Life at Affirm: Meet the COO

Note: One of the things I’ve learned in my career is that a strong leadership team is essential to your success as a company. Your execs should do more than bring experience and diverse backgrounds to your team, they also serve as cultural leaders and models for collaboration. I’m sitting down with different people around the company to talk about their perspectives as leaders and sharing our conversations on LinkedIn in hopes our transparent approach to leadership serves as an inspiring model for others, starting with our executive team.

Huey Lin, COO, Affirm

Huey is Affirm’s Chief Operating Officer, and was the first non-technical hire at the company almost six years ago. I met Huey at PayPal when she joined us as a product manager, and continued with the company for nearly 12 years including moves to Europe and Asia. It’s an honor to have her at Affirm where she’s played an integral role in our success and growth from the very beginning!

Quick Facts:

Alma Mater: Carnegie Mellon (undergrad) and Stanford (graduate)

Degree: B.S. Biology and Psychology; M.A. in Policy Administration

Favorite Affirm Perk: Health benefits

Q&A

At a young age, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a flight attendant! It was during Pan Am's prime and I just thought the uniforms were so glamorous. I'm from a small fishing village in Taiwan, so it was rare to see women wear suits or uniforms to do their jobs. After my dreams of being a flight attendant, I want to be a police officer because of the policewomen I saw on TV.

Now I think it's kind of ironic. I was working so hard to get to wear serious work outfits and now I work in tech where you just wear whatever you want! I'm sure being exposed to women in very official roles I had never seen before allowed me to dream and aspire to be in their shoes. I was inspired to work hard for a goal, even if it ended up being something else.

What led you to work in FinTech and become the COO of Affirm?

It was total serendipity. My first startup went belly up during the bubble burst in the early 2000s and as the panic of being unemployed began to sink in, our general counsel came over and gave me a sticky note with a phone number. She said to give them a call about a job at a company that was doing really exciting things. That company was PayPal.

I joined PayPal as one of the company’s first product managers assigned to “Special Projects” where I helped on everything from regulation issues to building out the company’s case management and administrative tools. I then began leading the team that built out core features such as password recovery, transaction log, marketing tools, self-help and the e-resolutions center. Amongst other projects, I helped scale the PM team until I ultimately moved to the EU with my husband. While in Europe, I helped stand up risk management for the territory and worked on the risk policy framework as well as the process for vetting and qualifying merchants. Another move took me to Hong Kong where I was assigned the task of figuring out customer retention with my first foray into Operational Excellence and Business Ops. Following the financial crisis, I moved to Shanghai and eventually took over APAC Ops which was how I eventually stumbled into true company operations. Then in 2012 I decided to join Affirm because of the founding team and vision for the company, which I was sure would attract even more great talent.

I think my career truly shows that if you always try to do your best work you never know what will come of it!

What do you do at Affirm?

At Affirm, I’m able to use my career experience to make sure the company runs as smoothly as possible. When I joined six years ago, I began laying the foundation for functions like finance, compliance, G&A, customer operations, loan servicing and people operations including hiring several of our executives.

Nowadays, I look after and listen for the “squeaks,” meaning our customers, partners and even our employees will always tell us what their issues are - it’s on us to make sure we’re listening and do something about them. I’ve consistently focused on building a culture of direct accountability while reducing frictions as we scale and grow in complexity.

What excites you most about where Affirm is going and the role Ops will play?

I’m stoked about the fact that we have been able to leverage a well-known method of acquiring customers and helping merchants grow their business, while staying true to values like “no fine print.”

I’m excited about truly getting to know our customers and finding new ways to connect with them (whether that’s through technology, or helping them with new ways of building a relationship with their money), listening to how consumers want to grow that relationship, and building products appropriately.

Getting customers to participate in providing feedback to us is where my team truly shines - being able to listen to the customer’s truths is a great responsibility. This proactive practice is what I think will serve us as we grow and will help us show what a modern finance company should look like. We have an opportunity to fix the power dynamic between financial institutions and customers, and we’re just getting started.

What is culturally unique about Affirm, and the department you lead?

My team is made up of people who hold three essential traits: they are skilled, curious, and motivated. To be truly successful on our team, and help the company reach its goals, each person should exhibit all three traits.

Affirm has a set of values and a mission that everyone subscribes to. This has allowed us to attract motivated talent who bring both curiosity and skill, which combine to propel us to success. We don’t have a culture of “that’s not my problem,” which is key in ensuring we’re building products that actually help people.

If people don’t believe in cleaning up after themselves, they’re not going to build a great financial services company. We must truly embody the Affirm value of “it’s on us.”

What’s the most important thing you tell your team every day?

“Earn the honor of being depended on.” When someone counts on you, it’s the greatest thing ever.