Paul Gu

When he was 6, his parents moved from Hebei, China, to Phoenix, ArizonaArizonaArizona is a state in the southwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Phoenix. Arizona was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1912, as the 48th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 7,151,502.Open the full entry; a 2013 article in Reason states that he came to the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry at the age of six knowing no English.⁠[1][2]

Newsweek’s 2017 article states that his family saw college as the path to upward mobility and that his parents had never heard of Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

The proxy statement that Upstart Holdings, Inc. sent out in April 2025 gives his age as 34 as of April 4, 2025, and the one sent out in April 2026 gives it as 35 as of April 16, 2026; Newsweek’s article of February 2017 describes him as 26.⁠[3][4][1]

He studied economics and computer science at Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry. Newsweek writes that by 2011 he was halfway through his degree; Reason states that he attended Yale for two years, while a 2015 article in Under30CEO states that he left with three years of credits.⁠[4][5][1][2][6]

Upstart’s proxy statement states that in college he led underwriting for two non-profit microlenders and that at 20 he built his first algorithmic trading strategies on the Interactive Brokers API; his author biography on the Financial Planning website likewise says that he began trading algorithmically at 20 and that his background is in quantitative finance.⁠[3][7]

Reason writes that he felt he learned better on his own and was impatient to get into the “real world,” which made the fellowship an easy decision; he described himself as having “a streak for independent thinking” and as preferring to try to beat the system rather than follow instructions.⁠[2]

Upstart’s proxy statement states that in 2011 he worked in risk analysis at D. E. Shaw & Co.D. E. Shaw & Co.D. E. Shaw & Co. (the D. E. Shaw group) is a global investment and technology development firm headquartered in New York. Founded in 1988 by computer scientist David E. Shaw, it was an early pioneer of computational finance and systematic investing, and its businesses span multi-strategy hedge funds, private markets, active equity and multi-asset class strategies. As of September 1, 2026, it had more than US$115 billion in investment and committed capital.Open the full entry (the D. E. Shaw group); his author biography on the Financial Planning website also mentions this work.⁠[3][7]

An article published by Outlook Business in 2017 writes that, like many aspiring entrepreneurs of the time, he was looking for a problem that technology could solve, and that he spent about six months working in New York before settling on one: he knew too many people of his age who were broke, some friends were struggling, and he himself had no credit history and no home to borrow against, so he wondered whether people could lend to him directly, through an online service or an app, without a bank.⁠[8]

Newsweek writes that in March 2011 he was among the finalists who presented to the Thiel Fellowship judges in San Francisco, with an idea for a local-commerce website.⁠[1]

On May 25, 2011, TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry published the list of the first 24 fellows of the Thiel Fellowship, chosen from more than 400 applicants under 20; each was to receive $100,000 from the Thiel Foundation over a two-year tenure, together with mentorship from Peter Thiel’s network. The list places Paul Gu in the “Career Development” group, together with Daniel Friedman, Eric McKay and Dale StephensDale StephensDale Stephens (Dale J. Stephens) is an entrepreneur, author and speaker, the founder of UnCollege, a venture promoting self-directed learning, one of the first Thiel Fellows and the author of Hacking Your Education.Open the full entry.⁠[9]

A Yale Daily News article of May 26, 2011, writes that he was a member of Yale University’s Class of 2013 and one of four Yale students in the first class of fellows; with Daniel Friedman he was working with Eric McKay, a graduate of Arizona State University, to change the way companies recruit, gathering feedback from people who know each applicant and combining it into “reputation graphs.” He described resumes and interviews as “very rough heuristics.” They planned to start full-time work on the project in August, and he and Friedman expected eventually to return to Yale to finish their degrees; he called the fellowship a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”⁠[10]

Newsweek writes that the fellowship provided $100,000 over two years for him to start a company with a classmate, on condition that he leave college. When he informed his parents that he wanted to drop out to take it, they were angry and confused; he accepted it despite their objections and his own view that his chances of success were low, saying that the safe path he had been on left little room to grow and that he wanted bigger challenges.⁠[1]

Under30CEO writes that, although others had left Yale before him, he was the first to leave it to join the Thiel Fellowship’s “20 Under 20” program. Upstart’s press release and proxy statement also record that he joined the Thiel Fellowship, and Tearsheet describes him as a member of its inaugural class.⁠[6][5][4][11]

