I woke up this morning and saw this article from CNET in my Google alerts. I knew that Renaud Laplanche, CEO of Lending Club, was planning an IPO at some time in the future. But at LeWeb12, a major technology conference in Paris, earlier today Laplanche conducted an interview where he stated that an IPO may only be as long as 18 months away.
I have reached out to the head of marketing at Lending Club for an official comment but have not heard back yet. If I get a response I will update this post. But this is very big news for Lending Club and for the p2p lending industry in this country.
[Update: I heard back from Scott Sanborn, CMO at Lending Club, and he spoke with Laplanche after this interview. What Laplanche had said to the interviewer off camera was that Lending Club would be IPO-ready in 18-24 months not that an IPO would happen in 18 months. The timing for an IPO will be dependent on many factors and there is no firm timetable of when that will happen.]
You can watch the entire interview below courtesy of the LeWeb YouTube channel. While the interviewer was certainly bullish on Lending Club he clearly was not as well prepared as I would have expected. Having said that if you have a spare 23 minutes it is well worth watching. For those who want to skip to the little IPO nugget it comes around the 21 minute mark. If you can’t see the video below then click here to watch it on YouTube.
