100M Americans have bad credit or no credit at all. This startup will fix that.

It’s crazy to think that this set of three-digit numbers can divide Americans into two categories: “worthy” or “unworthy.” Credit scoring is imperfect and arguably unfair, excluding far too many people from participating fully in our financial system. Today, we're diving in with Warren Hogarth from Empower

Access to affordable credit isn’t a given for over 100 million people in this country. It’s estimated that 60 million Americans have credit scores below 700, while 45 million are either credit invisible or unscorable.

00:00 Underwriting the next billion
01:12 Solving access to credit
3:28 The power of credit
5:43 Empower’s impact and mission

I’m Garry Tan, venture capitalist and founder at Initialized Capital. We were earliest investors in billion dollar startups like Coinbase and Instacart, and I’m a Forbes Midas List Top 100 venture capitalist in the world. We want these videos to be about helping people build world-class teams and startups that touch a billion people. Our startups have gone on to create more than $200 billion in market value so far, and Initialized has over $3.2B in assets under management.

Please like this video and subscribe to my channel if you want to see more videos like this!

Follow me on Twitter and Instagram so you'll never miss my videos and ideas—

[adibchyy]

Sounds like an interesting concept. I’m sure you and the founder are aware of Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Laureate for bringing about the idea of micro finance and micro credit. Hopefully you can build on what exists at Grameen Bank

[vinoblancoamor]

Damn. This is like bringing the Asian startup idea to the US.
Alternative credit scoring was big in China and spread to South Asia

But now finally coming to the US!?

Seems like it is a good time to do reverse copy idea startups in the US

[Vikram]

Thanks a ton for these kinds of videos, please bring more CEO of companies you have invested, would love to hear about their mission

[LetondAtreides]

So, it's incremental credit for risk mitigation + credit reporting to help build credit for underserved people?

I get the feeling that this is almost in the payday loan niche, but without the insane interest rates that that niche has.

I remember thinking that payday loans should perhaps be offered by government so that they don't become traps for people's lives (if people are definitely going to get those loans...)...

My point in mentioning that is that it might be interesting to build some of this capability to help people who need emergency credit as an offering for governments to leverage... That might also give your company access to more money with which to give out loans.

If nothing else, this feels like an area where you could easily do interesting new things...

[seanjones]

Definitely Impactful concept! Thank you Garry Tan and Empower

[stephanielin]

Great video. Excited to see the impact Empower will have in making credit more inclusive and accessible.

[dgainx]

So, how would Empower have stopped the GFC? Or how would their knowledge base have been able to advise once it started… pretty sure not many people in the industry, with the exception of those involved in the Big Short, would have been able to adequately maneuver the GFC. The founder’s story and mission didn’t align very well in this spotlight. Maybe if he said something like, after his parents lost half of their net worth in the GFC his parents needed better credit to qualify for loans or something…

[jasonturner]

I'm 42 have no debt, Rented for over 15 years, Just inquiries showing on my Credit report, owe no loans but I still have an ok credit score and I pay all my bills. Still can't get over 3000 credit limit. I've paid everything cash unfortunately over the years.

[CoryDAnimates]

This is great also it gets people away from Dave Ramsey odd ball ideas being anti credit score.

[shunnybunny]

We talk shit about China’s social score program. But we are the first one to label people with a number. Now that we see this capitalism labeling is missing some of the population, we are going to build our own social score system. But you know what makes us different than China. We are not going to tell you about it. Pretending that data mining everything we can about you to build a number of you it’s not just a social score.

[PropheticLifestyle]

I downloaded the app. I’m having issues with it. I’ll try it t with my laptop.

[plusalpha]

any difference against upstart or affirm

[rexhinohysa]

WHEN I BUILD MY BILION DOLLARS STARUP
I WILL MEET YOU

[milburgopalomino]

Hi Garry, my name is Milburgo Palomino, Co-Founder of Serouno Sports, we’re creating the next-gen true sport fan focused superapp! Would you be interested in knowing more?