Newsweek writes that he and his Yale classmate and business partner Daniel Friedman later parted ways amicably, and that after a period of pitching ideas without a clear product he grew frustrated and questioned why he had left school.⁠[1]

In 2012 he co-founded Upstart with Dave Girouard and Anna Counselman, and he has held various roles at the company since April 2012; Fortune’s 2026 article writes that he co-founded Upstart as its chief technology officer. Banking Dive writes that this was less than a year after he left Yale University to join the inaugural class of Thiel Fellows; Anna Counselman is a former GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry executive.⁠[5][3][12][13]

A 2021 First Round Review article relates that soon after leaving Google, Dave Girouard was introduced to him and spoke with him by phone, when he was a young New Yorker building something similar; Girouard recalled that he already knew he was in Peter Thiel’s “20 under 20” fellowship. He sent Girouard his entire financial model, built as an Excel macro, which Girouard took as a sign of trust; he then flew out on a Friday for half a day to test whether they could work together, flew back to New York, and on the following Monday returned to the Bay Area with his belongings.⁠[14]

Commenting on his appointment as chief executive, Dave Girouard said: “When we co-founded the company, Paul was barely old enough to drink – and I was older than his parents.”⁠[13]

Under30CEO writes that he met his two co-founders through friends while he was working on the first version of the income-prediction model that Upstart came to use; he said: “We were all excited about getting young people access to capital at fair and reasonable rates.”⁠[6]

Newsweek writes that after teaming up with two Google Enterprise executives he abandoned his original idea, and that the three raised a $1.75 million seed round for a lending platform through which investors could back young people; the platform evolved into Upstart, which uses algorithms he developed to assess a borrower’s earning potential and other factors instead of relying on traditional credit scores. By its third year Upstart had raised a $6 million Series A and had 10 employees; he found a significant share of its investors through fellowship networks, and Thiel’s funds also invested in Upstart.⁠[1]

The Outlook Business article writes that, helped by connections from the Thiel Fellowship, the team raised money within a few weeks in the spring of 2012, with Founders FundFounders FundFounders Fund is a venture capital firm founded in San Francisco in 2005 by Peter Thiel and his former PayPal colleagues Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Run by partners who were entrepreneurs themselves, it argues that founders should keep more control and is known for betting on difficult technology projects in areas such as space, defense, and artificial intelligence. It was Palantir’s first institutional investor, has invested in SpaceX many times since 2008, and its other notable investments include Facebook, Airbnb, Stripe, and Anduril; as of March 2026 it had raised nine early-stage funds and four growth funds.Open the full entry among the investors; Dave Girouard had been president of Google Enterprise. Paul Gu supplied an algorithm that used factors such as grade point average, career goals and past internships to predict future earnings, and seven other student entrepreneurs joined the beta test; the team worked in incubator space first at Google Ventures and later at Kleiner Perkins on Sand Hill Road.⁠[8]

The article writes that he held that the key question about a borrower is not whether they can pay but how seriously they take their obligation; he believed that people who were diligent in school tended to keep their commitments, that data-driven algorithms could predict reliability better than subjective judgment and could even assess character, and he gave a prepaid wireless phone number as an example of a possible sign of unsteady income.⁠[8]

A Yale Daily News article of January 30, 2012, lists him as a member of Yale University’s Class of 2014 and one of the university’s four Thiel Fellows. He said that time away from school lets a person “truly explore his or her interests” and that fellowships such as the Thiel Fellowship give students’ ventures “legitimacy and support”; his main goal was to grow as a person by learning entrepreneurial skills and to test how well he could succeed without academic pressures.⁠[15]

Reason’s article of November 10, 2013, writes that Upstart let investors fund an individual’s education in exchange for a share of that person’s future earnings. Drawing on his background in quantitative finance and economics, he said that a person’s career is the largest financial risk they face, one that conventional diversification of assets ignores; student loans take no account of future income, so people in low-demand fields may borrow heavily and gain little, whereas income-sharing contracts change the incentives, since Upstart can raise more money for people with higher projected incomes and its backers have reason to help them succeed.⁠[2]

He conceded that subsidized federal loans are cheaper than private options but argued that Upstart is less risky and more flexible for borrowers than any debt; to the charge that the model resembles indentured servitude he replied that investors do not control what the people they fund do, and that Upstart payments vary with income, unlike the fixed monthly payments of debt, which push people toward certain careers. He also argued that investing in individuals’ incomes is much less risky than investing in companies, especially early-stage ones, because people find new jobs when companies fail.⁠[2]

