PayPal co-founder Max Levchin is stepping up as CEO of Affirm after "quietly" raising $45 million. The startup's goal? Lending money online, with rates not based on borrower's credit scores, but information from their social media profiles.

New York-based blind date startup Grouper—think Uber, for yuppie polyamory—is down another key member: sources tell me CTO and co-founder Tom Brown is out of the dating game.

Despite already shelling out $19 billion for Whatsapp, shoving DMs into Instagram, and funneling its vast user base into Messenger, Facebook still looks upon Snapchat with envious eyes. Now, a month after killing off Poke, the social network's first sloppy attempt to go after the momentary messaging market, the company botched the rollout of "Slingshot," ephemerally releasing the app to iTunes' foreign markets before pulling it.

Airbnb is a novel, potentially income-saving measure for people who need to squeeze some extra cash from their homes. And then there are Airbnb users like Eileen Hickey-Hulme, who allegedly rented out her Tribeca pad for triple what she was paying while hanging in the Hamptons.

Facebook's IPO and stock market ascension has left the company's board with a big wad of cash—which is great news for the company's directors, who choose their own pay rate. Now Bloomberg reports an investor is suing Facebook and its hoodied founder for "[wasting] corporate assets" and "unjust enrichment."

Star venture capitalist Ron Conway absolutely lost his shit today at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit after fellow VC Chamath Palihapitiya suggested Mayor Ed Lee was doing a poor job addressing San Francisco's gentrification crisis.

A hearty golf clap to Homejoy, for using a stock photo of a woman cleaning the floor while also holding up her husband who is lying on a sofa, and to Fluc, for proving that naming your startup "Fluc" isn't literally the worst possible marketing decision. Your checks are in the mail, in the amount of -$100,000,000.

One way to staunch the flow of disastrous news from your disastrous startup is not even having a PR person anymore: Fortune reports Clinkle's Ana Braskamp, who might've had one of the bleakest jobs on our planet Earth, is no longer at the company.

Jack Dorsey was once a punk. He played in bands, his hair was a loose mess, he had *a tattoo*, and his website was littered in cuss-laden poetry. But then he traded his nose ring for Dior glasses, co-founded Twitter and Square, and amassed a fortune that affords him $10 million seaside homes.

Recode's John Paczkowski reports Apple is looking for a new PR chief, and this time they should be a little nicer: "[Tim Cook's] paying particular attention to those he believes could put a friendlier, more approachable face on Apple's public relations efforts."

Tom Fallows works as a product director at Google. He's also—if you believe the words of San Francisco's "Counterforce" protest group—a "capitalist shit bag," and everything wrong with techie gentrification. To prove their point, The Counterforce is denouncing Fallows on his own doorstep.

Google, like other enlightened corporations, makes its workers to routinely rank each other and forces the scores to match a bell curve. The employees who are placed at the wrong end of the bell curve risk termination. That's stressful enough—now imagine your CEO personally meddling.

Airbnb's gearing up to acquihire by the looks of this now deleted job listing. We heard the company is struggling to retain engineers; rumors also swirled around the design team. Okay, sharing economy, time to share what's going on at Airbnb: tips@valleywag.com

YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are parting ways. The duo worked together for 15 years, starting at PayPal, then got $1.65 billion from Google. But faced a series of missteps at their incubator Avos Systems. Now Hurley is cutting his losses and focusing on just one Avos product, MixBit, and Chen is joining Google Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Uber's latest investment round values the company at $18.2 billion—the second highest imaginary price tag for a startup in history. Number one? Facebook.

Here's a tip for all the transportation startups out there: if you're going to constantly hit San Franciscans with Facebook ads, at least make sure you're not using the same stock photograph as everyone else.

Uber is so hot with investors right now, they're in the position to dictate their own valuation. And now that number is set to hit $17 billion, the ride-sharing darling is poised to mint a new class of Uber-rich investors.

One of the most famous, lauded men in technology just called one of the most infamous men in the world a "traitor," on national television—all because the former is worried the latter might cost him some money.

The new law of apps demands that every startup should be all things to all people. Thus Tinder is adding a feature "that lets users share annotated pictures with their matches," just like Snapchat. Only instead of 10 seconds, Tinder gives users 24 hours before the photo disappears.

At a tech conference in Berlin yesterday, Jonathan Doklovic—a developer at Atlassian, which hosts the conference—gave the 500 sandwiches jerk a run for his money [via @Dmagge]