For the last several months the LendIt team has been hard at work putting together our flagship conference. LendIt USA 2016, to be held in San Francisco on April 11 and 12, will be the largest event in the history of the online lending industry.
For the uninitiated allow me to give you some background. LendIt was the first online lending conference (I am one of the co-founders), launching in 2013, when 350 people attended the inaugural event in New York City. Since then we have held successful conferences in the UK, China as well as the U.S. Our 2015 event in New York had 2,500 attendees and we are expecting many more than that in San Francisco next month.
Huge Speaker Lineup Headlined by Peter Thiel
We will have well over 300 speakers at LendIt USA 2016 with once again Renaud Laplanche, the CEO and founder of Lending Club, leading off proceedings on the first morning with his fourth annual opening keynote. We will also have the always popular Ron Suber of Prosper doing his annual keynote that will round out the opening morning.
Be sure to not stay out too late on the first night as bright and early on our second morning we will feature renowned entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel as the opening keynote.
We will also be featuring presentations from Al Goldstein of Avant, Noah Breslow of OnDeck, Sam Hodges of Funding Circle, Kenneth Lin of Credit Karma, Matt Burton of Orchard and many more. In fact the CEO of every major company in the industry will be on the stage at LendIt. Rounding out our keynote speakers will be the CEO and President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, John C. Williams.
The Most Extensive Agenda Ever Created
Here is how the agenda is going to work. In the morning we will be featuring all the major speakers on our main stage in the big ballroom. In the afternoon the ballroom will split in two for two main tracks and there will be many other tracks available. You can see the complete preliminary agenda here.
We know that everyone comes to LendIt with slightly different goals. With that in mind we are featuring many themed rooms in the afternoon as well as several deep dive tracks. All in all attendees will have 14 different deep options for content on both afternoons.
We will have deep drive tracks for small business lending, consumer lending, real estate, structured products and regulation. Our themed rooms will cover credit and underwriting, fund managers, wealth management, alternative lending, bank partnerships, international, sales and marketing, technology and operations. There will also be a company demo track.
PitchIt @ LendIt Features the Leading Startups our Industry
One of my favorite parts of LendIt is our PitchIt @ LendIt event. We received 93 applications this year (almost triple last year) and we will be culling that number down to 30 semi-finalists in the coming days. From there our list of eight finalists will be selected with each company doing a short pitch on the main stage at LendIt.
The finalists will be grilled by our esteemed judges, all of whom have a great deal of experience investing in startups: Frank Rotman from QED Investors, David Weiden from Khosla Ventures, Nick Shalek from Ribbit Capital and Chris Bishko from Omidyar Technology Ventures.
New this year is our mentoring program. We have a fantastic group of volunteers who will be working closely with the finalists in the lead up to LendIt to help hone their pitches on the big day.
Two Tiers of Tickets
Also new this year is our two-tiered ticketing system. We have an All-Access pass that obviously gives you access to the entire conference. We also have a less expensive Expo and Workshop pass that provides access to all sessions other than the main ballroom as well as the expo floor.
Get 15% Off With the Lend Academy Discount
As with every LendIt conference Lend Academy readers receive a discount off the ticket price. Just enter the coupon code LENDACADEMYVIP at checkout to receive 15% off. If you are on the fence about going don’t wait too long to register. The price goes up after March 18.
I hope to see many of you in San Francisco next month. And if you do see me please come up and say hi – I always enjoy chatting with Lend Academy readers.