Under30CEO’s article of January 26, 2015, writes that he specializes in statistics and finance and began by using data to build a model that predicts an individual’s future income; Upstart was then an online lending marketplace for millennial borrowers that assessed credit risk with statistical models analyzing education and work history, and it had raised $21 million and originated more than $40 million in loans. The article adds that the cost of Yale was not the reason he left.⁠[6]

He argued against starting a company for its own sake and urged founders to focus on a problem they care deeply about, suggesting that before starting they ask: “If this weren’t going to be a big and successful business, would it still be interesting to me to work on this?” On leaving school he said there is no blanket recommendation: school is valuable for most people, but for those who thrive independently or are committed to an idea, waiting may cost too much.⁠[6]

He has been a member of Upstart’s board of directors since April 2015; the 2025 proxy statement nominated him for re-election as a Class II director for a term running to the 2028 annual meeting, and the 2026 proxy statement lists his current term as expiring in 2028.⁠[3][4]

Newsweek’s article of February 22, 2017, writes that Upstart had by then raised more than $53 million and employed 100 people, and that he was one of 25 of the first 43 Thiel Fellows who had stayed out of college to work on their own companies or projects. His parents eventually accepted that he would never earn an Ivy LeagueIvy LeagueThe Ivy League is an intercollegiate athletic conference comprising eight universities in the northeastern United States: Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University. It was formally established in 1954, with league competition beginning in the 1956–57 academic year. Its athletic framework emphasizes student status, academic standards, and financial aid based on need. The name is also commonly used collectively for the eight member institutions.Open the full entry diploma.⁠[1]

On December 15, 2020, Upstart announced the pricing of its initial public offering at $20 a share, with 9,000,000 shares offered by the company and 3,015,690 by selling stockholders; trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol UPST began on December 16.⁠[16]

First Round Review’s article of January 2021 writes that the three co-founders stayed together from the founding through the IPO; at the founding he was the data science and technology lead, and at the time of the article he was leading the data science and product teams.⁠[14]

Upstart’s 2025 proxy statement states that in February 2022 the company granted him a performance-based restricted stock unit (RSU) award that would be earned and vest on the achievement of certain stock price targets, and that at the time of grant it was intended to be his primary compensation through 2029. Following significant macroeconomic changes in 2022 and the significant decline in Upstart’s stock price, the award was canceled in 2023; the proxy statement says that he will never benefit from it, although it must still be disclosed.⁠[3]

Valued by Monte Carlo simulation, the award appears in the Summary Compensation Table at $51,760,676; his total compensation for 2022 is given as $51,846,009, including a salary of $80,833.⁠[3]

The proxy statement that Upstart sent out in April 2025 lists him as co-founder and chief technology officer and gives his 2024 compensation as a salary of $450,000, option awards of $1,623,064, stock awards of $1,575,926, non-equity incentive plan compensation of $749,694 and other compensation of $4,500, for a total of $4,403,184; his total for 2023 was $5,724,681, including a salary of $425,000.⁠[3]

As of March 1, 2025, he beneficially owned 1,399,261 shares of Upstart common stock, or 1.46% of the shares outstanding: 842,445 shares held of record by him and 556,816 shares subject to options exercisable within 60 days.⁠[3]

Tearsheet published a podcast interview with him on October 22, 2025; its introduction states that Upstart’s model training data points had grown from zero in 2013 to 91 million, and the conversation covered the company’s 2025 roadmap, including a push to increase its AI advantage tenfold and to reach GAAP profitability.⁠[11]

On February 10, 2026, Upstart announced that he would become chief executive officer on May 1, 2026; at the time he oversaw all of the company’s product, engineering and machine learning functions and the general management of its emerging auto and home businesses. Dave Girouard would step down as chief executive, remain executive chairman of the board and serve as a special advisor to the chief executive and the leadership team.⁠[5]

In the release he said: “Credit is one of the cornerstone industries of civilization,” adding that changing it is hard but can be unimaginably impactful. Dave Girouard said that the two had been building Upstart side by side for almost 14 years and called the transition “a rare opportunity to have a founder-led company for decades to come.”⁠[5][13]

Banking Dive writes that Grant Schneider, Upstart’s former vice president of machine learning, rejoined the company to take over his role as technology chief; on an earnings call, Dave Girouard said that he “can’t imagine a succession plan more thoroughly considered or executed.” On the same call Paul Gu said that Upstart had grown rapidly in secured products and prime borrowers, segments with lower take rates but much larger markets. The article adds that Upstart’s share price had fallen about 19.5% since the earnings and the coming leadership transition were announced.⁠[13]

