Upstart’s new millennial CEO, a Yale dropout, thinks AI can make every American 10% richer
· Fortune
- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady interviews incoming Upstart CEO Paul Gu.
- The big leadership story: Workers’ job anxiety is poisoning the workplace and undermining AI initiatives.
- The markets: Mostly down as uncertainty over Iran lingers.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. How are millennial CEOs viewing AI opportunities? These digital natives have decades ahead of them in leadership roles. Take Paul Gu, who dropped out of Yale to become a Thiel Fellow and co-found Upstart as its chief technology officer in 2012. On May 1, he will step up to succeed Dave Girouard as CEO of the $1 billion-a-year AI lender. I spoke with Gu about his aspirations for his company, his generation, and the future.
On his company: “I think we can build something much, much bigger than what we’ve already built, and I think that it can be one of the most important generational companies of our time. Almost everybody is significantly mispriced in credit, or over-verified in credit. I want one of the answers to that question—how can AI make people’s lives better?—to be: ‘It made me dramatically richer in a direct way, because it radically improved my ability to get low-price credit.’ If you can make money cheaper, everyone just gets richer…You could literally make every single person in the society 10% wealthier if you just moved the cost of credit.”
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On millennials: “The really big thing that happened to us was that we really screwed up as a society when it came to the housing market and the ability to access housing. In the last five years, it’s gotten outright impossible. I think of them as having a certain high level of economic anxiety, and I would compress the 80–20 of it down to interest rates and housing.”
On AI: “We’re in a moment where people are extremely pessimistic about AI and what it will do for them—and they’re somewhat justified because so many of the early applications have been about optimizing short‑attention‑span entertainment and betting, not improving real‑world economic outcomes. Right now, people look at AI and think, ‘It’s going to take my job and create deepfakes of me I don’t want on the internet.’ If we do our job, one of the concrete counterexamples will be that AI made their financial lives meaningfully better.”
On the future: “I think the next generation’s problem is not going to be a crisis of economics, it’s going to be a crisis of meaning. People can all get on UBI (universal basic income), but if they don’t feel like they’re meaningfully contributing to the overall success of the society or its production, then I think there’s going to be a lot harder questions than just whether you can afford X, Y, or Z.”
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com