By Steve Holt

Kenneth Lin is an optimist’s optimist. It’s a characteristic he’s called upon to build a personal finance product now used by more than 120 million people in three countries. Lin’s also keenly aware it’s easy to say “no,” and a single “no” can stop an idea in its tracks.

“It literally takes 100 yesses to build something,” says Lin (CAS’98), CEO of Credit Karma, the financial technology company he founded in 2007 and sold for $8.1 billion in 2020. “Let’s work from a place of optimism and yesses.”

Launched just as the Great Recession was beginning to crush the financial services sector and hobble the livelihoods and 401Ks of many families, Credit Karma almost went out of business or ran out of money “at least three or four times,” according to Lin. But his belief in the tools he built to help consumers take control of their credit and finances—along with a dose of old-fashioned thrift and optimism—has saved the company again and again over the years.

Lin’s story spans the globe, from mainland China to Las Vegas to BU, where he gathered the knowledge that he would use to start the business that now employs 1,300 and serves 120 million members in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada—and clears more than $1 billion in revenue annually.

Lessons From His Parents

Lin and his parents emigrated to the US in 1980 from Guangzou, China, where his father worked in a factory, and settled near relatives in Las Vegas. Lin says he was always intellectually curious and usually entertained himself, whether that meant taking apart electric motors, playing tennis, or immersing himself in Sid Meier strategy games like Civilization on the computer. He now embraces the “dorky, geeky” traits he exhibited as a kid.

But Lin wasn’t living in his own world, and his parents’ hard work made a lasting impact: his father in a Chinese restaurant operated by relatives, and his mother as a cashier and at various other jobs. Out from under Communist China’s one-child restriction, the couple added another mouth to feed: Kenneth’s little brother, Tommy. Seeing his parents struggle to make ends meet—all while navigating a language barrier—influenced his approach to finances.

“I remember how challenging those situations were, and I remember the fights my parents would get into around money,” he recalls. “It was a source of anxiety.”

In choosing a college to attend, Lin sought a new experience in a city far from Vegas at a renowned institution. Financial aid was crucial for the first-generation college student, and BU offered Lin the best package, sparking in him a lifelong commitment to college affordability.  He picked math and economics as his double majors, with statistics immediately catching his attention. A class in econometrics—the use of statistics and quantitative data to develop theories or test existing economic or financial hypotheses—was particularly influential, and he still uses econometric methods to build and analyze economic models in his work today.

“If you talk to anyone at Credit Karma today or anyone at any of my prior jobs, I’m super passionate about digging into the analytics of things. What was the bias here? Did we think it all through?” Lin says.

Gaining Experience

After graduating from BU, Lin had multiple irons in the fire. Each of them, he says, provided important and specific lessons for how he would eventually start and run Credit Karma.

In 1998, he took a day job as an analyst at a Boston-area credit card company. But it was his side hustle—buying, modifying, and reselling PCs and computer parts out of a Comm Ave apartment—that gave him the most satisfaction and laid the groundwork for a lifetime of entrepreneurship.

At the turn of the millennium, Lin was a business consultant at a freewheeling tech startup. Following a splashy initial public offering that made him and his colleagues “paper millionaires,” the tech bubble burst, sending stock values plummeting and the startup itself. Lin says this experience was a lesson in the dangers of excess, overspeculation, and starting a company without sound fundamental principles.

By this time, Lin had opened Adrenaline Zone, a gaming-focused Internet café in Harvard Square that he later expanded to locations in Providence, R.I., and Tempe, Ariz. Subsequent stints at UPromise and E-LOAN embedded him in technology companies solving consumer problems like saving for college and getting a home mortgage. Multilytics Marketing, the data-driven marketing agency Lin founded in 2006, managed more than $40 million in marketing for Wells Fargo, eBay, Liberty Mutual, and other Fortune 500 companies. Lin values these early-career experiences for exposing him to industries that would overlap with Credit Karma and his other passions like college affordability and Internet marketing.

“Having two or three years of experience [in a job] is great to give you a sense of the landscape,” he says. “But [it’s] not so much that you’re fully indoctrinated to the status quo of, ‘this is the way it’s done.’ You can still challenge convention.”

Putting it all Together

In 2007, Lin set out to disrupt an industry that was fraught with inequity and lack of transparency: credit reports. He began building a founding team for a startup that would provide consumers with free access to their credit reports and other financial data—information that, for most people, has been intentionally difficult and expensive to access. 

The Credit Karma platform went live in 2008, at the outset of a three-plus-year economic recession. The need for financial guidance and tools for struggling families had never been greater, but the landscape for startups—especially those in the financial services industry—was bleak. In the darkest days of the recession, Credit Karma lost all 30 of its advertisers, and thus almost all of its revenue, Lin says. Venture capitalists were reticent about investing in the company at a time when banks were shutting their doors. 

“I remember being resigned to, ‘If we go under, we go under, but let’s go out being proud of what we built,’” Lin says. “​​Let’s build a product that people really do love. It almost forced our hand, because we couldn’t focus on the revenue side of the world.” Without revenues, Credit Karma leaned into building an experience customers would come back to again and again. Emails from users saying how the site had helped them get out of debt or save for their first home were what got Credit Karma through, Lin says.

What Lin and his team built was a platform that, following a simple sign-up process, unlocked a suite of personal financial services, all free. Users can monitor their identity, apply for credit cards, shop for a car or home loan, and, of course, track and monitor their credit scores. 

The company again had to dig deep at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. In late February of 2020, Intuit announced it would acquire Credit Karma for $8.1 billion in cash and stock. (The deal wouldn’t close until December.) Days after the announcement, the first cases of coronavirus appeared in the United States, and the financial markets froze. With traditional credit markets flagging, Credit Karma’s bread and butter services were hit hard. Lin and his team began to look for ways they could again best serve their members—who now exceeded 120 million people, all navigating a global health crisis. As local, state, and federal financial assistance programs for families began popping up, Lin and Credit Karma saw an opportunity.

“We said, ‘Wow, this is amazing to see the country and people come together,’” Lin says. “But as a consumer, this is completely overwhelming. How would you ever find your way through all these programs?”

Lin rallied his employees around their newfound mission, and Credit Karma’s engineers indexed public and private COVID assistance programs into the Relief Roadmap: a platform where users could see which programs were available to them, be it a city’s eviction moratorium or a federal stimulus check. “It had a huge benefit to our morale, because we were doing something helpful,” Lin recalls.

Next Steps

As Credit Karma navigates a financial world forever changed by the pandemic, Lin views the company’s role in the marketplace as vital and still relishes his leadership role there.

But the former first-generation undergraduate on financial aid also channels his passion for college affordability and access to his seat on BU’s Board of Trustees, which he joined in 2021. He says his strong bias in that role is toward assisting potential students left behind by an inability to navigate the college application process, let alone afford four years at BU.

Lin is so passionate about education, he even jokes about retiring from Credit Karma to become a high school teacher. “Education is a great equalizer, and education takes a lot of forms,” he says.

But Lin quickly adds that he loves what he does and has no plans to make a change. For him, it’s the passion for changing consumers’ lives that keeps him going. More than half of US millennials, for instance, are now on the platform, according to the company. And Credit Karma is expanding the services available to them, adding, among other things, free online checking and savings accounts.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever have an opportunity to make as much of an impact as I do right now at Credit Karma,” he says. “We have an amazing platform, we have a lot of users, and we have an opportunity to change a very important industry for the better for consumers.”