Empower's Warren Hogarth: "Giving credit to 100 million people"
The Times Tech Podcast
Will Morley
4.9 • 654 Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2022
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Warren Hogarth, founder of Empower, to talk about solving the credit score quandary (3:20), how his struggle to buy a car planted a seed for the company (6:20), tapping in to bank account data (8:05), his first job shoveling poop (13:00), trying his hand at fuel cell technology (14:40), then doing a fintech startup (15:50), joining the legendary venture firm Sequoia Capital (18:00), not investing in Lyft (19:55), launching Empower (21:50), the problem with credit scoring (28:05), learning how fintechs got built at Sequoia (31:10), raising $150 million after staying lean for years (34:10), completely automating credit approval (34:30), keeping an eye on employment amid economic turmoil (36:35), and operating remote-first (39:50).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Yo, technology. |
| 0:02.9 | What is it all about? |
| 0:04.5 | I literally shoveled shit, like horse shit out of stables and what have you, threw it into bags and, you know, sold those bags for a dollar a bag as like one of my first jobs. |
| 0:12.6 | That's a fertilizer. |
| 0:14.3 | Yeah. |
| 0:14.9 | So your first job was selling shit. |
| 0:18.0 | Yeah. |
| 0:18.7 | That's fantastic. |
| 0:19.9 | That might be the best first job we've ever had. And the five years of this podcast. That might be the best first job we've ever had. |
| 0:21.8 | And the five years of this podcast, that might be the best first job I've heard. |
| 0:25.8 | So, congrats. |
| 0:46.5 | Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley Your Weekly Dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech. This week, we are talking credit, specifically the credit score, that one number that is so utterly central to modern life, |
| 0:56.4 | it's what allows you to afford a car or not, to purchase a house or not. |
| 1:01.0 | And I don't know about you, but I've had moments when my score has dipped for whatever reason. |
| 1:05.7 | Sometimes I know why. |
| 1:06.6 | A lot of times I don't. |
| 1:07.6 | And all of a sudden life gets much more expensive or I suddenly am unable to afford something |
| 1:11.9 | or get just outright denied a good or a service. |
| 1:16.5 | And what is weird is just how primitive the credit score is still in 2022, especially for people |
| 1:22.3 | on the edges of the system. |
| 1:24.2 | So here's an amazing fact for you. |
| 1:26.3 | The 250 eligible people, really adults in America, |
... |
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