Upstart’s 2026 proxy statement states that in February 2026 the compensation committee, after consulting Compensia, approved a performance-based restricted stock unit award to him in connection with his appointment as chief executive, with an initial intended value of $37.0 million, eligible to vest in the first quarter of 2030; performance is measured by four-year total stockholder return relative to the companies in the F-Prime Fintech Index.⁠[4]

The proxy statement that Upstart sent out in April 2026 states that his base salary was raised to $485,000 in 2025, an increase of 7.8%; the Summary Compensation Table lists for 2025 a salary of $482,083, option awards of $1,999,396, stock awards of $1,955,498, non-equity incentive plan compensation of $408,337 and other compensation of $4,500, for a total of $4,849,814.⁠[4]

The same table gives his 2024 salary as $447,917 and his 2024 total as $4,401,101, and his 2023 salary as $390,833 and his 2023 total as $5,690,514, figures that differ from the 2024 and 2023 salaries and totals in the 2025 proxy statement; a footnote explains that prior-year base salary amounts were updated from the amounts in prior proxy statements, which reflected the base salary in effect at year-end, to reflect the base salary actually paid. The base salary table of the same proxy statement gives his 2024 base salary as $450,000.⁠[4]

As of March 31, 2026, he beneficially owned 1,742,598 shares of Upstart common stock, or 1.81% of the shares outstanding, comprising 1,008,116 shares held of record by him, 44,930 shares held by The Paul Xinquan Gu 2021 Gifting Trust, of which he is a trustee, 80,000 shares held of record by JECCO, LLC, of which he is a managing member, 20,000 shares held by The Gu Qiao Family Trust, of which he is a managing member, 573,419 shares subject to options exercisable within 60 days and 16,133 shares subject to restricted stock units vesting and settling within 60 days.⁠[4]

In its CEO Daily newsletter of April 24, 2026, Fortune published Diane Brady’s interview with him, describing Upstart as a $1 billion-a-year AI lender. He said: “I think we can build something much, much bigger than what we’ve already built”; arguing that almost everyone is mispriced or over-verified in credit, he said: “You could literally make every single person in the society 10% wealthier if you just moved the cost of credit.”⁠[12]

He said that society “really screwed up” on access to housing, which had become “outright impossible” over the previous five years, and that millennials’ economic anxiety comes largely from interest rates and housing; he considered public pessimism about AI partly justified, since early uses had centered on entertainment and betting, and said: “If we do our job, one of the concrete counterexamples will be that AI made their financial lives meaningfully better.”⁠[12]

He also argued that the next generation’s main problem will be “a crisis of meaning” rather than one of economics: universal basic income might cover financial needs, but people also need to feel that they contribute meaningfully to society’s success and production.⁠[12]

On May 1, 2026, he succeeded Dave Girouard as chief executive officer of Upstart.⁠[4][12][17]

On May 5, 2026, Upstart released its first-quarter 2026 results with comments from him as co-founder and chief executive: total revenue was $308.2 million, up 44% year over year, and revenue from fees was $277.1 million, up 49%. He said that originations had grown 61% year over year in the quarter and that the company had advanced its AI models, applied for a national bank charter and grown rapidly in home and auto lending, adding: “As I begin my tenure as CEO, my focus is straightforward” — to build a high-growth, capital-efficient business that delivers strong long-term returns.⁠[17]

First Round Review writes that Dave Girouard describes him as having a “true North, seek-the-truth approach,” calls him brilliant but very understated, and once urged him to stop being so deferential to himself in fundraising meetings; a former early employee summed him up as “seek the truth.” At a practice pitch for the Series B before the partners of First Round CapitalFirst Round CapitalVenture capital firm.Open the full entry, one partner’s feedback was that the founders were smart but “no Pied Pipers,” which Girouard admitted was accurate.⁠[14]

Under30CEO writes that he applies analytical thinking to his own life, writing a three- to four-page self-review every couple of months that covers his strengths, weaknesses and plans for improvement.⁠[6]

His author biography on the Financial Planning website states that he was named to the Silicon Valley Business Journal’s “40 under 40.”⁠[7]

Upstart: Official website: https://www.upstart.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[19]

D. E. Shaw & Co.: Official website: https://www.deshaw.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[20]