Dave Girouard - Making Better Loans - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 52]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types.
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:37)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:02)
My guest today is Dave Girouard, co-founder and CEO of Upstart, a lending platform that leverages AI to make loans more accessible and affordable. Dave started in Silicon Valley as a product manager at Apple and later spent eight years at Google where he built their suite of cloud apps. In our discussion, we cover the lessons Dave has learned about building speed into a habit, the intricacies of training an AI model to predict the future, and what it was like to start a FinTech business as an outsider. We also discuss the past, present, and future of lending, why Dave and his team have no plans to build a super app and the differences between public and private market investors from a founder's perspective.
One of the tropes you'll hear these days is that lending has become a customer acquisition tool for FinTechs. But as Dave explains, the market and opportunity set in lending itself should not be underestimated. Please enjoy this great conversation with Dave Girouard.
So Dave, I think the best place to begin this conversation is with just a really fun, interesting topic that you've written about before we get into the great journey of Upstart and everything you've learned building that company. The topic to begin with is this idea of speed as a habit in business. And this is very popular notion in technology, you know, the move fast and break things, probably the most famous example of a phrase that exemplifies this idea. But I think you've really thought about the various levels of building speed into a habit and why that's good and maybe areas, ways in which it isn't good or can be dangerous. And I'd love to just begin with this concept. I think it's really fun and one that a lot of people could apply to their own lives. Walk us through what you've learned here and why you think it's interesting.

**Dave Girouard** (3:35)
Yeah, thanks Patrick. So I only occasionally contribute something to the, I don't know, the blogosphere or whatever you call it. Sometimes I just keep thinking about something until at some point I feel like I have something useful to contribute. So several years back, I really started thinking about how some companies just move much more quickly than others.
And I sort of kept thinking about why that is and how that is and what the implications of that were. I had been at Google for a lot of years and I thought of Google, at least at the time, as a company that even at significant scale was able to move quickly.
So speed as a habit really came down to trying to break down what is it about how some companies do things that create speed and can you habitually do that? And that's where the title comes from. But basically it came down to the idea that most of what we do in business is number one, making decisions, and number two, acting on those decisions.