The uniform did not fit the picture Chantal Rapport had formed of management consulting. There was a yellow safety coat instead of a pressed suit, cable cutters instead of a laptop, and a truck instead of a conference room. For the first six weeks of her consulting career, she trained undercover beside telecom technicians. The assignment put a young business graduate where service promises either became real or came apart: at a customer's front door.
Rapport watched wires get fixed, drank Dunkin' Donuts with crews, and spoke with more than 300 customers. She heard frustration when a product failed, disappointment when the delivered service did not match the expectation, and relief when the connection finally worked. The details gathered on the trucks eventually changed a large quantitative model her team was building. What looked small on a spreadsheet could shape the whole experience in a home.
Rapport's early telecom fieldwork supplied context the transaction data could not: what customers expected, where the process broke, and how the fix actually felt.
Years later, Rapport would lead marketing and growth at a company built around machine learning. It is a satisfying arc, but not because the human work was replaced by algorithms. The continuity is more interesting. She kept working on the seam between what the data says and what the customer lives.
Three hats and one useful habit
The field assignment took place at SATOV Consultants, where Rapport worked after earning an Honors Business Administration degree from Ivey Business School at Western University in 2014. She described bringing three perspectives into each case-team meeting: customer, technician, and consultant. One could name the emotion, one knew the operational constraint, and one had to turn both into an implementable recommendation.
That is a useful way to read the career that followed. Rapport did not stay in a single marketing lane. Her early work included enterprise auditing at KPMG and management consulting for banking and telecommunications clients. At MuleSoft, she worked in sales operations and finance, designing global field-sales strategy while the enterprise software company scaled toward its IPO. Each role offered another seat inside the growth machine: controls, customers, distribution, and the economics tying them together.
There was an entrepreneurial rehearsal at Ivey, too. Rapport was one of four students behind Tokynn, a mobile concept for sending restaurant and bar gift codes. The venture appeared in the school's 2013-14 entrepreneurship report as an example of students pushing classroom ideas into pricing, marketing, and expansion decisions. It was a small project beside the public-company roles to come, yet it added another vantage point: the awkward work of making a product understandable before anyone has a reason to care.
Upstart recruited Rapport in 2017. Her first major remit was strategic partnerships, one of the lending platform's acquisition channels. The job was not simply promotion. It sat at the intersection of borrowers, capital, financial institutions, and the platform connecting them. Under her leadership, the channel brought billions of dollars in loan originations to Upstart.
By June 2020 she was vice president of growth. That year added an unusually public operating test: Upstart went public in December, and Rapport oversaw the marketing around the IPO. In 2021 she became chief marketing officer. Forbes later put her in its 2022 30 Under 30 class for Marketing & Advertising, noting her use of Upstart's own AI and machine-learning expertise to reshape customer acquisition. She reached the C-suite before 30, but the speed makes more sense when viewed as accumulated range rather than a sudden leap.
The scale arrived quickly. In 2021, her organization had grown beyond 100 people, and the company's third-quarter marketing budget reached $87.1 million. Upstart reported $194 million in revenue for the second quarter that year, more than ten times the figure from the same quarter a year earlier. Those numbers belong to a specific market moment, not a permanent trajectory, but they show the managerial change hidden inside a title. The job had become allocating capital, building a team, and deciding which signals deserved belief while the business moved at public-company speed.
“The company is brand, and brand is performance.”Chantal Rapport
The brand escapes the marketing department
Rapport's view of brand is almost aggressively cross-functional. She has said she cannot comprehend the idea that the marketing organization or CMO owns it. Her point is practical: a loan applicant meets the brand in a rate, a wait, a form, a decision, and a service interaction. The ad is one touchpoint among many. Marketing can sharpen the promise, but the company has to deliver it.
This collapses the old quarrel between brand and performance marketing. Rapport argues they are interrelated and impossible to free from one another. A campaign changes what a customer expects from the product. A product experience changes how the next campaign performs. Brand may lower acquisition costs, lift retention, or improve lifetime value; performance activity teaches the market what sort of company is behind the click.
The philosophy fits the category. Credit asks a consumer to hand over private information, accept a judgment, and trust a process that can carry years of consequences. Upstart positions AI as a way for banks and credit unions to evaluate risk and automate decisions. Rapport's task is to translate a technical system into a customer experience that feels legible and dependable.
At Upstart's inaugural AI Day in New York in May 2025, she presented the company's case for becoming what it calls a “category of one.” Her portion linked three pieces: proprietary AI, a marketplace for capital, and a consumer brand built by product delivery. Her argument was that a durable brand does not come from a large commercial alone. It comes from offering better rates and a process that feels materially faster and easier than the one borrowers expect.
The presentation also revealed how her remit had widened. The partnerships leader who once worked on a single acquisition channel was now explaining the connective tissue among underwriting technology, capital supply, product range, and consumer expectation. Marketing, in that frame, is less a layer placed on top of the business than a way of making the business legible. The claim still has to be tested in each application and interaction. Rapport's old three-hat habit - customer, operator, strategist - scales neatly to that problem.
Creativity with an economics lesson
None of this turns marketing into a spreadsheet exercise. Rapport still makes room for the physical jolt of a well-made billboard and expects generative AI tools to make creative ideas faster to produce. Her distinction is between faster output and memorable work. The tool can shorten the path from concept to artifact. It cannot decide what deserves a person's attention.
She also talks about time with the bluntness of someone who has managed both budgets and growth targets. Money, she has said, can be made again. Time cannot. That makes the patient work of brand harder to defend and more important to explain. The internal pitch has to connect creativity with terms the rest of the company already uses: revenue, retention, acquisition cost, trust. A brand investment cannot live forever on vibes; a performance dashboard cannot account for every reason someone chose to click.
“The most finite resource we all have is time. It's not money. I can make money. I can't make time.”Chantal Rapport
Her public conversations return repeatedly to combination: creativity and data, personalization and privacy, debate and decision, brand and performance. Even the telecom story carries the same structure. The customer interview did not invalidate the model. It found the detail that made the model more useful.
That human language surfaces in how she speaks about credit as well. In 2025, commenting on a survey about Americans asking for financial support, Rapport called the right support “a major unlock.” Her emphasis was on what becomes possible when people feel understood by a trustworthy financial partner: attention can move back toward work, family, and community. It is an expansive promise for any lender or marketplace. It also gives the marketing brief a clear test. Speed matters, but so do comprehension and trust.
The promise has to survive contact
Rapport's career has unfolded inside companies selling systems most people never want to think about for long: audit controls, enterprise integration, telecom infrastructure, consumer credit. Marketing these systems calls for translation, but translation can easily become simplification. Her answer has been to move in both directions, closer to the customer and deeper into the operating machinery.
That approach now operates at a larger scale. As Upstart's Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President of Growth, she leads across brand, acquisition, and retention. The title joins two functions companies often separate. In her telling, they were connected all along.
The yellow coat is the memorable detail, but the cable cutters are the better symbol. They suggest work done at the place where the promise either connects or fails. Rapport's path from those service calls to AI lending is less a reinvention than a widening of the same assignment: understand the system, listen to the person using it, and make sure the story told in the market can survive contact with the product.