#59 - Providing Fair Financial Products for the 56% of the US Without Access to Them - Jake Rosenberg of LendUp

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Jake Rosenberg and Ali Rowghani.
Jake's the co-founder and CTO of LendUp, which was in the winter 2012 batch. And their customers are the 56% of Americans that have what is described as a subprime credit score, and that basically means they can't get approved for credit at most banks.
And Ali, who you've probably heard on the podcast before, is the CEO of YC Continuity. All right, here we go. Here we go.

**Ali Rowghani** (0:29)
Jake, really awesome to have you here. Thanks for coming back to YC and spending some time with us and spending some time on the mic.

**Jake Rosenberg** (0:36)
Absolutely.

**Ali Rowghani** (0:38)
Cool, so I wanted to ask you a few questions about yourself, first of all. You've got a really cool background. You got started in this industry a long time ago as a youngster and have been at some interesting companies. So tell us how you kind of got involved in tech and where you've been and how you're today at LendUp.

**Jake Rosenberg** (0:56)
Yeah, absolutely.
So I grew up in the Bay Area. So I was here during the first.com boom. And when I was a teenager, I was really interested in tech. Two main areas actually were messing around with computers and video production. And so the two companies that I really wanted to work for when I was a teenager and that I applied to summer internships for that I really was excited about were Yahoo and Pixar, which obviously you're background in Pixar.

**Ali Rowghani** (1:26)
Yeah, that place isn't bad.

**Jake Rosenberg** (1:26)
Yeah, it's a pretty awesome place. And Yahoo ended up contacting me about a summer internship. Pixar did not. I'm still waiting to hear back. So I'm hoping you can help me there. You're in. Yeah, okay, all right. And so I was in high school. Yeah, I was 16 and I was looking for a summer internship. And so Yahoo ended up contacting me about being a production intern. So just coming in and doing anything they needed. So I went in and interviewed. My mom actually drove me to the interview because I was 15 and a half. I had my learner's permit, but I didn't have my license yet. By the time I would get the job, I would have my license. So my mom drove me and then waited outside while I interviewed with some of the early people at Yahoo. They were about, at the time, they were 65-ish people.
Still private. When I interviewed, they were still private. By the time I joined that summer, which was the summer of 96, they had gone public with like 80 people and 1.6 million in revenue or something like that.
So it was a different time.
So I ended up being a production intern that summer and worked on cold calling to try to get listings for Yahoo Classified's cold calling car dealerships and getting them to export their cars in Excel and stuff like that. And then writing Perl scripts to like munch the data and load it into our database. So immediately got just thrilled and excited about what was going on with tech and with the web.
And wanted to be a part of it and sort of took off from there and never looked back. So went back to Yahoo the next few summers as I graduated from college and with a degree in CS. And then went and joined full time and was there for about eight years, building a bunch of different products. Eventually working my way up to a more senior sort of architectural position there. And then after that, I moved on to Zynga where a friend of mine who was a product manager was building out a team that was building infrastructure for all the games. So it was building out shared messaging and communications infrastructure for the scale of Farmville plus Cityville plus Mafia Wars plus Words with Friends. So doing a lot of user to user messaging and the gifting system and email system and things like that. So really fun as an engineer to work on very, very high throughput, high volume applications.
And really enjoyed that. I was there for a couple years through the IPO.
And then I started on LendUp. So my brother and Sasha and I embarked on that journey.

**Ali Rowghani** (3:58)
Great. So tell me, so you'd been an engineer at startups and seen two amazing companies scale. You saw one IPO inside the company. And obviously Yahoo was kind of a legendary company for a long time and still a big company today.