Where We Started
When Renaud started his first company in 1999, he charged the first few expenses on his credit card. Over the next few months, Renaud had put $20,000 on his card, but was surprised that he was paying 18% interest despite his good credit score. He was too busy to shop around for lower rates and read the fine print. Instead, a few friends offered to lend him the money he needed, at a 10% interest rate.
That loan helped Renaud make critical investments and complete the development of MatchPoint, the contextual search software company that would later become an industry standard and be acquired by Oracle. This experience set the founding principles of Lending Club:
- Most people are paying high interest rates on personal loans and credit cards, because they don't have the time to shop around for better rates and are being inundated with offers which include hidden fees and confusing terms.
- Technology can be used to match lenders with borrowers, and identify connections among people through social networks and online communities. These connections build up trust on the lender side and responsibility on the borrower side.
A few years later, Lending Club was born as a social lending network, combining the latest matching technology with the social benefits of affinity groups and social networks to make person-to-person lending easy, safe and private.
