Episode
The $100B Niches Hiding Inside Payments
- Podcast
- The a16z Show
- Published
- Sep 3, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3639
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-a16z-show-436525/episodes/the-100b-niches-hiding-inside-payments/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-a16z-show-436525/the-100b-niches-hiding-inside-payments.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Erik Torenberg is joined by a16z General Partner Alex Rampell and Affirm Co-Founder and CEO Max Levchin for a conversation on 25 years of fintech, from the early days of digital payments to the origins of Affirm and the next generation of agentic commerce. Max and Alex revisit what surprised them most about how payments evolved, why the card interface has been so difficult to displace, and why even the smallest corners of payments can become enormous markets. They also trace the early idea maze behind Affirm, from "pay with your identity" and the pajama problem to the realization that installment financing could dramatically increase merchant conversion. The conversation also gets into real versus "fake" 0% financing, what people misunderstand about Affirm today, why negative customer acquisition cost can be such a powerful business model advantage, and why Max is more bullish on agentic payments than on agents choosing what people buy.