Simon Cunningham is the publisher at LendingMemo.com one of the few sites like Lend Academy that is 100% devoted to p2p lending education and analysis. Simon and I have complementary approaches to the industry and we both believe in collaboration rather than competition, so I am delighted he agreed to come on the podcast for the first show of 2014.

I first corresponded with Bryce Mason about two years ago; he reached out to me soon after he developed his credit model for investing in Lending Club. He was one of the first people to do a rigorous statistical analysis of completed Lending Club loans. He produced an interesting chart on default rates that I shared in early 2012. Bryce has also written a couple of guest posts on Lend Academy this year.

In the second episode of the Lend Academy podcast, I am excited to welcome Larry Ludwig of Investor Junkie to the show. I have been following Larry’s blog ever since I started blogging about p2p lending because he was one of the few people writing about p2p lending when I started.

In the first Lend Academy podcast I interview Michael Phillips, the founder of NickelSteamroller.com. If you are a serious p2p investor you will probably have spent some time on his site before – if you haven’t you should go there right now and do some research. It is the premier p2p lending statistics site for Lending Club investors and he has been slowly adding support for Prosper. But Nickel Steamroller has not had any major updates in a long time. Having said that, as Michael confirmed in this interview there are some big changes in the works. I