Harrison Hochman and Devin Cintron recently launched a pilot of an online loan marketplace that is called Sparrow Lending; Sparrow Lending allows students to create a profile which includes their GPA, extracurricular involvement, work experience, career goals as well as a personal story; students can then set a payment term and interest rate which in turn are reviewed by non-accredited lenders; Hochman provided an example of an alumni who might want to help fund the loans of someone attending their alma matter; he came up with the idea last year when participating in Birthright Excel which is a startup accelerator program in Tel Aviv; with the pilot they are focused on Stanford students and alumni but hope to expand to more schools and let institutional lenders participate. The Stanford Daily
