Upstart’s new millennial CEO, a Yale dropout, thinks AI can make every American 10% richer

In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady interviews incoming Upstart CEO Paul Gu.

The big leadership story: Workers’ job anxiety is poisoning the workplace and undermining AI initiatives.

The markets: Mostly down as uncertainty over Iran lingers.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. How are millennial CEOs viewing AI opportunities? These digital natives have decades ahead of them in leadership roles. Take Paul Gu, who dropped out of Yale to become a Thiel Fellow and co-found Upstart as its chief technology officer in 2012. On May 1, he will step up to succeed Dave Girouard as CEO of the $1 billion-a-year AI lender. I spoke with Gu about his aspirations for his company, his generation, and the future.

On his company: “I think we can build something much, much bigger than what we’ve already built, and I think that it can be one of the most important generational companies of our time. Almost everybody is significantly mispriced in credit, or over-verified in credit. I want one of the answers to that question—how can AI make people’s lives better?—to be: ‘It made me dramatically richer in a direct way, because it radically improved my ability to get low-price credit.’ If you can make money cheaper, everyone just gets richer…You could literally make every single person in the society 10% wealthier if you just moved the cost of credit.”

On millennials: “The really big thing that happened to us was that we really........

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