There have been over 100 posts since the market closed yesterday. Here are a few of them (in their entirety):
“Misleading title and silly article… Zillow’s failure doesn’t imply that AI as a tool is questionable. There is no content here.”
“Dang man…I thought you were talking about today’s earnings…Haven’t checked, but very misleading…”
“https://ir.upstart.com/static-files/c64de42c-972e-4b0e-b5dc-…… Just now saw it here, but not seen in my usual lookups, so posting this here.”
“Well, I suppose, this was the worst case scenario.”
“The presentation looks to me that it will be a very positive call, more so than the numbers.”
“- called out small/medium business lending as an opportunity in 2022 - will be investing in 2022 for mortgage lending…will take time for this to come to fruition, but calling this out now to prepare investors”
“These were pretty great results, but of course the expectations were hyper-inflated. I think it will bounce back fairly quickly, at least part-way.”
“Has the story changes? Have they dissapointed? If not, then one should probably buy more shares now. I’m curious to what you all think. 71% beat on EPS. Thats pretty good.”
“Doing this live on the call but I heard reason for the q4 improvement / The model improving will drive future growth / Had a fraud prevention problem in Q3”
“Sanjay replied to the Barclays analyst that their guidance is based on what they see currently and that as they have said before their growth is driven by model improvements that can be choppy. My interstation is that we should see an growth improvement next q.”
“Sanjay also mentioned opportunities they expect with new products, which I took to mean Auto loans.”
“Can anyone explain what exactly they mean by the models improving? I didn’t fully understand. Do they need to train the model for each banking partner?”
“It’s a S/W term, Machine learning is based on the model, the more data ML program consumes more intelligently it can predict, this is called training the model. So with wider customer base, model is improving every day.”
“The math seems right but the question of if it’s a “dip-buying opportunity” is complex. It depends on how much the street was expecting this quarter to be up after the 1000% blowout. A dip from $400 is definitely happening. What is fair value now is much harder!”
“If you have a model that is completely autonomous, and the information for that profile was purchased on the dark web, does the model issue the proceeds and allow for a fraudulent loan to be executed? Additional fraud checks would be needed if this is something that was out of hand (even marginally impacting numbers). Speculation above. Beware.”
“I wish there’s more clarity on the fraud issue. How that affects their fully automated loan, going from 71% to 67%”
“My understanding is that the model can have a higher loan acceptance rate as the growing portfolio base builds a deeper pool of information, metrics and trends which AI can work with. So growth accelerates as the model improves”
The most amazing thing? All of these above happened in the first 90 minutes after the market closed.
Nowhere in the 100+ posts is a post from Saul, Gaucho, Muji, etc. Do you know why? If they’re like me it’s because they don’t even want to waste their time reading all this, much less trying to respond to it! PEOPLE: THIS IS NOT TWITTER. ONE LINER POSTS ARE EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN HERE! MOST OF YOU KNOW THIS! SERIOUSLY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL THIS BOARD?
Seriously, I’m not going to give my thoughts about Upstart, because I had to spend my time doing this. And there is no way any board manager needs to spend her/his time deleting all these posts, because there are way too many of them. Please, please stop posting one liners. If someone posts a question like “What did Sanjay mean by this 30 seconds ago on the conference call?” PLEASE IGNORE IT. If your post is less than a paragraph, PLEASE DO NOT POST IT. EVEN IF YOU ARE POSTING A HELPFUL LINK, YOU NEED TO TAKE A FEW SENTENCES TELLING US WHY IT IS WORTH OUR TIME.
Obviously I am frustrated, but I am calm enough to realize I can’t force anyone here to do anything. I am not telling you. I am begging you. Please don’t kill this board.
I also realize this was a reaction to Upstart’s call. But we just can’t react like this, because it crowds out good posts. There were some real good ones in the last 100…but every one-liner post makes the good ones harder to find.
Please no responses to this post. Saul’s rules are clear, and I am just reminding us to follow them.
Bear
Assistant Board Manager (unless I decide to quit)