market share in US buy now, pay later and is gaining share against Klarna and Afterpay. 2/ 95% of transactions come from existing customers. Average usage has grown from 2 transactions per year to 7 since its IPO. 3/ Affirm can have negative customer acquisition costs. It makes money when a new customer signs up and completes their first purchase. 4/ 70% of purchase volume comes from interest-bearing loans, rather than the shorter-term pay-in-four products most people associate with BNPL. 5/ Affirm earns roughly 4% gross profit on purchase volume after funding costs and credit losses. 6/ Affirm underwrites every transaction individually, using AI to determine how much to lend, to whom, and at what rate. 7/ Affirm Card already accounts for roughly 20% of purchase volume and is growing over 100% annually. 8/ Only 75 of the 250 largest US merchants have integrated Affirm directly into checkout. 9/ Headcount, G&A expenses, and stock-based compensation have remained essentially flat for several years despite significant growth. 10/ Max Levchin earns less than $40,000 in annual salary and owns billions in Affirm stock. He now spends much of his time working with a small engineering team on new products. 11/ Roughly half of Affirm's loans are sold to third parties, with the other half remaining on its balance sheet. 12/ Affirm has no late fees, no compounding balances, and no deferred interest. Every loan is designed to be paid down to zero. Enjoy! $AFRM

Applied Intuition's mission is intelligence on a billion machines in the next decade. Qasar (@qasar) and Peter on Dana, their new agentic platform for physical AI that will help us get there faster: "If you ask why don't we have intelligent robots and intelligent vehicles everywhere today, it really comes down to building this stuff is really hard, and that is the limiting factor. Dana really is the culmination of everything we've worked on over the last decade. It makes developing these systems so much easier than it has been in the past. If you wanted to build a delivery robot for college campuses or a little vacuum that cleans your house, it's a pretty daunting thing even for hobbyists and computer scientists. These complex workflows would require switching between 20 different tools in the past... Now with Dana, all of those complex workflows can be very seamlessly orchestrated from an agentic interface. The thing that we really wanna do is just lower the bar. So anybody, starting with engineers, but ultimately really anybody can develop robots."