In 2013, Max Levchin described a peculiar shopping assignment: someone at HVF had been told to buy every heart-rate monitor he could find. The team had already bought connected bathroom scales to investigate what they cost to make. For a man who had helped build PayPal, this was an interesting use of an afternoon. But the shopping had a purpose. Devices were collecting information. Levchin wanted to know which of that information might become useful.
- The work: explore data-driven ideas, recruit founding teams and build companies.
- The evidence: Affirm and Glow emerged from the wider HVF effort.
- The distinction: HVF Investments became SciFi VC in 2017; HVF Labs had the company-building job.
HVF stands for Hard Valuable Fun. The name reads like a founder’s private checklist, which is largely the point. Difficulty gave the work substance. Value gave it a reason to exist. Fun made a long investigation bearable. The lab’s ambition was to find places where technology could improve a stubborn real-world process, then assemble people capable of turning that improvement into a business.
A lab with its own clock
Levchin dates HVF’s beginning to 2011, after Google acquired his social-media company Slide. By January 2013, he was working with roughly a dozen engineers and financing the operation himself. He told interviewer Om Malik that ideas would mature inside the lab and, when ready, become separate companies. The timing mattered: there was no promised public launch date for the projects under discussion.
“Launch time frame is tied to value creation.”Max Levchin, January 2013
Personal financing bought discretion over the calendar. It also put the cost of engineers, equipment and exploration on the founder. A small team can copy the habit of asking questions; reproducing the financial conditions is a different undertaking. The important expense was sustained attention before a product had earned the right to demand it.
Two industries, one suspicion
The original thesis was that useful data was accumulating faster than people were finding productive uses for it. Sensors, phones and cheaper computing made previously opaque activities easier to examine. HVF looked for opportunities inside that mismatch. Its practical work included conversations with specialists, studying datasets and rapidly prototyping ideas generated within the team.
Consider the distance between its early businesses. Affirm tackled consumer finance. Glow, released as an iPhone app in August 2013, helped people track fertility. A checkout decision and an attempt to conceive belong to different parts of life. Both, however, involve consequential decisions made with incomplete information. That common structure helps explain why the same laboratory could be interested in both.
One underlying thesis. Separate products, markets and operating teams.
Glow made that approach tangible: users could record cycle information and symptoms to receive fertility estimates. Its launch paired a free tracking app with an optional US fertility-funding program. The product’s usefulness depended on a specific task, rather than on asking people to admire a collection of data. The company, rather than HVF itself, had to earn those users’ trust.
Affirm supplied a different kind of evidence. Its shares began trading on Nasdaq on January 13, 2021, at an IPO price of $49. The public company was far removed from an exploratory project inside a lab. That journey demonstrates that HVF could help originate an enduring operating business. It does not establish a studio-wide success rate or make every subsequent idea a sensible investment.
A company needs someone to run it
By February 2017, the umbrella had become awkward. In a public explanation of a name change, Levchin distinguished two activities: HVF Labs recruited teams and incubated internal ideas; HVF Investments backed outside founders. The investment operation became SciFi VC. Levchin also said he was running Affirm full time. Exploration had produced a business that required his operating attention.
That division clarifies where HVF fits in the market. Its immediate collaborators were prospective founders and operators. The shoppers using Affirm and people using Glow belonged to those businesses. HVF’s role combined technical investigation, team formation and early capital. An accelerator generally supports companies already taking shape; a studio can participate earlier, while the problem and founding team are still being worked out.
Insurance offered another test. Pathpoint’s founders began working on the venture at HVF Labs in 2017. Its formal 2020 launch followed development and a soft launch with agents. The platform connected retail insurance agents with excess-and-surplus carriers, allowing coverage to be quoted and bound digitally. Here, the obstacle was a fragmented commercial workflow. Software still needed carriers, licensed operations and agents willing to use it.
A notebook you can open
There is also a less imposing doorway into HVF’s work: Franchise, an open-source SQL notebook published under its GitHub organization. Its documentation describes querying local data files in a browser, creating charts and comparing queries side by side. A companion bridge connects databases. For someone trying to understand a dataset, these are concrete conveniences.
Franchise is useful evidence of engineering work beyond company formation. It lets a reader inspect software associated with the lab without needing an invitation to its office. Its documented local-file workflow also offers a small practical lesson: sometimes the product opportunity is making an existing analytical task less annoying.
The part worth borrowing
Levchin’s documented idea habit was straightforward. Talk to specialists. Ask why a process works that way. Write down the questions they cannot explain, then revisit the notes. The transferable lesson is to investigate an assumption before organizing a company around it. A useful experiment should sharpen the question enough that the next decision becomes easier.
Our reading of this history has limits: patient exploration needs money, useful information and people who understand the industry. Regulated businesses also need permission and distribution. HVF’s old domain now leads to SciFi VC, a reminder that organizations change while their early stories keep circulating. What survives as a useful idea is the order of operations: investigate the friction, build something specific, and find the people prepared to own what follows.