The longest running one-on-one interview show in all of fintech, since 2013
The longest running one-on-one interview show in all of fintech, since 2013
The longest running one-on-one interview show in all of fintech, since 2013
Aaron Vermut, the CEO of Prosper, has presided over one of the most remarkable turnarounds in this industry’s short history. I have been wanting to get him on the podcast for some time and we were finally able to have a chat last week. In this extended interview he talks about the challenges of building Prosper, the latest developments and his vision for the future.
Rohit Arora, the CEO and Co-Founder of Biz2Credit has been quietly building one of the leading small business lending platforms in this country. If you haven’t heard their name much I can assure you that is going to change very soon. They have issued over $1.2 billion in small business loans to date and will do well over a billion dollars in loans in 2015.
Scott Langmack has been around P2P lending almost since the beginning. He first met Lending Club founder and CEO, Renaud Laplanche, back in 2007 and he became one of the largest investors on the platform as well as an equity investor in 2008. He started the very first fund in the space back in 2009 and he also produced an excellent educational webinar series. This series of videos formed the foundation of my knowledge when I started studying this industry.
This episode of the Lend Academy Podcast features Matt Burton, the CEO and Co-Founder of Orchard. Orchard has quickly become one of the leading companies in the marketplace lending space, developing the ecosystem that connects institutional investors with platforms quickly and easily. Because Matt talks to both platforms and investors on a daily basis he has a very interesting perspective on the whole industry.
Cormac Leech is our first ever repeat guest on the Lend Academy Podcast, he was also our featured guest on Podcast 8 back in March. Cormac is one of the only investment analysts who is dedicated to the peer to peer lending space and he is also one of the true thought leaders in our industry.
Brendan Ross is the founder and president of Direct Lending Investments which is the general partner of a fund focused on high-yield, short term small business loans. I am an early investor in Brendan’s fund and last year I profiled Brendan’s fund. His fund has grown a great deal since its launch almost two years ago and is an important part of the marketplace lending ecosystem today.
Jared Hecht and Brayden McCarthy are two of the smartest young minds in our industry. They are both executives at Fundera; Jared is the CEO and Co-Founder and Brayden is the Head of Strategy and Policy. Fundera is a platform that helps small business owners evaluate different loan options by providing easy access to these options along with transparency and education of this often onerous process.
In this edition of the Lend Academy Podcast we have someone quite a bit different than our typical guest. Jonathan Morris is a banker, but he is not your conservative banker who works at a big bank, he is very much an innovative and forward thinking banker. His bank, Titan Bank, was one of the first banks to invest on the Lending Club platform. They started in June of 2013 so they already have some track record with their Lending Club investments.
For many years the p2p lending industry in this country has been dominated by two platforms: Lending Club and Prosper. Dave Girouard, the CEO and Co-Founder of Upstart and guest on this edition of the podcast, wants to change that. Upstart began with a unique lending idea called Income Sharing Agreements but earlier this year they pivoted to offer an unsecured loan product very similar to the other p2p platforms.
SoFi has been somewhat of a quiet achiever in the p2p lending industry. But they have been breaking a lot of new ground over the past few months. In this edition of the Lend Academy Podcast I talk with Mike Cagney, the co-founder and CEO of SoFi. I came away from this interview so impressed with what SoFi is doing. They are executing incredibly well and have many new tricks up their sleeve.