Pros
there once were many now there are none
Cons
Here is the story that many at LC now are piecing together - the way LC went down: it started with the firing of Renaud Laplanche by the board. Total overreaction designed to appease regulators. He was a visionary CEO with amazing sense for storytelling and the media loves him (he just raised Series D round for his LC copycat Upgrade at $1B valuation while meanwhile LC's valuation has plummeted to less than $350M). Scott Sanborn - a nice guy, who had never run anything bigger than a small lending operation before is promoted to CEO by the board and hires the former CFO of WaMu's mortgage operation which was seized by regulators in 2008 under his watch . Scott then makes precarious hire #2 by bringing in as a President one of the worst imposters in the industry - Steve Allocca who was pushed out of PayPal and before that out of Well Fargo. Steve clashes with Tom as well as with the COO Sameer Gulati - a talented and charismatic strategists almost immediately. The COO leaves and Steve starts plotting how to take over the CEO job from Scott by positioning himself as a visionary who's hands are shackled by lack of authority to re-orient the company. Steve creates utter chaos around a fairy-tale story about LC as the financial messiah spreading wellness to the masses despite the fact that the company knows too well that the credit scores of 75% of its customers deteriorate and debt levels rise precariously after customers take a LC loan. For a few years Steve manages to string the board along with this fairytale but fails to produce a substantive plan of how exactly that plan of his work. Then Scott makes mistake #3 and hires an absolute nightmare of a CTO - Bahman Koohestani - a fixer with zero product or technology skills but with profound absence of charisma and penchant for intimidation. An exodus of talented product and engineering leaders and credit professionals ensues. Scott, Tom, Bahman and Steve proceed to cut costs and weaken what's left of LC's core competency in service of the fairy-tale that Steve created to turn LC into a financial-wellness provider. After almost 3 years of pain and "destroying what is working" the board finally loses patience and fires Steve Allocca in the middle of the COVID epidemic which practically shuts down LC's only revenue producing business - personal loans. With the company now left with a skeleton staff and a pale shadow of its former self, Scott and the board hunker down to try and survive COVID until the bank acquisition deal materializes after which there will be no more LC left.