Paul Gu

@ryanjrand Thanks! Surprisingly fun

@paulxgu I very much enjoy the increased frequency of your posts!!

Pure intelligence is overrated as the rate-limiter to getting stuff done at scale. From Anthropic's Head Economist: - AI adoption is high enough in the US to show up in numbers - But it is not reducing jobs - Unless ALL essential inputs get automated, no singularity or plunge in labor share of income "A 10-20x increase in lines of code yielded only a 30% increase in software releases, and no total increase in app usage."

@alexnkruse Yea, more is coming for sure

@paulxgu A ton of code development involves hardware and that has not been looped in yet.

@HunterQThompson For sure. But also every startup I’m an investor in is still hiring 🤷‍♂️

@paulxgu Could this be a product of large organizations being designed in a pre-ai era and now being ill equipped to allow individual high achievers to achieve greater productivity?

@byersblake If AI capex sucking up capital is a bull story, the even bigger bear story would be federal debt. It increased by more than $1T over the last 6 months to ~ $40 trillion, far more than AI capex

rates will continue to rise. this is not a bear signal. it is the reality of capital being sucked into AI capex with a return that far exceeds the cost of capital. x.com/byersblake/sta…

Public markets are supposed to be public. I never realized until we IPO-ed that public companies do hundreds of closed-door meetings with Wall Street analysts and investors every year. While the “material” information is in filings and earnings releases, there is so much value in getting to ask management your most critical questions and hear their thinking directly. I want everyone to have access to that. That’s why we’re doing investor relations on X, and will be looking for more ways to engage with ALL of our shareholders. Come ask us your worst!

Tried two new X products. Money: smoothest banking sign-up I’ve experienced. Plus 6% APY and 3% debit card cash back right now while acquiring users. Grok 4.5: feels like frontier quality at flash model speed. Insane this is one company whose main business is rockets.

@max4c_ @MinimalCompany Both

@paulxgu @MinimalCompany Did you choose this over Gabb or pinwheel because of the e-ink or the physical keyboard?

We got our 5yo a @MinimalCompany phone. Black and white, tactile, low-stim like a kindle, set up with just a texting app for family. She now has a real use to drive her learning of letters. And side effect is I get these amazing messages throughout my work day!

@wubalubb @MinimalCompany Yes

@paulxgu @MinimalCompany Does it do outbound calls to a preset list of contacts only?

@dhunten @MinimalCompany Parental controls + adult family already have accounts. But it could be much better

@paulxgu @MinimalCompany why do it through facebook?

@aliceisplaying I’m hoping autocorrect will fully obsolete the value of learning the “right” spelling of the many non-phonetic exceptions in English.

this is very cute and also it's really interesting to see kids go thru the phase of contending with the insane spelling of the english language

@ira_quint @MinimalCompany Tech for good!

@paulxgu @MinimalCompany such a fantastic idea. instead of restricting ur kids screen time, giving them this seems 10x better!!

@charlesacartron @MinimalCompany 100%, that would’ve been a nonstarter

@paulxgu @MinimalCompany And no scrolling 👍

@HunterQThompson @MinimalCompany Hoping their v2 has a smoother refresh and the form factor is a little comfier in my pocket

@paulxgu @MinimalCompany I love the e-ink display. Tried to make it work for daily driver computer but didn't really work that well.

@HunterQThompson @MinimalCompany This is the way

@paulxgu @MinimalCompany I am unironically buying one of these to use for myself. This is incredible.

@RecurringItems @Tai_Chen_Hsiang Not generally on a lag. But old naming convention had confusing dates. New ones should be clear, e.g. UMI as of June 3rd would mostly impact how we underwrite after that date

@Tai_Chen_Hsiang @paulxgu Related to #1, is the sensitivity of originations to UMI on a lag? If so, what is the lag? If UMI was up 2% MoM in the latest read, is that saying May originations would have been higher by 2-4 appx absent the UMI change? Or is the 2-4% headwind going to be realized later?

We've made a few changes to the Upstart Macro Index. Watch to learn more. If you've got questions about it, reply here and I'll answer tomorrow (7/9) morning. ir.upstart.com/news-releases/…

@lostonebyone No comment on specific guidance, but as it relates to UMI in general: higher UMI = lower volume all else equal, and our strong philosophy here is credit-first and model-first so we wouldn't manually mess with UMI for the sake of volume

@paulxgu 1. We expect the UMI to be between 1.4 and 1.5. If the UMI rises above 1.5, will the Volume decline as it did last year? 2. If the rise in UMI is due to rising oil prices, and we are now clearly seeing a decline in oil prices, will UPST manually reduce the volatility of Volume?