In today's episode, Ryan Zauk sits down with Dave Girouard, Founder & CEO of the recently IPO’d Fintech, Upstart.

Upstart is an online lending marketplace that provides personal loans using 1,600+ non-traditional variables, such as education and employment, to predict creditworthiness.

If you listened to our episode the other week with Chi Chi Wu of the National Consumer Law Center, you know credit and lending is a huge issue in America (https://soundcloud.com/wft/credit-reporting-and-consumer-protection-chi-chi-wu-national-consumer-law-center)

Upstart is using artificial intelligence and rigorous machine learning to attack this issue, making it not only a great company, but a wonderful mission.

In today’s episode, Ryan and Dave discuss:

3:30 – What exactly is Upstart?

6:44 – The current state of credit scores and how Upstart is upending the traditional credit score

10:57 – What needed to be true for banks to trust Upstart?

13:19 - How he navigated the regulatory environment, who he hired, and what a no-action letter is

15:39 – How COVID affected his business

18:40 – Why it was time to IPO, why he questions SPACs, and why raising private money was really, really hard

21:50 – How the IPO was different from private rounds and the importance of momentum

23:00 – The toughest challenges he faced as a founder

25:15 – His decision-making framework for leaving an amazing role at Google and founding Upstart...including the long conversations he had with his wife that made him take the plunge

26:24 – A rapid-fire round including his thoughts on bitcoin, where he was when the IPO bell rang, his favorite dinner meal before a long work night, first covid vacation and more!

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