More than a decade after he helped found and sell PayPal for $1.5 billion, Max Levchin is finally getting over the fear of a sophomore slump.

To be fair, to call it a "slump" is an insult to everyone who hasn't created a billion-dollar company in his youth. But Levchin's struggle to redefine himself after PayPal gives some insight into Silicon Valley's obsession with hot new things, and the heavy expectation that one success will inevitably bring many more.

Affirm, Levchin's latest company, announced Wednesday that it has raised $275 million in debt and equity financing from Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and others. The eye-popping figure promises to help Affirm, a lending service focused on millennials, grow its foothold in a competitive and complex market. At the same time, it serves as a loud and decisive declaration: Max Levchin is back and he's ready to bet big on financial services for the first time since PayPal.

Levchin, a Ukrainian computer science prodigy who was PayPal's original CTO and cofounder, left PayPal and the world of FinTech behind in 2002, following its acquisition by eBay. He went on to cement his position as one of the savvier investors in Silicon Valley. Levchin was the first to back Yelp and still serves as chairman of the $3 billion company. He also invested in a staggering list of billion-dollar startups, including Pinterest, Stripe and Square.

As an entrepreneur, however, Levchin's record is decidedly more mixed. His big post-PayPal project was Slide, a company that built social and gaming apps. Slide was eventually acquired by Google for around $200 million in 2010 — an impressive sum, but a pittance compared to PayPal's price tag. Worse still: Google killed Slide one year later to focus entirely on Google+.

Slide was in some sense doomed from the start. Levchin never really cared about social applications or games. His first love is math and financial technology. But he just couldn't bring himself to return to the financial services field again, with its inevitable comparisons to PayPal.

"It used to weigh on me," Levchin admitted in an interview this week with Mashable. "I spent a little bit of time running away from this. I did not want to be compared so directly to my past. What if I wind up with something smaller, how would that look?"

Looking back now, he adds a rhetorical line that sounds like a direct plea to his earlier self: "Why am I running away from the thing that I'm good at if I like it?"

Levchin's personal struggle sheds light on the large burden and larger egos of the technology industry's brightest minds. Those fortunate enough to be part of one startup that rises like a rocket ship often feel compelled to find or build an even bigger rocket ship next. That is particularly true for the group commonly referred to as the PayPal Mafia, whose members include Levchin's cofounders Peter Thiel, a billionaire investor and entrepreneur, and Elon Musk, who is literally building rocket ships at SpaceX. In that circle, selling a gaming service for a couple hundred million dollars sounds cute at best.

Late into his wilderness years, Levchin received some valuable career advice that helped set him straight. It didn't come from fellow entrepreneurs in the valley or his former PayPal colleagues. It came from his wife, who he describes as his chief cheerleader and chief critic.

"The best advice I got from her is to focus on things I'm already good at because that's where I have the most leverage," Levin said. "Don't be embarrassed to do another financial services company. You don't have to prove to the world you are a great dancer."

Max Levchin playing Guitar Hero while working on his startup Slide in 2008. He later sold the company to Google. Image: Flickr, Joi Ito

Levchin's next act

In early 2011, after having sold Slide and quickly exited Google, Levchin put together a startup incubator called HVF (it stands for "Hard Valuable Fun") to help steer the way to his next big thing. That led to two spun out companies: Glow, an app for tracking fertility, and Affirm. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Levchin decided to go with the latter as his full-time gig in 2014.

The short-term goal is Affirm is to make it easier for people to shop online and pay in installments. Affirm partners with select merchants — many of which are startups like Casper, a mattress service — to let customers break up a purchase in three, six, nine or 12 payments, with a flat interest rate ranging from 6%-30%, depending on the merchant and the item for sale.

By raising a huge pile of financing, the majority of which is in debt, Affirm hopes to appeal to larger merchants.

It may not sound sexy, but Affirm taps into the larger trend to re-think financial services for millennials, who have a healthy distrust of banks and prefer mobile-friendly solutions.

Levchin, 39, isn't part of the millennial demographic Affirm is targeting, but he does know a good opportunity when he sees one. "It's a huge and rapidly growing market," he says.

The longer-term goal for Affirm is to eventually build up a suite of consumer financial services, whether it's improving credit cards or "traditional depositing services," according to Levchin. "We expect your phone to be your primary financial tool, as opposed to an ATM or a bank branch."

If re-imagining the entire financial system sounds like a bold ambition, you can thank Levchin's wife (again). "Some of the earlier versions I ran by her... she said, 'This isn't big enough. Why fly to the moon? Fly to the next galaxy.'"

That's what he's trying for now. And if he happens to overtake PayPal in the process, well, all the better.

"I believe it can be much bigger than PayPal," Levchin says with renewed confidence. "But I also believe it can be much bigger than the biggest bank in the world."

Whatever happens, he claims to have come to terms with his past success. "I don't mind if people compare me to it."