Life at Affirm: Meet the CTO

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.

Libor Michalek, CTO, Affirm

Libor is Affirm’s Chief Technology Officer, heading the largest department at Affirm. He has extensive experience working with a variety of tech companies, large and small, for the last 20+ years - and I’ve known Libor since college!

Quick Facts:

Alma Mater: UIUC

Degree: Computer Science

Favorite Perk: Affirm product testing stipend

Q&A

What led you to work in financial technology?

I think the best way to learn something is by doing it for a living. As an engineer, there’s software in everything, and you can take your skills in how to build software, large systems, and services and then apply those skills to anything. So it was a question of what do I want to learn about and what do I think has a lot of opportunity to be improved or fixed? And of course, the other big piece is, who am I going to be working with? Because those are the people you’ll ultimately learn from..

I don’t think there actually is a “true” fintech company yet. People talk about AdTech and RetailTech, but it didn’t get to the point that there was a big company tackling the tech issues of those industries until many, many iterations. Once technology became the driver of scale, efficiency and customer acquisition, it effectively defined the company as a technology company as in the case of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay. People talk a lot about fintech but I think that story has yet to be written, one where technology is the true driver. I think that’s what is exciting about working at Affirm, having the opportunity to help write that story and potentially being the first true technology company in finance.

What do you do at Affirm?

At a very high level I do what every engineering manager and leader does. This includes looking at the capabilities of the people in their organization and how they’re trying to grow and improve and pairing that with technical projects. Also, making sure that the technical direction that we have set for the organization and that I’ve set with the rest of my team leads makes sense. It comes down to understanding the project execution phase and how that lines up with the product, technology, the org and then figuring out where I need to spend more time to make sure those four things line up.

I spend most of my day reading about technical proposals and decisions, product decisions, project execution, and mentoring engineering leaders and managers to do that. I also focus on recruiting, which is important in a quickly growing organization where there are always gaps to fill.

What excites you most about where Affirm is going and the role your team will play.

One of the exciting aspects of using technology as an enabler for a consumer finance company is the idea of improving the efficiency of how users interact with merchants.

In essence, our technology helps consumers to find a retailer and financial product that gives them the best deal possible, and one that is honest and accurately represented. Affirm is helping them understand what that purchase means in the construct of their financial life.

At Affirm, we’re building tools that ensure we’re effectively modeling the data we use to make financing decisions, and that then present the resulting information to a consumer in an understandable and actionable way.  It’s not just a financing decision, it’s a finance conversation that is enabled by software and is on the consumer’s side.

What makes the culture unique at Affirm and in your department?

We generally believe the best engineers are those who are interested in working with other great engineers to become better engineers. We focus a lot on how we work together, how we structure feedback and development, and how we think about lining up engineers with projects, teams, and mentors. I think people are excited to work in that type of environment and Affirm does a good job of making that growth-centered philosophy a reality.

Affirm is growing really quickly, and we’re focused on making sure our concept grows as well. This is an engineering challenge:how do you go from prototype to something large, repeatable, and sustainable? The combination of speed and a group of people who are also excited and motivated by growth is a great opportunity to double down on your skills and get better faster.

We also believe that humility and confidence are complementary skills and not contradictory. Building a startup is an exercise in the unknown, and we want to hire people who can approach that with a sense of humility, but also a level of confidence that they as a group can figure it out and get things done.. It’s a cool balance of really smart people who are energized by learning and getting better.

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

I subtly tell them every day that mistakes are ok as long as we’re learning from them and doing better the next time around.

Very early on, we started addressing any issue, by writing up a post mortem about it. The goal is to not only understand the cause and what we could have done differently to detect it faster to prevent it, but also what should be done moving forward to improve.

It’s constantly reinforcing the idea that yes we are moving fast, we’re writing a lot of software, there’s a lot going on, and there are going to be problems but we need to learn from them and get better in order to make progress.