‘Go with people’

• Max Levchin, CEO of Buy-Now, Pay-Later Platform Affirm, He said it is important to help his employees pack their boxes after they are discouraged. Although he was “terrified of possessing the responsibility that I fucked”, he found the experience “between cathartic and therapeutic,” he told the 20 VC Podcast presented by Harry Stebbings.

During layoffs, it is easier for CEO to go back in their corner offices and see how chaos and fatigue develop. But a technology executive says that he makes the conscious decision to be with his employees while pacying his boxes and are being sent.

Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and CEO of the Buy-Now-Pay-Later AFFIRM platform, said one of the greatest leadership lessons he learned was to help his newly fired employees out of the office.

“I was terrified of owning the responsibility I fell,” Levchin He told host Harry Stebbings in the 20 VC podcast Posted on Wednesday. But a good friend told him that, as a leader, he had to be there helping people to pack their boxes and be part of their goodbye.

“You can play this from the comfort of your office or in the middle of the floor that is crying,” said Levchin. “Go with people. In the end he will feel better, and in the end they will feel better. ”

In 2023, Affirm 19% of your workforceor 485 people, and put another 140 people in February 2024. At the time of the layoffs of 2023, Levchin described its decision as the “most difficult”, but also admitted that the company “conscious before the income required to support The size of the equipment “.

In it 20 VC Podcast, Levchin acknowledged the choice to hire before income as one of its greatest calculated risks that do not work.

“You decide that you want each incremental engineer to build more functions, while the collection of funds is good, and suddenly it is not,” said Levchin. “There is nothing you can do apart from saying ‘I am very sorry, but some of you cannot have a seat anywhere.'”

AFFIRM was not alone in its 2024 cuts: Other payments—Contrando Paypal, Brex, BlockAnd Klarna did the same.

Helping their dismissed employees “was between cathartic and therapeutic,” Levchin told Stebbings. “That was a really important lesson to learn. You can’t hide the pain that is a dismissal. “

Other CEO have not handled dismissals with the same level of attention. In 2021, Vishal Garg, online CEO Mortgage Company Better.com, was subject to scrutiny after Designing 900 employees about zoom. The accounts of the affected employees immediately darkened, and Garg then admitted that “”unfortunate“Dismissal.

“The culture of the company is not just who you hire and shoot, it is also how you do it,” Ralf Specht, author of Building the corporate soul: cultures and success by promoting with the soul system, He told the Society for Human Resources Management In December 2021. “The traumatic impact on which they were allowed to go was immense.”

Despite the layoffs, AFFIRM is uploading the payments, working to meet Levchin’s Dream of knocking down the credit card industry. The first quarter of the tax company 2025 Income increased 41% at $ 698 million.

“We are not the only company that built this madness of purchase, now, but I would like to believe that we achieved the change of financial services that are really for people instead,” said Levchin. in Fortune‘s Leadership below podcast in November 2022.

This story was originally presented in Fortune.com