Max Rhodes

Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer Faire

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Max Rhodes is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Faire, the online wholesale marketplace that connects independent brands with the local shops that stock them. He launched it in 2017 with three colleagues, most of them out of Square, and raised more than $1.5 billion behind it. What makes him unusual among founders at that scale is what he has said publicly about the middle of that story: Faire’s valuation went from $1 billion to $12.59 billion in roughly eighteen months, he concluded in 2022 that the growth underneath it was not real, and he cut spending, withdrew the incentives that had driven it and reduced headcount by around a fifth. Faire is now valued at $5.2 billion — less than half the peak — and Rhodes describes the position as one of relief rather than loss.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Faire in 2017 with Marcelo Cortes, Jeff Kolovson and Daniele Perito, and has been its Chief Executive Officer since.
• Built a platform carrying 100,000+ brands from more than 120 countries, serving hundreds of thousands of retailers across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, with $8 billion+ in brand sales to date and retailers in over 70,000 cities and towns.
• Raised over $1.5 billion from Sequoia Capital, Forerunner Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Y Combinator, DST Global, Norwest Venture Partners, Dragoneer, D1 Capital Partners, Wellington Management, Baillie Gifford and Durable Capital Partners.
• Reversed Faire’s growth strategy in 2022 after finding deteriorating retention beneath accelerating revenue, cutting roughly 20% of a 1,200-person headcount and ending discount-driven acquisition.
• Was an early product lead at Square, working on Cash App and as a founding member of Square Capital, a product Faire says helped more than 230,000 merchants access capital.
• Holds a B.A. in history from Yale.

Professional Journey

Rhodes read history at Yale and was, by Faire’s account, a small business owner before he was a technology executive — which is the detail that explains the company he eventually built. He joined Square as an early product lead, working on Cash App and as a founding member of Square Capital, the lending product that extended working capital to merchants already processing payments through Square. That is a useful apprenticeship for what came next: Square Capital’s premise was that a platform sitting in the middle of a small business’s transactions knows things about its creditworthiness that a bank does not.

Faire, founded in 2017 with Marcelo Cortes, Jeff Kolovson and Daniele Perito, applies a related idea to a different bottleneck. Independent retailers buy stock from independent brands, historically by travelling to trade shows and committing cash up front to inventory that may not sell. Faire moved that market online and took the risk off the retailer, offering open terms and returns on opening orders — which only works if the platform can predict, from its own data, which products will sell in which shops. The company describes itself as a wholesale technology platform that helps retailers discover unique brands, and reports $8 billion in brand sales to date across 100,000-plus brands from more than 120 countries.

Investors arrived quickly and in volume: over $1 billion within five years, from Sequoia, Forerunner, Khosla, Founders Fund, Lightspeed, Y Combinator, DST Global and others, taking the company to a post-money valuation of $12.59 billion after a round in May 2022. Rhodes has since been unusually direct about what that money did to his judgement. Headcount doubled two years running, revenue growth accelerated, and he read the acceleration as proof the strategy worked. It was, he told CNBC in March 2026, partly hubris and partly the pandemic — trade shows were cancelled in 2021 and stimulus money was circulating, so some of the growth “was just sort of happening to us”.

The turn came in April 2022, when growth slowed and he went into the underlying numbers. What he found was falling retention, complaints about the state of the platform, and customers who had come for short-term discounts and left. The available response was to spend more to reignite growth. He did the opposite: cut spending, cut roughly 20% of staff, and removed the incentive and discount programmes that had been buying the numbers. Faire reports that revenue growth recovered within months, that 2025 revenue grew 32% over 2024, and that the company expects to break even in the near future — though CNBC noted that Faire declined to provide documentation verifying the revenue figures.

The valuation has settled at $5.2 billion following a secondary share offering, a little over 40% of the peak. Rhodes leads an executive team drawn substantially from the same Square lineage that founded the company, including a chief financial officer who led finance at Square and investor relations at Block, alongside a chief product officer from Tripadvisor and a chief technology officer, Thuan Pham, with a large-scale marketplace background.

Education

Yale University

B.A., History