Forbes has announced Upstart Holdings’ co-founder and CEO, Dave Girouard who is also an ex-Google employee, as the latest tech expert to become a billionaire.
According to Forbes, he is now worth of $1.3billion. This comes after his company’s shares increased by a whopping 89% on a single day trading to make him a billionaire within 24 hours.
He was a former president of Google Enterprise Services where he built Google’s cloud app business worldwide.
Girouard founded Upstart, a marketplace lender that offers personal loans using non-traditional variables such as education and employment, to predict creditworthiness.
After the market closed on Wednesday, the San Mateo, Calif.-based firm reported fourth-quarter earnings that nearly tripled average analyst expectations and posted full-year 2020 revenue of $233 million, 42% higher than in 2019. The company now sports an eye-popping market capitalization of $8.3 billion, or 20 times trailing revenues.
“Last quarter was monumental for us as we took the company public in the midst of a historically complex and challenging time for the world,” Girouard said Wednesday evening during Upstart’s inaugural earnings call. An Upstart spokesperson said Girouard was unavailable for a Thursday interview.
While speaking to the thenativesociety.com, Girouard shared insights on how he founded Upstart and his vision for the company. He pointed out why and how he made millennials the target market for Upstart and how it worked perfectly.
“My co-founders and I started the company based on the observation that people in their 20s don’t really have access to credit on fair terms. They’re considered “thin files” because they don’t have a lot of history using credit. So it’s kind of a catch-22 — how can you get good credit if you haven’t used credit? But we came from Google, where we used a whole ton of data to make hiring decisions for this same demographic — where somebody went to school, what they studied, how they performed academically.
So we figured that this type of information could not only be used to make hiring decisions but also to make credit decisions. If you’re young, your educational background is critical to understanding your employment potential — and conversely your unemployment potential. And that information helps us better understand the relative risk of our borrowers,” he said.
Upstart received very robust funding from VC firms and Google. According to Forbes, Upstart received a sum of $160 million from Google Ventures, Third Point, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, etc.
